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NEWS AND VIEWS - MARCH 2025
I finally finished writing Lillandra this month. The remaining chapters will be posted to my Patreon shortly, and I'm currently working on a preliminary ebook version which should be available there in a few days as well. Or, if you want, you can continue to read it at Royal Road. It's a relief to have finally finished this project -- I've been working on it every day for the last nine months, give or take, and over the last few weeks especially I've been steadily losing interest in it. I basically wrote Lillandra to market; my goal was specifically to try to appeal to Royal Road readers and people who enjoy this sort of lighter, more familiar fantasy, the kind with elves and dragons and RPGish tropes. I did the best I could with it, but I wasn't writing it for fun; I was writing it to try to build up an audience. And if you're not having fun...well, the writing process can get to be kind of a chore. 
Anyway, now that I'm done with Lillandra, I'm going to try to finish up some more Signalverse short stories for my Patreon -- "Ankhara and the Anzu Bird" and "Life in the Fast Lane" -- and then maybe take a break for a few months while I decide what I want to write next. Here's my list of potential projects: The Treehouse At the End of the World. A short Playground Noir novel starring kid detective Pip Fencer. This is what I was originally planning to write after I finished Lillandra, but I ran into trouble with the outline; I don't think I'll be able to get a complete novel out of it after all. Might work as a novella. Sam Fortune and the Mysteries of Nineveh. A third Sam Fortune story. I'm not really happy with how the previous Sam Fortune book came out and I'd like to make up for it with a third novel, but these Sam Fortune books are my own little passion project and I'm not sure I should be wasting time writing another novel that only two or three people are going to want to read. Gunman's Oath. This is a vaguely steampunk/Weird West fantasy set in a world where gods and goddesses once walked the earth, and intermingled with humanity to the extent that generations later, human beings are occasionally born with some aspect of a god's superhuman power. These superhumans, called Avir, come in two types: the weaker Avir Lessene and the extremely powerful, but very rare, Avir Majeste. After his wife and daughter are killed by an unknown Avir Majeste, Colton L'estrange, an Avir Lessene who possesses the Gunman's Gift, sets out to avenge them...but first he needs to get his hands on the Blacklight Special Model No. 9, a prototype gun and the only known weapon capable of penetrating the force field-like "halos" that surround and protect Avir Majestes from physical harm. I've done a lot of preliminary work on this one, but I'm not sure I want to jump into another fantasy so soon after finishing Lillandra, even if it does have a pretty different flavor. Also, it just seems like this sort of fantasy is out of favor these days. Romantasy, LitRPG's, isekai stories, "progression" stories...are people still reading traditional fantasy? I wonder. Special Squad E. The eleventh Signalverse novel, starring Ollie Hawthorne, a new recruit to Signal City's Special Squad (a division of the police department which deals with superhuman crimes and threats). I'm on the fence about this one. I like writing these Signalverse stories, but I also like how I ended City of Strange Gods and I'm not really sure I want to continue the series with another novel. And that's it. I do have some other ideas (a military sci-fi novel, a comical zombie outbreak novel), but none of them are as developed as these. If you like any of these ideas, let me know! Apart from the writing stuff, well, it's been just an ordinary month for me here. My insomnia was very bad in February, but it was much better in March, which was a nice change of pace; I was able to get a lot more work done. But it was also kind of an unlucky month, because I had a bunch of stuff crap out on me, including a graphics card, a hard drive, a mouse, and a phone, among other things, and times being what they are, I can't really afford to replace these things right now. So that sucks. But I don't really have any major complaints here overall. Catch you next month! |