Progress report, February 2020

February 29, 2020 in Blog

I find myself in a unique position, since I’ve never done a progress report. I could be comprehensive and talk about the successes I’ve had in learning to walk, to speak using various words, to write to words using a series of glyphs, etc. But for now maybe I’ll just focus on the latter.

I have to admit to being a bit frustrated—or maybe anxious is the more proactive term. I wrote and self-published my first book, The Hole In the World in 2016 because it was the first work I’d completed that was worthy of release. After that, my goal was to find an agent for my subsequent books, because there’s (still) something exciting, symbolically, about such a feat. But the publishing tides are turning, and … well, yada yada, we all know this.

Skip to today, and I have three standalone science fiction novels in the can—the two unreleased ones as yet without cover art—and a fourth novel being edited as I type this. As a result, it appears to the world as if I’m a one-book author—since 2016, mind you—and I can’t disprove that notion until I have world-class cover art for the remainder of my backlog.

Well, such is the life of a (beginner) indie author. Still, it will be satisfying to go from a 1-book name to a 4-book name in the course of a single year.

Stay tuned.

As for future work, standalone novel #5 is completely outlined, and ready to be transmogrified into prose. It’s about a man who learns, only as he’s approaching middle age, that he has an identical twin. He crosses the country with the intention of meeting this man. But he commits a serious error in judgment when he presents himself as this identical stranger. Trouble, as they say, ensues.

Standalone book #6 is in the early planning stages. In the near future, Earth is contacted by an advanced interstellar civilization who wants to evaluate our species prior to its joining their small collective of intelligent peoples. Only there’s a catch, in that they’ll only accept human emissaries if they give up— Well, it’s such a cool idea that I daren’t spoil it here. But I’ve already outlined a short story as a lead-in to the novel. My plan is to give that away for free here on this very site.

And that’s where things stand at this hour. This will be a busy year if everything goes according to plan.