Wow, it’s been a while since I gave an update on what I’ve been up to. Life has been crazy, but not too crazy. I really ought to get back into the habit of blogging more regularly.
Last week was LTUE here in Utah Valley, and while I didn’t attend the convention, I did stop by the launch party for Ark Press. It looks like it’s going to be an interesting publishing venture, with Tony Daniels, Dave Butler, and David AF heading it out. Their goal is basically to be the MAGA of science fiction and fantasy publishing, though they probably wouldn’t put it quite that way. However, they do want to publish more pro-American, pro-conservative, pro-human fiction, and to fill a gap in the current publishing market that has neglected male readers in recent years.
They’re also running a contest, with the winner receiving a $10,000 publishing contract, to be published on July 4th, 2026. The theme for the contest is America 2076, and it can be any genre (though it sounds like they want it to be a pro-American story). Of all the WIPs I currently have floating around, The Road to New Jerusalem might actually be a good fit for that. I haven’t worked on it for a few months, but I’ll probably dust it off pretty soon here and get it ready to submit.
Speaking of my J.M. Wight pen name, I ran the first three chapters of The Fall of the Poet King through my writing group, and I think the best course of action is to rewrite it as a fantasy novel loosely based on the David and Bathsheba story. If I’m going to write it as a straight historical fiction, I need to do a lot more research to firmly ground it in the era, and the trouble with adapting a Bible story (especially a more difficult story like David and Bathsheba) is that everyone brings their own baggage or personal interpretation to it, and is liable to get miffed if your retelling doesn’t exactly match what they’ve got in their own head. Besides, fantasy sells a lot better than religious fiction, so I think this is a much more prudent course to take.
In fact, I’ve recently made an inventory of most of my WIPs, and decided to trunk all of them that don’t explicitly fall in the fantasy genre. I will still finish the Outworld Trilogy and the Falconstar Trilogy, but after that, I’m going to focus a lot more on writing fantasy than on writing science fiction. Also, I’m not going to work on those until after I’ve filled up my writing queue with more fantasy-oriented works. This is a pivot that I’ve been meaning to make for some time now, and I’ve been slowly making that pivot, but now I think I need to speed it up and make it more definitive.
So that’s what I’ve been up to, mostly. I’m currently finishing up the rough AI draft of The Unknown Sea, and plan to pick up the human draft of Bloodfire Legacy, which should be coming out in the Spring. And hopefully I’ll be working on that David and Bathsheba story again soon.
