Stars of Blood and Glory coming out soon

So last year about this time, I wrote a novel in the Gaia Nova universe.  Usually when I sit down to write a novel, it falls apart about midway through the first draft, or I have some kind of a break down, or something else comes up and I have to put it on hold for a while.

From start to finish, this one came out in about six weeks.

Even the title, Stars of Blood and Glory, really seemed to stick (usually, I go through three or four lame titles before finding one that works).  It took a lot of energy to write it, but the writing process itself was fun.  Seriously, everything just came together and the story practically wrote itself.

However, writers can often be notorious judges of their own work.  For that reason, I set it aside and tried not to touch it for a few months (I did rework the first couple chapters, but later ended up cutting out most of that stuff and going back to the original version, which was better).  Over the summer, I picked it up for the first revision, and while the scenes were out-of-order and a few of them were missing, but for the most part, everything that was there seemed pretty good.

Just to be safe, I sent it out to some first readers and laid it aside for another six months.  I didn’t hear back from everyone I sent it to, but those who did read it said it was pretty good.  The problems they found were relatively minor, or could be fixed relatively quickly, without having to overhaul the story.

To be perfectly honest, this blew me away.  My first drafts are usually really messy, and require a lot of work before they’re any good.  But this one…this one seems different.  This one, I might have just nailed it <fingers crossed>.  And if that’s indeed the case, it’s probably better not to risk revising it to death, or polishing the voice right out of it.

It’s always a scary thing to send a book out into the world.  However, I think the time to send out this one has come.  I’m going to do one last revision pass, just to make sure there isn’t anything too egregious, and then I’ll send it out to my editor and commission the cover art.  If all goes well, I’ll finish the revision next week, and publish it in ebook and print-on-demand sometime in February.

As an indirect sequel to Bringing Stella Home and Desert Stars, Stars of Blood and Glory has a lot of recurring characters.  Here are some of them:

• Captain Danica Nova
• Master Sergeant Roman Andrei Krikoryan
• Rina Al-Najmi
• Stella McCoy, aka Sholpan

Besides that, here are some of the other cool things you can expect to see:

• A far future Japanese-Polynesian society on an ocean planet with giant floating cities.
• A Hameji offensive, with massive space battles and planetary slaggings.
• A lonely boy emperor who fears that he’ll never live up to his father’s dying wish.
• A runaway princess who wants to experience everything the universe has to offer.
• A young Hameji prince who yearns to prove himself in the field of battle.
• A cyborg mercenary who feels like his humanity is slowly fading into irrelevance.
• An unlikely assassin whose mind and body are not completely her own.

All of this comes together in a war of epic proportions that will determine the fate of the last free worlds in the galaxy.

So yeah, I’m really excited about this story.  It’s a departure from some of the more intimate (and less action-y) science fiction romances I’ve been putting out lately, but in all of the right ways.  If you read Bringing Stella Home and wondered when you’d get a worthy sequel, well, this is it.  And hopefully, it’s just the first of many.

Expect it to be out in ebook and print-on-demand sometime next month.