Some Writing Updates

Well, Crimson Star has been out for a little over a week and a half, and it’s doing pretty well.  A few reviews are in, and some of you have said it’s actually your favorite of the series so far.  Some of that seems to be because a lot of it is much more irregular warfare, more reminiscent of the American Praetorians series.  To that, all I have to say is that as the war drags on, and more expensive (and irreplaceable) assets get taken off the board, the more irregular this next World War is going to get.

I was planning for Hank and his section to head out into the Pacific after the Chinese following Crimson Star, but now that the first volume of his arc is done, it’s not looking quite so cut and dried.  The state of affairs CONUS is bad enough that the response is going to take time.  At any rate, we’ll be back to Matt’s Grex Luporum Team in the ETO with Strategic Assets later on this year.

Before that comes Brannigan’s Blackhearts #8 – Enemy of My Enemy.  That’s going to be fun (we may see a certain Russian mobster again from Fury in the Gulf).

However, there might be a little more time between now and Enemy of My Enemy.  And here’s why.

I spent all year on military fiction.  Not a bad thing, all told; most of you read my stuff for that.  But last year was the first year in which that was all I wrote.  No genre jumping at all.  And it told.  I really struggled to get Crimson Star finished, and in time.

So, I’m re-cocking and building in some anti-burnout time this year.  I’ll still be writing, and I’m going to be picking up on Brannigan’s Blackhearts soon, but I’m weaving in some other projects, both science fiction and fantasy.  (Yes, I’ve started outlining another Jed Horn novel; no, I don’t have an ETA for that one.)  I might also be attempting to relaunch The Unity Wars, just this time under my full name, since I’ve gotten several comments from readers who were interested, but didn’t know it existed, since I tried to keep it a separate brand.

The fantasy project, part of what Nick Cole calls “Tolkienism,” is going to be a bit of a departure for me.  Something of an experiment, if you will.  I’m still not sure exactly how I’m going to approach publishing it; I might serialize it online first, with an eye to publishing in ebook and paperback later on.  We’ll see.  Act 1 is outlined already.  Got to put some more thought into it.

But, the SF/F projects will likely be weekend projects once I get Enemy of My Enemy outlined, so that I’ll be working on them in parallel.  I did that a little bit in 2018, and it worked okay.

Now, back to the word mines.

Oh, and if you have finished Crimson Star and enjoyed it, please consider leaving an Amazon review.