Sorry to drop off the face of the Earth for the past couple of weeks. My parents were in town, and between spending time with them, introducing my girlfriend, celebrating my sister’s birthday, and a whole bunch of other family-related things, my blogging has kind of fallen by the wayside.
But don’t worry–I’m still writing! I finished the first draft of Strangers in Flight (Sons of the Starfarers: Book III) in the first week of July and sent it out to my first readers. With luck, I’ll be hearing back from them in time to make any necessary revisions and publish that book in August. The first series omnibus (books I-III) will be out six weeks later in September, and book IV will be out … well, it will be out after I’ve written it.
In the meantime, I’ve started a couple of short stories and been making some good progress on those. The first one should be finished in the next day or so: it’s titled “The Gettysburg Paradox” and involves a time tourist at Gettysburg realizing in horror that most of the combatants on both sides are actually time travelers.
The other one is an orc story partially inspired by my friend Sarah’s orc story. This one, though, is less of a love story and more a brutally violent tale of orcs being orcs. It’s probably going to go long, perhaps up to novelette length, though not any further–I’ll trim it fairly aggressively if it does.
Besides short stories, I’ve picked up work on The Sword Keeper again. This is the epic fantasy novel with the enchanted swords, which I started while I was living in Georgia. I haven’t worked on it much since coming back to the States, but last month I basically told my girlfriend the whole story arc of the trilogy, and she really got into it. So that’s my current WIP now, and I hope to finish it before the end of the summer (famous last words, right?).
There are other things I’d like to blog about, but I’ll save those for later. Here are some of my ideas for blog posts:
- Gods and Generals by Jeff Shaara
- Why I quit Facebook
- Thoughts on character development and likability
- Thoughts after watching Divergent
- Dating someone on the autism spectrum (I’ll have to run that one by my girlfriend first!)
- Y Mountain hike
- Random poetry
- Places I like to write
Goodnight!
I’d love to hear why you quit Facebook. I never liked it, but it seems like everyone else I know is now waking up to the fact that it sucks. I’d like to know what changed.
Definitely! I could rant forever about that, so I’m trying to work through how best to condense my reasoning into something that won’t go off into a screed. I also kind of want to recount my history with Facebook, since the ways I used it changed a lot over the years, and that probably has something to do with it as well. Not sure if I should just give my reasons or go for the history angle.