Coming This Year...

I usually manage this a little sooner in the New Year than I have this time, but I think that it's about time that I talked about my plans for 2018. Last year I managed – just – to put out twelve books, though I will freely admit that it was something of a stretch, and one of them consisted largely of a complication of hitherto unavailable work, the Logan Winter series. This year, I'll be putting out twelve books once more – in fact, I might actually manage a couple more than that. In fact, I know I will, but I'll get to that later.

My first project, the one in fact that I am working on at the moment, is the latest Alamo novel, the twenty-eighth in the run, 'Cries in the Dark'. I'm a third of the way through it, and my target date for publication is the 20th of this month, though I hope to do a little better than that if I can. I know that this has been a long time coming, but it has proven extremely difficult to write, and I'm currently on about my sixth attempt at it. This time, I'm pretty sure, it will stick, and while I'm not giving away any spoilers, I will say that this will conclude the Andromeda story arc.

As of that book, the main Alamo series will be taking a rest for a little while. That's one of the reasons that I introduced the 'Lost Alamo' concept, the first of which was released just before Christmas, and the experiment has been enough of a success that I intend to continue with it. You can expect to see at least three of these this year, possibly more, as well as a paperback compliation of the first two books, coming out somewhere around May. (This is an experiment – if it does well enough to pay for itself, then I'll start to work through the rest of the series, probably in twos and threes to provide decent-sized volumes.) More on this later.

Also in late May/early June, around the fifth anniversary of the first book, I intend to release a short volume of short stories set in the Alamo universe – probably around forty thousand words, all of them stand-alone pieces. I have the first of these written already, and the next couple outlined – there might well be a paperback version of that, also, to go with the compilation of the first two novels, but that's for later.

Those of you who follow the mailing list will know the other big release of this year – and I've already done the bulk of my work on it last year – the Battlecruiser Alamo roleplaying game, being produced by Shades of Vengeance! I've written more than 90,000 words of setting material for this book, and there's going to be a lot more on that in the near future. We'll be launching a Kickstarter for this – we're talking about a full-colour publication here, illustrated by Keith Draws, the artist behind the covers of the Battlecruiser Alamo universe.

That's the old then – now for the new. I've got three new science-fiction series planned for this year, the first of which will almost certainly be the long awaited 'Fox Company', a trilogy of novels that are a little different from my normal work – ground forces based, rather than starship based, following a company of soldiers in the Army of the Terran Federal Republic in the final days of the Colonial War, a war that is going extremely badly for old Earth. (My core concept here, if it helps, is Battlestar Galactica with a ground-forces focus.) I'm shooting for releases in February, March and April for this trilogy. Following up will be a 'Lost Alamo' in May, with another series, 'Ring Raiders', to follow in summer. (The tag line for that boils down as 'Buck Rogers' meets 'Firefly' – and I'm still wavering a little in which one to do first – I have seriously considered alternating the two, and that remains an option.

I'm also going to push on into historical fiction. I'm working on a few trilogies here – series set during the First Crusade, the Norman conquest of Italy, and the Spanish Reconquista. These will be longer books, probably well into six figures, and will likely be released on a quarterly basis. I'll be shooting for four of these this year, and to an extent, using that as the framework for my other releases. There will certainly be a release every month this year – the majority of which will be military science-fiction, though to an extent, it will be a question of a book coming out when it is ready to come out, rather than anything else! (I am sorely tempted to go to Fox Company/Ring Raiders/First Crusade, with Lost Alamo novels positioned to fill in gaps in the schedule, and I might well end out going down this path next.) One thing I have learned is that I want to write in a greater variety of universes this year, as well as to push myself into that new genre – I've even got a Post-Apocalyptic series or two in the pipeline, but I'm not yet certain whether I'm going to venture down that particular path.

One thing I am sure of – it's going to be an interesting year.