The Dyn’taren Guard
These books for young readers (roughly ages 7 and up) are all about Fluffy Dog and his team of talking animals, who hide in the world by pretending to be stuffed toys. They use magical artifacts from the planet Dyn’taren to solve problems and protect themselves and their way of life from anyone who shows them malice. Successive entries in the series will gradually expand its setting and scope so the books will grow along with their audience: early stories stay mostly within the bedroom of Fluffy’s human keeper, while later ones will venture into the rest of the house, the houses of other family members, the rest of the town the Guard lives in, and beyond.
The Doll Universe is by far the oldest construct in my body of work. Having officially begun with Detective Dog and the Strange Shaking, the inaugural entry into my second grade writing portfolio, the Dyn’taren Guard’s existence actually stretches back even further when you include things like me talking imagined scenes into a tape recorder or the repetitive-enough-to-become-scripted games my sister and I played with actual dolls. The name of the planet Dyn’taren dates to either fifth or sixth grade, though I wasn’t using it in the series title at the time.
The core set of Fluffy’s adventures was written between fourth and eighth grade, in tandem with my early work on the Woodvale Universe (there was even a period of chaotic, non-canon crossovers I like to call my “fusion era,” when everything I was writing at once got written literally all at once, on the same pages). I saved and organized the entire continuity for revisiting, reimagining, and releasing in the 2020s and 2030s, though when I found out I had some new young fans of The Case of the Crooked Candles (which doesn’t technically quite feature the same animals as the Dyn’taren Guard does) 20 years after its publication, I wound up starting a little early with Power of the Name. Currently, I’m aiming to release books two and three of the series in tandem once they’re ready.