Winter is Coming

My friend and collaborator, Baron Schuyer, came over today for another eight-hour marathon of character profiling and scene mapping for our imminent fantasy series, currently code-named "The Dragonette." (The actually refers to the protagonist's ship rather than the protagonist herself.) We have bumped this project back numerous times to give Baron room to create maps, perform period research, and otherwise let us chart a detailed map forward before embarking too far on a series that will probably span over 500,000 words. That's not Game of Thrones long...but it's pretty damned long. As of today, we are dangerously close to having the entire first book mapped out. I begin writing in September.

Why not now? Well, because the YA sci-fi adventure duology I've been cranking on for months suddenly became a trilogy today. Closing in on the half-way mark of Book 2, I realized I was going to be right around 75,000 words, which is spot on for an average-length novel. Baron asked me, "Can you split it into two and still have a contained story?" I said no. Then I thought about it. And I realized that, with some tweaking, yeah, I probably could. It might feel a bit like the end of The Empire Strikes Back, but it would work. So, a trilogy it is, and I need another eight to ten weeks to draft Book 3.

Then there's the apocolyptic sci-fi series I'm not writing on my phone. Shorter pieces this time. I'm trying to keep it in the 40,000 to 50,000 range for each of the seven installments in the series, but I can already feel Book 1 starting to balloon a bit on me. I'm about 10,000 words in on this first episode and am hoping to have first draft wrapped by the end of August. I'm not planning on releasing until January, though, because I want to get a little ahead and set this series on a regular four-month release schedule.

And there it is: three different series now in various stages of development. Beta readers should start seeing material by late summer. First publications should start going live in Q4, and 2015 is going to be...ridiculous.