July Update

Those of you who are impatiently waiting for Thrall will be happy to hear that I’ve just finished chapter 19, so things are still on track for a fall release. I’m still projecting that the book will be about 23-24 chapters long, so I’ve only got about four chapters to go.

My plans for Alice have undergone substantial revisions, because I finally have a plot for a real sequel to Perilous Waif. Merciful Troubleshooter is going to be a door-stopper of a book, but it should be fun to write. We’ll see a lot more of the weird societies and advanced technology of the 26th century, and explore what it’s like to work security for a crew of shady characters when their past comes back to haunt them. The events of the novella I’d been planning will end up being worked into the latter half of the book.

Finally, I’ve decided how I’m going to handle preview content for my books from now on. I like to post the first few chapters of a novel here before its release date, so readers can get some idea of what to expect. But my books sometimes undergo major revisions as they’re being written, and I don’t want to post a chapter and then discover I need to completely re-write it before publication.

Luckily I’ve also decided I need to move to a more professional pre-publication process, including using a proofreading service to help rid my manuscripts of all those little typos and grammatical snafus that tend to sneak past me. That adds a few weeks between finishing the first draft and actual publication, which gives me an interval where I know there aren’t going to be any more major changes. So what I’m going from now on is post the first preview chapter as I wrap up the end of a book, and then post another preview every couple of weeks during the editing process.

At my current rate of progress, that means you can expect the first public preview of Thrall in early August.