It is amazing how the simplest change can link one story to another. In my writing I am linking previously published stories to others that have not yet been published. In doing so I realized, of course, that names must remain consistent in all the stories.
One of my published stories, The Black Umbrella, which appeared in the 2008 Edition of The Westchester Review, was about a member of the first generation of my fictional extended family when he was an old man. This character's name was Sam.
I have since written several other stories about the family and realized that I had also used the name Sam for a brother-in-law in that first generation. All of these first generation people appear in one story, and as I began to draw a family tree, with its marriages, divorces, births and deaths, I settled, once and for all, on each character's name. The brother-in-law in that first family became 'Sam.' The old man needed a different name; he became 'Max.'
I went back to The Black Umbrella, nicely stored in a folder on my computer, and, with a simple "Search and Replace" function, changed Sam to Max throughout the story. I saved the story in a new folder, called Linked Stories.
To underline the connection, I also wrote a new sentence in which the old man, who was already looking at a wall of old family photographs in one scene in the Black Umbrella, sees a sepia colored wedding photo of his brother-in-law and sister. Thus these two men are forever linked to one another in two completely separate stories which trace family lives over four decades.
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