Howdy, everyone!

It’s been a bit since my last blog update. But there is good news behind it!

While new fatherhood has kept me certainly busy, there is once again time for writing. And though I have not been writing blog posts, I have been writing. There are three manuscripts in flight, because that’s how I roll: Slow Boil Rising Volume Two, and two novels that are set in the SBR universe, but are standalone prequels, written much closer to our own timeline.

One of the prequels now stands at about 25,000 words (or about 100 pages). I estimate this is roughly 60 percent of what will be its total length when finished.

The working title is: Terry Joyner: Criminal Seismologist. It’s an outgrowth of the short story I wrote in a compilation called The Event: The Chicago Rust Yards alongside works by Steve Metcalf and Robert S. Miller.

A few months ago, while cooking up plot lines and story boards for all three books at the same time, I was talking with another fellow writer about my impasse. M.P. Johnson, who is incredibly prolific, shared some sage advice. I was basically stuck, not getting much progress done on any of them. I know my readers want the sequel to SBR first, after all I left some people hanging off some cliffs. But I had this other story I was fleshing out and felt drawn most to that one. M.P. said, “I’m a big believer in writing where your energy is.”

Damned good advice.

And my energy right now is writing a precursor to the extreme dystopia of the year 0039, set in the burgeoning dystopia of or present timeline.

It’s a lot of fun to write something set in the late 2010s, while putting some tie-ins to the year 0039 of the Enlightened Era. The themes of seeing people twisting values in the pursuit of power and feeling like the only sane person in the room are just as applicable now as they are in the Enlightened Era. It’s kind of a building block scenario.

Stay tuned for more updates. If I keep writing at this present rate, Terry Joyner: Criminal Seismologist (or a book with an eerily similar title) will be drafted and in the hands of pre-readers in the next 3-4 months. I think a 2019 release date very likely at this point!

Don’t worry. SBR volume 2, will happen. It’s about 20,000 words in as well. But I am presently at an impasse on which direction to focus the narrative. Do I follow Sulla most of the time? Or El Asno? Or Bowperson? Or Crowe? Or do I keep it like The Gods Must Be Crazy and follow all of them at once?