Weekly Preview: Feb 1, 2021

Monday, February 1, 2021 at 4:30pm

I made good progress on The Ghost King this weekend, ending Sunday at a word count of 14k words. It feels as though I will likely finish the novel’s “Part One” at around the 20k word mark. A total of five parts are planned. If that word count turns into a pattern for the novel, this will be my longest novel since Voyage Embarkation. As I’ve mentioned here before, the goal is to keep the novel nice and focused and not let it sprawl.

Just one month into 2021, and I’ve already shaken up my plan for the year. That certainly didn’t take long. But then, my publishing schedule for the next couple of years is now shaping up nicely.

• 2021
  • Intersection Thirteen
  • Chronicles of Ytria
• 2022
  • The Ghost King
  • Voyage Redux
• 2023
  • Novel (?)
  • The Five Kingdoms of Daniel Worthy

For the 2023 novel, I have options. The two top candidates right now are:

• Land of the Free. This is an idea I’ve been tinkering with for a great long while. It’s set in a fantastical future United States where all major cities have become hostile to human life in a myriad of ways, unique to each city. This idea has been around for years, at least since 2015. For a long while it was lacking even characters. I have some of its principal actors established, but others elude me still.
• The True History of the Ksezian War. This would be a return to the world of The Shipwright and Other Stories. The idea is that three writers in various eras, each attempting to write a history of the great war between Palípoli and Ksezia, end up inadvertently warping reality through the act of writing their respective histories. The distortions become so pronounced as to endanger the war’s successful outcome and jeopardizing all of their history as they know it.

Both of these have yet to reach exit velocity from being cool ideas and into something that feels meaty enough for me to execute. But then, I’m describing a problem I won’t need to solve until this time next year. I can afford to let them simmer a bit more. And something new might yet crop up. Stranger things have happened.