building a shared universe on accident, but also on purpose

One of the things that I struggle with as a writer is that a lot of the times the ideas that I have have some sort of overlap in them. A little one but overlap none the less, an original country, some sort of mythology, locations - definitely locations. For the longest time I struggled with the fact that while I can make different but similar locations I don't want to. I simply want to reuse the old ones because why not you know if it fits why not sit? I will say that for years I also knew that I didn't have to, that shared overlapping universes was a totally valid choice to make - looking at you Stephen King and Sarah Dessen. But now I think I'm finally ready to commit to yes across the various projects that I have there is simply a shared world things. I am however fighting my deep need to map it all over to figure out where on a timeline everything would fall because that information is for the most part irrelevant and it would only add an undo burden to myself and the creative process. But really why do I need to recreate fictional Brooklyn every time I want to write something set in a place that's like my home but not my home? Surprise! I don't have to and I'm not going to. I think one of the things that I will however be adding to the plate of stuff that appears in this blog is people and locations that appear across various projects, why they appear across various projects, and how they do (or don't) overlap with one another. One of my favorite things about Sarah Dessen's books was realizing and spotting the small overlaps between books. Not so obvious as say like how comics all have shared universe but more like what CLAMP did with xxxHolic where if you know what the reference is you'd be that one Leo meme pointing at the TV. Also I think I enjoy the process more of looking at things I've already created and making them work in slightly different ways that their original use case. All this because I keep making up new divine pantheons and honestly I'm sick of it! So I'm just going to make a single pantheon and leave it alone. Who's gonna stop me? And also isn't that how pantheons work in general? This whole post started because in my head I have a good way to attain divinity and I like that methodology but I keep reusing it and I don't know felt like I was cheating somehow, but like cheat who? On what? And again who is going to stop me? So please look forward to that. I'm going to buckle down and crunch some numbers, flip through my project Rolodex, and clean up another world building post because I need to find all my pantheon notes and put them in the same place but that will be an upcoming thing. But I give no timeline because I have an absolutely trash understand of how time works, its passage, and how long anything actual takes to do.