Sorry not to post anything new in a while. This past week has been rather busy/disorganized for me, which isn’t helped by the fact that I had my last wisdom tooth pulled today. I’ve swallowed so much blood that my mouth tastes like I’ve been sucking on an anvil, and I can also feel a piece of exposed bone with my tongue. Awesome.
So I’m in the middle of Strangers in Flight (Sons of the Starfarers: Book III), and it looks like I’ll have to do a fairly substantial revision. That’s going to throw off the publication schedule a bit, but hopefully not more than a couple of weeks. Comrades in Hope (Sons of the Starfarers: Book II) will be out by the end of June, and Strangers in Flight will be out sometime in August. After that, I’ll take a break to work on some other projects and write the next three Sons of the Starfarers books.
I really enjoy writing in series of novella-length books. I know that a lot of readers complain when writers chop their stories into parts rather than packing them all into one full-length novel, but novellas come a lot more natural to me than novels. I probably won’t go any shorter than Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I), which technically is a novelette–novelettes lean more toward short stories in terms of structure, whereas novellas have a lot more room to play with (but not so much that you get lost in it).
What I’m thinking about doing from now on is writing novellas to start off with, and if a series does well (like Star Wanderers), to write a couple of full-length novels with the same characters. I can put out novellas a lot faster than I can put out novels, and putting them in series is a great way to build traction across a whole lot of books. And if the series is successful enough, then I know that a novel with the same characters will do fairly well too.
It’s kind of like Star Trek, in a way: it started as a TV series, then spun off a bunch of movies with the same characters. Which makes me wonder, why didn’t Voyager ever get a movie? Voyager was my favorite Star Trek series, and I totally think it deserved a movie or two.
In any case, I definitely want to write a Star Wanderers novel bringing back some of the main characters from that series. I’ll probably work on that after finishing Strangers in Flight, though with how long it takes me to write a novel, it may be a year before it’s ready for public consumption. It’s definitely on the list of books to write, though.
In the meantime, Sons of the Starfarers is going to consume all of my attention for the next month or so. I’d better get some sleep so I can work on it tomorrow. So much to do, so much to write … but I think you guys are really going to like it when it’s done!
