I recently completed a new afterword for Schrödinger’s City, one I’ll
be posting on this blog when we get closer to the publication date. It’s
largely a reflection on my writing career over the last seven years, a
topic that’s been on my mind as of late, especially as I am in a very
different mental space than I was when I penned my first three novels.
A part of my reflection that didn’t make it into the afterword is how
much more difficult it is nowadays for me to keep myself focused and
energized than it was seven years ago. I think some of that can be
chalked up simply to age, but the are probably other factors as well.
However, I’m not the kind of person to dwell overmuch on causes. I much
prefer identifying and chasing solutions, and my go-to strategy for
keeping energized and focused is the creation of goals. This doesn’t
mean that the goals are a rigid framework. It may turn out, when I when
I look back in a decade’s time, that I ended up deviating from this plan
significantly. That’s not important. What is important is that these
goals help me keep up my momentum.
Short Term (2020-2021)
Draft and publish Intersection Thirteen
a large bureaucratic and economic system falls apart when a
once-in-three-centuries event strikes a nation-state whose
territory is contained entirely within a pocket universe
Draft Land of the Free
the life and times of various individuals in a far-future
dystopic North America where all major cities have become
fantastic and lethal hellscapes
Publish one short story collection
Medium Term (2020-2025)
Publish Land of the Free
Draft and publish The Ghost King
in a world of magic, a magicians’ guild conjures up a demiurge
to help them make decisions when their archmage goes missing and
their land’s king proves mentally unstable; but as time
advances, the demiurge’s power grows, as do the people’s blind
faith in its decisions…
Draft and publish The True History of the Ksezian War
set in the world of Palípoli, an ancient writer, a medieval
writer, and a modern writer all sit down to craft their own
versions of the great Ksezian War; to their dismay, they find
the world around them changing with each of their embellishments
Draft and publish Programmieriad
a mashup of the modern tech industry and the ancient world modeled on The Iliad; two
Seattle tech companies wage a great war with one another, their
programmer army utilizing a mixture of coding skills and bronze
weaponry.
Publish one additional short story collection
(Optional) Publish another Palípoli short story collection
Long Term (2020-2035)
Establish a definitive “second period” of my writing, beginning in
2020 with the publication of The Other and containing at least
three novels and two short story collections. (2020 to ~2025)
Establish the foundation for a third period. This will require
revisiting my reading goals once I’ve finished my second phase. I
have a number of classical authors to finish out (Thucydides,
Cicero, Virgil, Livy) as well as medieval and renaissance thinkers.
There are also a number of science fiction and fantasy authors where
I have some ponderous gaps to remedy, most notably, Wells, Le Guin,
Lem, and Miéville. (~2025 to ~2028)
Begin a third phase. I have no ideas what these works will be, even
thematically, as a decade tends to change a person a lot. And who
knows where I’ll be on the other side of all that reading, too.
Anyhow, the rough shape of this is another 3 to 6 novels, but in
this phase, between each novel, I’d produce a work of non-fiction.
I’m thinking either literary criticism of some of my favorite works,
or perhaps thematic collections of criticism organized around a
particular topic (ecology, politics, etc.). (~2028 to ?)