[tap tap tap] Is this thing still on?

So, almost two months without an update? Yeesh, that’s terrible.

November was…not good, folks. Not good at all. At least it was terrible as far as my writing goes; on the personal front, things are fine. But November was easily the worst writing month I’ve had in all of 2016 and the worst I’ve had in several years. November was NaNoWriMo, so I should have produced at least 50,000 words. In fact, I produce only 21,262.

Ouch.

Why is this? Well, I cannot lie, but I also don’t want to be political on this site, so I’ll simply say that the results of the American Presidential election threw me for a serious loop that did major damage to my mood for a big chunk of the month. It took almost ten days afterwards for that hangover to wear off and for my creative brain to lurch back into motion, by which time NaNoWriMo was a lost cause. Alas.

But it wasn’t all bad. I did finish the Doomed Kayak Expedition horror novel! The draft ended up at just under 84,000 words, which is the shortest thing I’ve written yet, and I’m sure that when I edit it I’ll get it down below 80,000. For me that is positively Hemingway-esque in terms of brevity! I also gave that book a title:

The Jaws of Cerberus.

If you’re wondering to what that name refers in terms of the book, well…hopefully the book will see the light of day sometime in 2018.

What’s next? A space opera novel! No, not Forgotten Stars IV, but something new. It’s a new series, but it’s set in the Forgotten Stars universe. I’m not sure right now where it fits time-wise with that series, but I am not planning any direct overlap at all (that’s the current plan, anyway), so it might not matter. I don’t have a title yet, but I can tell you this much:

  • It’s book one of an open-ended series of space adventure books.
  • The main ship is a light freighter named Orion’s Huntress.
  • The crew is initially comprised of four women with varying degrees of trust issues.
  • The Captain and the astrogator are lovers.
  • The ship’s doctor actually owns the ship, which makes her relationship with the Captain rather tense.
  • While I don’t have a title yet, my current idea is for every book in the series to have the word Huntress in it, alluding to the ship.

This is an idea I’ve been knocking around for a while. This is nothing new: I like to let my ideas knock around for a good long while! So here I go with this one. I’m aiming for a series of shorter books, around 100,000 words each, with each book being relatively self-contained. This is more Firefly or Miles Vorkosigan than, say, Star Wars or The Song of Forgotten Stars.

So that’s what’s going on right now. Stay tuned for more posts, I hope! I have 2017 to plan, after all. I’m behind on editing and publishing, so I’ll have more to say about those things in days to come. Stay tuned!

Because in my head I'm still twelve. #AmWriting #overalls

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