I’m going to admit something. Four weeks ago, when I completed work on Lincoln’s War, I was facing a problem that I hadn’t faced in a long time. I had no idea what I was going to write next. I knew that I wanted to work on some new projects, and I had a ‘wish list’ of ideas that I was considering, but nothing came to my mind, nothing at all. (Part of the problem is that we’ve been in the middle of a heatwave, and that always dulls my mind a lot…lack of sleep tends to do that…) I was beginning to get a little worried, but over the last couple of weeks, I’ve reached what I consider to be my creative highpoint – and far from worrying about the next book, I’ve got the next nine worked out in my head. And a short story as well, but that’s for a later post.
The first of these, of course, is Exiles of Earth, and I just got the first cover in the series in today. (Which, by the way, is fantastic, as you can see above!) I wanted to do a series that looked back a little, one that had a more compact core cast, focusing more heavily on character development. I had a setting that I’d come up with a while ago, trying to conjure a ‘realistic’ interstellar exploration, almost an alternate take on the Triplanetary Confederation universe. (You can, if you like, look at this as a ‘what if’ for that setting – with the core concept being the end of technological civilization on Earth in the 2050s, two centuries before the beginning of the book.)
Somehow, out of all of that, Exiles of Earth was born. I wanted to do a series that didn’t have the ‘grand epic’ of the last couple of series. This time, the whole galaxy is not at stake – just one ship, Endurance, and her crew. (The title of the first book, Rebellion, is perhaps a little bit of a hint about how things go.) What I hadn’t expected was that this series would end up far longer than anything I had ever written before. I’ve mentioned in the past that I don’t operate with a detailed outline, just a series of bullet points, and I started to prepare the outline, and it just kept on going. Way past 60,000 words, 70,000 words – and I realized that I had my first six-figure book, and that future books in the series will be just as long. These characters are singing to me, and I’m getting the same feeling about this book as I did about Alamo in the early days – once again, one crew, one ship. Something I’ve lost a little, perhaps.
It’s a strange feeling, writing a book half as long again as anything I’ve ever written; it very much represents a chance for me to work in everything I’ve learned over the last few books, and while the focus remains on the single ship, single crew, I’m able to work in a lot of universe building, a lot of fun additions to give the setting real flavour. In the past, I’ve always taken breaks in between each books – sometimes with the idea of doing other books in between, though that hasn’t really ever worked. This time, I’m not doing that – I’ll be starting the second book, Redemption, almost as soon as I finish the first. (The remaining books in the series are titled ‘Retailation’ and ‘Revolution’.) I aim to release the books thirty-six days apart, and to have them completed considerably before that time.
Which brings me to my next project, something I can go into in rather more detail than I did before. I did a little figuring recently, and I realized that the conclusion of the ‘Exiles of Earth’ series, around the end of the year, will put me over the three-million-word mark. That’s almost unbelievable; I could never have imagined that I’d have so much work on Amazon when I started. Given the project I’ll be working on after ‘Exiles’ – about which more in a moment – it’s a reasonable time to look back at all that, and so, ‘Three Million Words’ was born as a concept.
I’m sure that almost everyone interested in writing has read Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ at some point. I know I found it one of the two most useful books I read on the subject. (The other is ‘Secrets of the World’s Bestselling Writer’. Frankly – read both. They’re fantastic, and I go back to them at least once a year.) I’ve pondered the idea of taking my own crack at the concept of writing about writing, and I think I am finally at least minimally capable of pulling it off. What I intend to do is go back over my work, writing about the process behind the books, the creation of the universes, stories, characters, working out where I succeeded and where I failed, the false starts, everything. I think it’s probably going to end up at around eighty or ninety thousand words, and if nothing else, will serve as a companion to my work – though I’m rather hoping to make it more useful than that. I’m hoping to have it out before Christmas, but it might end up pushing to after the New Year, depending on how things go.
After that, another complete change of pace in prospect. I’ve written almost exclusively in science-fiction, though I’ve written a couple of fantasy books as well. (Both of which will certainly be in ‘Three Million Words’ in considerable detail; I’m rather looking forward to writing it, actually…) I need a break; I’ve thought that for a long while, that I need to push myself more, into a new genre, widen my repertoire. Historical fiction has always called to me, and I’ve been seeking a topic, something to really get my teeth into – and Ancient Egypt has increasingly fascinated me over the last couple of years. Until recently, though, I was struggling to find something new…
Then, a few weeks ago, I was looking through Amazon at new releases, and I noticed something interesting. Two biographies on Pharaoh Seti I, coming out within a month of each other. Now, he’s an interesting man – one of the founding lights of the 19th Dynasty, the father of Ramesses the Great, born in the wake of the fall of the solar worshippers of Akhenaten. It’s an interesting time, and better still, it’s not Tutankhamun! (So many just seem to default to him…) The concept is obvious – the career of Seti I, from his time in the military to his ascension to the throne, and onward through his reign. We know enough that I should be able to put the pieces together, but not so much that I won’t have to use my judgment to fill in the gaps. I’m pretty sure that I can do this in four long books – though I won’t know for certain until I get closer to the draft, as I usually leave drafting to the last minutes. (Also – the books of which I spoke are out next month and the month after, and I should probably read them first…)
After I’ve done that – I’ll go back to military science-fiction. A series I’ve tentatively called ‘Spoils of War’ is in my head. I’m not ruling out alternating between the two, and if the Egypt series ends up running long, that’s almost certainly how I’ll do it, but that’s not something I need to decide for a while. In an ideal world, I’d do one then the other, as I seem to work better that way, but we’ll see how it goes. Now…back to work…
