As a content creator, I've found myself on both sides of the sequel situation. I wrote a screenplay (Interactive Adventure) that hinted at a sequel, but with no intention of making one. The idea was to open up the imagination of the audience at the end. On the other side, once I had killed off nearly all the characters in my first eccentric novel (The Goddess, the Trilobite, and the Rest), a found that I had spent too much time developing them to simply abandon them, so my second eccentric novel simply followed them into a temporary afterlife (The Little Gray Wagon), and them dumped them into different formats and scenarios, even casting them into alternate roles. This held up through novels 2, 3 (The Watched Potboiler), and 4 (The Temporary Title), but novel #5 (What a Terrible Thing to Ca;ll a Horse!) seems to have been a little too calculated, so I decided to end the series after that. A couple of years later, though, I bumped into a fresh approach, resulting in novel #6 (All Routes Lead to Certain Death, Sooner or Later). Novel #7 (The Return of the Faraway Man) was the last actual sequel. Novels # 8 (The Killing Bard) and #9 (And Then She Turned the Page) both had completely different characters/casts, so they weren't sequels. I tried dusting off the old characters for another novel. but the thing collapsed, so I abandoned it. One original eccentric project plus 6 sequels was as far as I could go, and I broke just about every imaginable rule to do that much.
I think there's a fine line between "a sequel" and "something broadly new with some recurring characters". For example, while each Discworld novel exists in the same setting, and often have cameos from recurring characters, I'd be hard pressed to describe most of them as "sequels" to the previous one. Certainly there are some chains of sequels in there, but lots are mostly stand-alone stories in the setting.
Perhaps there ought to be a term for something in the middle, in the same setting, but in a different style or with different characters -- Japanese does have a good term for this: "Gaiden", which roughly means "side story".
As I recall, most of your novels are very dreamlike and/or picaresque, so I might think of them more as being side stories to themselves. Or perhaps multiple seasons of a sketch comedy show with a familiar and beloved troupe of comedians.
As a content creator, I've found myself on both sides of the sequel situation. I wrote a screenplay (Interactive Adventure) that hinted at a sequel, but with no intention of making one. The idea was to open up the imagination of the audience at the end. On the other side, once I had killed off nearly all the characters in my first eccentric novel (The Goddess, the Trilobite, and the Rest), a found that I had spent too much time developing them to simply abandon them, so my second eccentric novel simply followed them into a temporary afterlife (The Little Gray Wagon), and them dumped them into different formats and scenarios, even casting them into alternate roles. This held up through novels 2, 3 (The Watched Potboiler), and 4 (The Temporary Title), but novel #5 (What a Terrible Thing to Ca;ll a Horse!) seems to have been a little too calculated, so I decided to end the series after that. A couple of years later, though, I bumped into a fresh approach, resulting in novel #6 (All Routes Lead to Certain Death, Sooner or Later). Novel #7 (The Return of the Faraway Man) was the last actual sequel. Novels # 8 (The Killing Bard) and #9 (And Then She Turned the Page) both had completely different characters/casts, so they weren't sequels. I tried dusting off the old characters for another novel. but the thing collapsed, so I abandoned it. One original eccentric project plus 6 sequels was as far as I could go, and I broke just about every imaginable rule to do that much.
I think there's a fine line between "a sequel" and "something broadly new with some recurring characters". For example, while each Discworld novel exists in the same setting, and often have cameos from recurring characters, I'd be hard pressed to describe most of them as "sequels" to the previous one. Certainly there are some chains of sequels in there, but lots are mostly stand-alone stories in the setting.
Perhaps there ought to be a term for something in the middle, in the same setting, but in a different style or with different characters -- Japanese does have a good term for this: "Gaiden", which roughly means "side story".
As I recall, most of your novels are very dreamlike and/or picaresque, so I might think of them more as being side stories to themselves. Or perhaps multiple seasons of a sketch comedy show with a familiar and beloved troupe of comedians.