The First Draft of Triple-Cross is complete!

First of all, I’d like to apologize for the lack of posts on this blog lately; I’ve been working flat-out on Triple-Cross, but that isn’t the only thing I’ve had going on lately, one of which is going to have a pretty major effect over the next few months - I’m moving house, halfway across the country. I’m leaving London behind after more than twenty years in the capital, and heading for the wilderness, probably Wales, I think. I’m looking forward to being able to look out of my window and see green instead of grey.

Another thing is that I am typing this blog on my brand-new Chromebook, sitting up in bed, no less - and yes, these two items are related. I’ve been back with a desktop PC for the last couple of years, and while I have no intention of giving it up, I do need something portable. This gadget is as light as a feather, and it has a pretty good keyboard to boot. I’ve been using Google Docs anyway for my last three books, and it worked well enough that I felt confident to take the jump - and I must confess, not having to worry about viruses or power outages is pretty darn compelling!

To get to the news that likely brought you here to the blog...I have finished work on the first draft of Spitfire Station: Triple-Cross. It’s clocking in at around sixty-six thousand words, and might expand a little when I go back over it in a couple of weeks. It’s already out with the beta readers, and they are saying some pretty nice things - so I have every confidence that it will be on sale by the end of the month.

My next task - almost immediately, in fact - is to start work on Battlecruiser Alamo: Sacred Honor, which I want to target for an end-July release. This is one I’ve been looking forward to - I can’t wait to get started. Writing a spin-off has been an interesting experience. Triple-Cross is designed to show another facet of the universe of Battlecruiser Alamo, and...well, I suppose it is my Deep Space Nine to Alamo’s Star Trek: The Next Generation. A series based on a space station, where the drama comes to the characters - lots more intrigue and double-dealing, but there is still plenty of action, and a few nice space battles.

All along, I knew that I wanted to expand the setting, take it beyond a single crew. What I didn’t realize was that I’d end up with a second spin-off! While I was writing this book, another character - one of my POV characters - pretty much reached up, grabbed me, and demanded a series of his own, and the first of his books - ‘Not In My Name’ - is now on the schedule for September. I don’t want to give too many details about it at the moment, as it would give some spoilers to Triple-Cross, but that’s an extra Alamoverse book that I now plan to write this year!

To give you some idea of what I am planning to release in the rest of the year - and various events have already meant that my planned schedule has been scattered to the four winds - there are Alamo books scheduled for July and October, Spitfire books tentatively scheduled for June and November, and NIMN planned for September. Nothing scheduled for August and December at present...but that is five more books coming in 2014.

As for next year, well, that’s all somewhat up in the air at the present. There will definitely be four more Alamo books, taking the series up to twelve, and almost certainly four more of the spin-offs - NIMN is intended as the first of a trilogy, and there will be two more Spitfire Station novels in 2015. I’ll be having another punt at fantasy next year, as well, but there are details to follow on that one. It’s still very much in the planning stages. And given that I have Raiders of the Lost Ark on the television right now, I want to write a pulp adventure novel...and I’ve had something set in the latter days of the Russian Civil War in the pipeline for a while. It’s going to be a lot of fun, I know that much!