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What’s been going on since February?

I know, I’ve been terrible for blogging. It’s been four months, I’m sorry. All I can say is that I’m better at writing than I am at blogging / marketing / tweeting!

But it’s with great pleasure that I can announce that the first draft of the third and final book in the Navigator / Parasites trilogy, tentatively named Exodus, is finished. It was an odd book to write – I had a lot of freedom in the first book because I had a rough framework for where I wanted to go, but I could essentially make the worlds from scratch. The second had a few limitations, and a rough sense of direction, but I very much felt that we could still be exploring and experiencing the wonders of the universe.

Exodus was a lot tougher. Our heroes are on the run, up against the wall, and have a very, very narrow window for success and survival, not to mention big ambitions. They’ve got a lot riding on them, and although they’ve got some remarkable individuals on their side, they can’t pause for breath – and that’s not something that comes easily to Lyrans.

But we’re there, and I’m now starting the editing process, which isn’t wildly exciting to blog about or report on. I want to do a re-read of Parasites and Dusk to ensure good continuity – and if either of them get a tiny little sprucing up in the process, then all the better!

In other matters, one of the reasons why I’ve been quite quiet has been works on the house, which has been quite disruptive (and expensive). The house seems to have been cursed (hopefully not literally) with a number of leaks in a number of rooms, and rather than tackle them piecemeal, we’ve had major works done to correct them – which has been stressful, and often meant that I’ve not been able to write as much as I wanted to. I’m still slightly embarrassed to say that even when I had a full day to write (and only write) I barely managed 7k words. I did 4k in an afternoon at the weekend, which just goes to show the power of good mental health and the lovely Cherry Stream keyboard (scissor switches for the win!).

So I’m looking forward to bringing you all a new book soon – and then we can get onto the very exciting subjects of Grace and Vengeance, and the Slow and Gentle Wyrd, which I’ve been putting off to get Exodus done!

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October: Wild Court paused, Dusk in editing

September and October were – strangely – pretty good months for writing. I reached about 90k words, or two-thirds of the way in, to Wild Court and then paused again. I’m not quite sure why this one is being so troublesome, but it’s falling into neat thirds, with a year-long pause between the first and the second, so I really hope this isn’t the case for the second and third! That said, it did allow me to go back to Dusk, the sequel to Parasites, which I started mapping out in early 2020, just as the pandemic started.

I’ve got three different introductions to Dusk, and no clear favourite. Thankfully, the rest of the book is much less troublesome, and after a fair amount of work, it’s now sitting at just north of 105k words (about the same length as Parasites) and I can just about claim that the first draft is finished.

There’s a lot of work to be done; there are at least two parts that just don’t work – one of them is just quite flat, and the other is a plot section that needs relatively major reworking, but I’ve got my eye on them, and they’re first and second on the list of a one-page word document entitled ‘Major Edits’. Admittedly, this document does seem to incorporate minor edits as well, but I suppose I can always retitle the file when I’m done with the major stuff.

All in all, I’m fairly pleased with how it’s come together. Kael and Alessia, along with the other major car crews, embark on an important mission to launch satellites from faraway worlds, gathering intelligence on the structure of the universes, while Basteel and Slyph head across Lyra to Vulpes, Lyra’s farming city, where there may be appearances of a creature worshipped as a deity on the city-ship of Carthusian. Of course, nothing is straightforward on either the rescue mission or the journey across the surface of a damaged asteroid to reach a planet formerly inhabited by a super-evolved species of aliens… 

It’s all compounded by a new threat, a robust and malevolent species seemingly incapable of diplomatic relations, throwing Lyra’s plans into disarray.

I’m not quite sure of when it’ll all come together – I doubt it’ll be this side of New Year, but it’ll certainly be early 2022 at some stage, and I’m also quite excited by the prospect of releasing both hardback and paperback versions, now that KDP allows both, alongside ebooks, of course.

I’ll keep you posted with any details about release as we get closer to the time, but for now, that’s about all. 

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What happened in September? Resting, re-charging and a little Dusk

Hi team! It’s still just about September, but this’ll be a shortish update. I’ve been trying to recharge over the last few weeks after getting knocked sideways by an illness – thankfully not the dreaded ‘C’-word, but still something that saw me sleeping a lot and generally doing anything other than working and writing.

Thankfully, this also seems to have recharged my brain a little – I’m not entirely sure how season five of Prison Break, both seasons of The Order, the first half of Once Upon a Time and quite a few books managed to do it, but I’m slowly starting to get back into Dusk. I’m still only averaging 10k words a month, which is a bit measly, but I’m feeling better about it, and we’re currently sat at around 69k. It’s definitely going to be longer than Parasites – I’m still four or five chapters off finishing one of the major story strands, and only about a quarter through the other – but that’s pre-edits, of course.

Everything else is on hold, but in the meantime, I’ve written a short blurb for Dusk – hopefully this isn’t too much of a tease; we’re probably looking at a release date of mid- next year, but it’ll be sooner if I can, promise!

You can also read this on my Books page, but here it is:

It’s two years since Kael and Alessia returned from their expedition to find a solution to the big crunch, but things haven’t gone according to plan. Despite an unexpected source of help, Lyra’s resources are being used up faster than ever before, and one of the monstrous creatures from Carthusian, the city-ship, seems to have been sighted in Vulpes, Lyra’s farming city.

With new enemies coming from unexpected places, Vega’s mayor Alhambro is determined to find a faster way to navigate the thinnings linking universes, dispatching Basteel and Slyph into the diplomatic and scientific nightmare in Vulpes. At the same time, Kael and Alessia embark on a mission crossing a forbidden asteroid, an abandoned planet previously home to a super-advanced race and into the unknown.

But as a new, hostile species capable of traversing the thinnings emerges, it seems that the sun is setting on Lyra for the very last time.

I’m psyched about it and can’t wait to bring it out to you all. As ever, take care, stay healthy, and be kind.