So I\’ve been editing Emergent for a while now, and not alone. I\’m usually a bit ahead of my editor friend, currently five chapters, or one to two busy editing days.

Like I wrote the other day, ever since Christmas \’20, life is a bit out of whack here. My personal situation is pretty stable, I\’m doing my teaching as usual and writing (right now only editing, I\’m bad at multitasking) when I can, but my wife is still very weak. Covid infected her heart muscle, and that led to a number of problems. Healing can take up to six months, or so I\’ve heard, and she\’ll likely stay home to recover until July, or however long it might take. The only thing that counts is her recovery.

We got the keys to our new house now and will move at the end of the month, which means I only have three weeks left to finish Emergent, if I want to publish it before the move. I\’ll then be offline from April 22nd until 27th, but I can still connect to the net via phone, so that\’s something. I estimate a month or two for things to settle down properly, and I\’ll take that time to plot the next story.

Which brings me to my future plans. I already wrote somewhere that I\’ll do a second edition of Pendulum at some point, but I\’m not in a hurry. I have editing notes for roughly half the book, and some ideas on how to improve it. I won\’t turn it into a page turner, but I\’ll fix some issues I\’ve been feeling for a while now, mainly unused potential for more conflict, especially with what I\’m planning for the future.

Directly after Emergent though, I\’ll plot and write another new book. 

This one will be on Earth, involve intrigue and action and be some sort of \’urban fantasy cyberpunk\’, similar to Emergent, but the setting will be a bit more advanced. We\’re now in Deirdre\’s timeline. The United Nations have their goals, so do the two courts and the AI. So do various radical fringe groups, and rogue states like Gilead and China. 

This novel will tell the story of Makoto, the speaker for the AI, in a diplomatic setting. Makoto, a changeling, used to work for the Summer Court in Emergent. He\’s a bit older now, but age isn\’t so relevant for Otherworld creatures like him. He has his connections, his friends and foes, and I\’m looking forward to meeting him again. He will only be one of the protagonists though. One of the viewpoint characters will be the Winter Court ambassador. The Winter Court are the primary opponents of Makoto in Emergent, and I feel I\’d like to tell their story as well. They\’re \’the bad guys\’ in Emergent and not playing any special roles in Pendulum, so there\’s a lot of room for a character representing their side.

The second edition of Pendulum will happen some time later. Most likely this year, but I\’m not on a schedule. New content is definitely higher priority for me.