January update

I had hoped to write a big blog post detailing my goals and plans for the year, but January got off to a rocky start (food poisoning, the flu, massive back-to-back snowstorms, and sub-zero temperatures), and this week I’m working a temp job. The big New Year’s post will have to wait.

I do have plans, however, and they’re already in motion. The main thing for now is to finish the 3.0 draft of Gunslinger to the Stars. The story is pretty much ready to go, so now I’m doing a final draft to tighten it up. I’m hoping to get it down from 66k words to just under 50k. Should make for a rip-roaring adventure.

My original deadline for Gunslinger was the end of this week, but with the job eating up all my time, it looks like I’ll have to push that back to Wednesday. Fortunately, that’s still quite doable. Revision is a pain, but it goes a lot faster for me than drafting, especially if the story is already in place.

After that, I plan to work on The Sword Keeper and finish the 2.0 draft. These are major story revisions, so it’s going to take some time to work them all out. My plan is to publish it in August, and I want to have it finished before it goes out for pre-order.

With luck, both of those projects will be finished by mid-February, freeing me up to really throw myself into Edenfall. You guys have been asking for it, and I plan to deliver. The Genesis Earth trilogy has waited long enough!

There also seems to be a great deal of interest in more J.M. Wight stories. “Worlds Without Number” has been performing exceptionally well, especially without any kind of promotion. I have some great ideas for more stories in that universe, and do hope to finish Starship Lachoneus sometime in 2018. There’s still a lot of work to do before that can happen, but if this is the story you guys want to read, I’ll move it up from the back burner.

I also just came up with a great idea for the next two Gunslinger books. The first one will be Gunslinger to the Stars, the second, Gunslinger to the Galaxy, and the third, Gunslinger to Earth. If the first one does well, I’d love to expand it into a trilogy.

But first! I’ve got to finish book one. The next big step is to find a good cover artist, then send it out for edits and put it up for pre-order. Right now, it’s scheduled to release in May, going up for Amazon pre-order in April and everywhere else in February. Gotta get on that!

TL;DR, things are crazy crazy busy around here (but in a good way). I do have a resolution to blog more frequently this year, especially with these quick update posts. Let me know what you think, or if there’s any particular book you’re looking forward to! In the meantime, thanks for reading!