Three Million Words...

As I pass the half-way mark in ‘Exiles of Earth: Rebellion’ I thought I’d give a quick outline of my planned release schedule for the rest of the year, now that I have some concrete idea of the form it is going to take. ‘Exiles of Earth’ is going to run for four books, with the first now scheduled for release on August 16th. Subsequent books will follow at thirty-six day intervals, with the last one coming out somewhere around the beginning of December. The length means, naturally enough, that these are taking a little longer than normal to put together, but I think they’re going to be worthwhile. I’ve got the same feeling about these books that I had with the early days of Alamo, and while I’m telling an epic story, I’m keeping the focus a little tighter this time.

The release of the fourth book is going to put me over a significant milestone, one that I can hardly believe is coming up – by then, I will have no less than three million words in print. About two-thirds of that set in the Battlecruiser Alamo universe, the rest in the new series I’ve been producing over the last year or so. I’m enjoying coming up with one new universe after another, though I’m still planning on writing ‘Lincoln’s Legacy’ at some point in the near future, maybe in the next year or two. I have some plans for my next series, the first of 2019, but they’re still so vaguely formed that I don’t think it would be fair to go into detail with them at present. Though I will say that ‘Spoils of War’ is a working title for the next series.

While I plan to release four more novels this year, I do have another project in mind, and that’s what I intend to reveal today, a non-fiction book that will look back, in detail, over the last five years – a book that will discuss the creation of the Battlecruiser Alamo saga, as well as all the other books that I’ve worked on, talking about what worked and what didn’t, the decisions I made, the blind alleys I took along the way, as well as the lessons I’ve learned over the years on writing long and short series, and working in the genre of military science-fiction in general. The title, well, will be ‘Three Million Words’, and I plan to start writing it in November, in between other projects. As for right now, I’m open to suggestions and questions, and if you have any thoughts on what you might like to see in this book, I’d be more than happy to hear them, and incorporate them into the text. At present I have in mind something at the seventy thousand word mark, but I have a feeling that it’s going to get bigger, rather than smaller, as I work on the concept. It seems like a good way to cap off my fifth year as an author, and it’s a project I’ve been toying with for some time.

That’s it for now – I’d better get back to work!