I didn’t write a lot about what I’m up to these days, and the latest update was about an old novel of mine, Emergent, which I republished wide. The process wasn’t as straightforward as expected, but worked out in the end. If you follow this blog, you know about at least two more projects of mine, some of which have been in the works for quite a while now: Synthesis and 5150.

Synthesis is now in the final stages of editing. I’m currently going through the whole novel via TTS, to find all those pesky little things that won’t pop up in script anymore, after rereading it a few times. It’s a long book, it has a lot of worldbuilding behind it, and the edits were a lot of work, but I’m happy with it now and will just add a bit of polish. When this is done, I will assemble the ebook and upload it. Since I just republished Emergent, I’ll schedule it for preorder with a release on Friday, October 14th. This leaves me time for my other projects.

5150 is in the late drafting stages. I didn’t work on it lately, since I wanted to focus on getting Synthesis off my stack, but I have the ending plotted properly and can write it out of my system in short order. With 13 scenes left to work on, the drafting process itself will take roughly 2 weeks, so I’m aiming for the end of the month. Then I’ll put it on the shelf for a few weeks and start my new project. The plan is to have it for preorder ASAP, and to publish it in January.

I mentioned some time ago that the goal is to have a number of casts of characters for my Aes Sidhe stories. All these casts will also fall into different subgenres, albeit all of them sharing one universe and being Science Fiction, broadly speaking.

The cast of Emergent, Synthesis and 5150 plays on Earth and is Cyberpunk/Thriller with a touch of fantasy (where my “aliens” are concerned, the Aes Sidhe, creatures of Celtic lore). There will be more in that vein at some point, but I’ll be finished with my immediate plans for this cast when 5150 is done. I’ll still want to explore things like the future of the Uehara syndicate, developments in Gilead, and maybe even take a look at China later, but not yet. That needs proper planning. I’d like to dive deeper into the posthuman aspect and have Nadya be the main POV character in one of those novels.

Pendulum and its follow-up novels are Space Opera. They’re also the “flagship” of the whole thing, even though it doesn’t look like it right now. Only one novel in that setting is done, and I’m currently republishing it a chapter a week here on this blog, but in the end, the brunt of the novels will follow Deirdre, Maya, Cpt Thornhill, Fionnlagh, Achim and the rest of the crew. The next book in that series will be about Maya and the Mag Mell, revising their plans to discover something completely different than the planet they had been assigned to. I don’t want to talk too much about this yet, but I have a lot of good ideas for stories with that ensemble. My reason to start writing again after all these years was my desire for optimistic sense-of-wonder SF, and this will be it, so I’ll always have a book in that series in the works from now on.

I’ll add a new cast of characters to the roster, and a new genre, but I want to test things first, so the first book might be only a novella and an offshoot, never to be seen again, in case I can’t make it work. The idea is to have this branch of the Aes Sidhe universe be mystery novels. I’m currently learning how to do those properly, and while there are some aspects of this in Emergent and Synthesis, those are more Thriller and less problem solving. The story will be told from the POV of the sidekick, while the sleuth will be a kleptomaniac. I’m still figuring things out here, so no definitive plans to reveal at this point, and I might just have this cast be an episodic novella series, just so I can write two things at a time, and both being completely different. I found that helps my creative process.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Back to work.