Yesterday I finally finished the second draft of Friends in Command (Sons of the Starfarers: Book IV)! I know I’d said I was working on other projects, but those were intermittent—this was the main one I was focusing on. I still need to run it by my first readers, but I’m pretty sure this is the version that I’ll publish. If all goes well, you can expect to see this go up on pre-order before the end of March.
While working on the revisions for Friends in Command, I more or less plotted out the rest of the Sons of the Starfarers series in my head. There are going to be nine books total, most of them around 40,000 to 50,000 words (or 150 to 200 pages). It will probably take me between two and four months to write each of them, including sending them off to first readers and implementing their feedback. If my first readers come back with problems, though, it might take more like five or six months.
While I’m definitely committed to finishing up this series, I’m probably not going to work exclusively on Sons of the Starfarers. As much as I would like to wrap up this series and get it all out there, there are a lot of other projects calling out to me—projects that I’ve been putting off for far too long. Here are just a few of them:
STAR WANDERERS: CHILDREN OF THE STARRY SEA
Yes, I have another story in the Star Wanderers series to tell. This one is a full-length novel, though, and it takes place about sixteen years after the events of The Jeremiah Chronicles. It’ll be fun to bring back all the old characters, but this story is mostly about their children (hence the title). This WIP is still in the early outlining stages, but I have lots of ideas with where to take it. I’ll probably write it sometime over the summer, unless there’s enough demand for me to write it sooner.
THE SWORD KEEPER
This is my epic fantasy novel that I’ve been writing on and off for the past two and a half years. I put it on the back burner last summer after I got blocked, but just last month I figured out what I needed to change to get the story flowing again. I could probably finish this one in a month if I focused on it. Hopefully, this is the year that I’ll finally get this one finished and publish it.
QUEEN OF THE FALCONSTAR
This is the passion project that distracted me while I was working on Friends in Command. I wrote about three chapters, put it on the back burner, and then daydreamed the whole rest of the book. Needless to say, I’m eager to get back to this one. I think it has a lot of potential—Star Wanderers was an unplanned passion project just like this one.
KING WASHINGTON
This is a new project that I haven’t blogged about yet. I’m collaborating on it with a friend (the story was actually his idea), and we’ve spent the last two or three weeks plotting out the entire series. All that is done now, so all we have to do is figure out our collaboration style and write the thing. We’re doing it in season/episode format, with five seasons of 12 episodes each. The episodes are each going to run about 20k to 30k words, so once we have our workflow down we should be able to pump out an episode every four to six weeks.
Lots and lots of stuff to work on—that’s partially why I haven’t been blogging much in the last few weeks. I hope to change that soon, though. And even if I’m not quite so active online as I have been, don’t worry—I’m still writing!
