Both family vacations are out of the way and we’re into the home stretch of the year.
The Saturn Anomaly and Crush Depth and The Kuiper Dominion
3 books there now. I had a bet with someone that The Kuiper Dominion would get into a security review before I got clearance on any of my books and I won. I’ll ping the Pentagon on the first two sometime in August.
The Kuiper Dominion
It’s done, minimal beta reader feedback by design – it’s the 3rd in a series, it’s going to be hard to get readers. But I love it. It’s a bit shorter than I had planned; it’s barely 85,000 words, but it’s tightly plotted and a fitting end to the series that started with The Martian Incident. I sent it to the Pentagon and it’s sitting in the queue there.
Memento Vivere
This is where like 80-90% of my writing time went in July.
I went through the drafted chapters – One through Thirty-Eight – and aligned them to what the book’s magic/religious system needed to be (all of the work I’ve done on that book from January until now, getting everything consistent and aligned). I used AI to help with this, this is a great LLM use case that I’ll probably do a blog post on in the future. If you can get an LLM to not inject its own opinion, and have strong creative tastes of your own, you can get it to salvage a half-complete manuscript that didn’t know what it wanted to be. I didn’t have the magic set up well, the antagonists needed to use an “old” (pre Proto-Indo-European) language and spells, and there were some oddities with the main character. And it took me a few weeks but I got it in good shape.
Then I started drafting again. Thirty-Nine was half-done, so that was easy, but Forty was where all of the plot threads – the main character’s nightmares, his genetic identity and how it tied to the spellbook, the antagonists’ aims and how they tied to Bronze Age migrations, the connections to Christianity and Catholicism, and his relationship with the main female character all came together. That took me about a week and a half to draft and it’s one of my longer chapters, clocking in at almost 4,000 words. But then Forty-One and Forty-Two were much easier to write! Hoping to get close to Chapter Fifty-Two by the end of August.
I’m sitting at 72,000 words and 42 out of a planned 56 chapters done. I had a stretch goal of getting the book released this year and while I’m confident in finishing the draft, I’m not in getting it edited and out to the world. It’s a very personal novel, it’s one of my two self-insert characters that I’ve allowed myself. The other is Grace Parkowski’s Space Force husband Mike DePresti in Lag Delay and its sequels, and he’s not on the page anywhere near as much as Matt Kovar in Memento Vivere, nor is he a POV character. I need to get this one right and that’s probably going to involve quite a few rounds of editing. But I love the book, love the concept, love the characters, and I think it’s going to be a banger.
The other thing I’ve worked on with it is some cover concepts. I don’t have anything to show, and that’s part of the problem – it’s not a particularly commercial novel (unlike some of my others); it’s going to be a hard sell. It’s my love letter to Tim Powers, and it’s similar to his but different too. I don’t think there’s much out there like it and that is a problem (and probably worthy of a blog post as well!). None of the covers I’ve looked at work – they’re either supernatural thriller or horror, or they’re urban fantasy, and they don’t capture the “Tim Powers novel set in 2000s southeast Pennsylvania with heavy religious themes” vibe that the book is. More on this to come.
Short Stories
Working on one for the Deep Blue call from Raconteur Press – I have a lot of unused submarine material from the previous drafts of Crush Depth. Hoping to get it out to beta readers in August so it’s edited and good to go for the 1 Oct call. Starting to get my stack ready for 2027 – I did 4 this year, hoping to do the same again.
Critique
In the middle of a surprisingly good crit swap with a Redditor, but I don’t have a next one lined up.
Here’s to the last month of summer!
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