Status Report

It’s been a few days since I last blogged, so I thought I would let you all know what is going on at the moment. I’ve finished the draft of ‘The First Duty’, the latest Alamo novel, and it is scheduled for release before the end of the month. This one was both the hardest and the easiest book I’ve written yet - it was almost impossible to get started on it, but once I got going, it flowed really well. This one starts to tie off a lot of the loose ends, especially the ones left over from ‘Stars in the Sand’, and answers a few questions about the history of the setting - though opens a few things up as well. 

Next comes ‘Ghost Ship’, which was originally to be released first, but the original concept I came up with simply didn’t seem to work, so I had to go back to first principles. This I have now done, and you should be seeing it some time towards the end of December, hopefully a week or so before Christmas. This one opens up the start of a thematic trilogy that will continue in Alamo 11 and 12 - and among the characters is the President of the Triplanetary Confederation, who I’ve been rather looking forward to working on! 

Then...well, then comes Alamo 10, ‘The Shrouded Stars’, which will wrap up the six-book story arc of Alamo’s voyage through the Cabal - a chance for some old-fashioned exploration, though with the usual touches as well. This one is scheduled for a January release - which means I’m going to be rather busy, I think! When I started this arc, I originally had in mind four books, and it rather snowballed a little - at some point I’ll have to post my original conceptions of how the arc was going to run, but I don’t want to do it until it’s a bit freer of spoilers. Tucked in around there somewhere, probably again in the run up to Christmas, will be a re-release. 

Back in 2011, I wrote a non-fiction book called ‘One False Step’; I was rather proud of it, but I ended up taking it down last year because I’d released it through a distributor, and wanted to take control of it back for myself. Now, it’s coming back at last; this is a history of spaceflights that never happened, such as the Soviet Lunar Landing program. I think I’ll be releasing it around the same time as ‘Ghost Ship’, so look for it then - and of course, on the blog. 

I’m not going to go much further than this for the moment - I’ll be talking about next year’s projects in a series of posts in December, I think, but I will say that I’m going to increase my output next year, that there will be at least one new series of books, probably fantasy, and that there are some big shakeups planned to the crew of the Battlecruiser Alamo to take it into a new cycle of stories. More to follow!