Usually, during the middle of a book,
there comes a point when I have to stop writing for a day, sit down,
and take stock of where I am and where I am going; this has been the
case of each of the Battlecruiser Alamo books so far, and I was
completely unsurprised when this morning I woke up to realize that
one of the two chapters I was planning to write today just didn't
work. It's usually a signal that I need to unravel a few threads in
my head; so I took half the day off, went for a stroll, and managed
to resolve it; hopefully everything will be full steam ahead for the
rest of the book. (I plan on having the first draft ready in around a
week; got about thirty thousand words to go.)
What this has given me a chance to do
is sit down and take stock of my plans for the next few books. Sales
of 'Price of Admiralty' have, well, blown my breath away. I'm
overjoyed that people are buying and reading it, and I'm really
looking forward to progressing with the series – for the rest of
this year, Battlecruiser Alamo is my absolute top priority. (On that
note – I'm really glad that I did the second book before releasing
the first. I'm nervous enough writing the third book, I hate to think
how I would have been if I'd had the 'can I do this twice' bear on my
back as well.)
As I said above, I aim to have what is
now titled 'Not One Step Back' finished on or around the 16th
of this month, then it's off to my beta readers for their verdict. A
nervous time, to the point that I shall very definitely arrange to be
doing something else on the following day if at all possible! The
last thing I want to be doing is checking my emails every five
seconds to see if there are any new comments. (If curious, I have a
pool of around half a dozen people who read each book before I revise
it...and none of them pull their punches, I assure you!) As soon as
that book is out to the betas, once I have gathered my nerves back
together again, I'll be working on getting book two, 'Fermi's War',
ready. That's going to take a good solid week, I think, so you can
expect to see the second book in the Battlecruiser Alamo saga out
around the 23rd. You can take it as a given that I'll be
posting as soon as it's up, but if you want to make sure you hear,
remember the mailing list...
What comes next? Well, book four of
course! I've committed – at least in my own head – to release a
book each month this year. Fast? Well, yes and no. Actually getting
the words on the page is pretty quick, but for me personally, a lot
of the hard work is done by then. I spent most of the last two or
three years working all of this out in my head, and although my
characters are throwing some interesting surprises at me, a lot of
the hard brain-work is done. Which is not say things are proceeding
as planned; they aren't. I'll give you an example; the book I'll be
writing in August was not on my original schedule. By about twenty
thousand words into the book I'm working on know, it stood up on my
desk and demanded to be written; in truth a whole plot segment leapt
into place that puts the characters in an interesting place and
advances the overall story nicely.
That's the other thing about 'Not One
Step Back'; in the first two books – although they are both
stand-alone – I've put in a lot of seeds for future plots. There is
an ongoing arc, at least in my head, and the third book starts to
make some serious progress along it, and this gets reinforced in the
fourth book nicely. Which is odd, because that wasn't actually part
of my early conceptions of how this series was going to go! (I'm
really sounding like a shambles here, aren't I!) As I started to spin
books together a few months ago, when I decided I was really going to
knuckle down and do this, it
only then occurred to me that a story arc was dropping into place.
I'm looking forward to seeing how it comes out myself – at this
rate, I'm going to be as surprised as the rest of you! (Though in
time-honoured tradition, I'll have to claim that it was 'all the plan
all along'. Looking at you, Final Five Cylons.)
So –
right now the projection is for seven 'Battlecruiser Alamo' books to
take the series up to December, and which should wind up the primary
plot arc I have in mind. (Not that it will represent the end of the
saga, oh no. I already have some vague ideas for a six-book series
which will follow it, but that's a bit vaguer in my head at the
moment.) After I've done that, I think it's going to be fantasy;
those who read this blog in its early stages (Hi, Mark!) will know
that I have enough of a fondness for Howardian Sword & Sorcery
that it's pretty much inevitable that I'm going to be working in the
field again, so that's looking likely for next year, whether as a
trilogy or something longer, I don't yet know. (Battlecruiser Alamo
started as three. Then four. Then five. Now seven. So it's anyone's
guess; my primary criteria is simply 'is it interesting?')
All I
know at the moment is this; I'm having a complete blast writing them.
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