A quick update this week covering the various things I’m working on.
Risen
Alex Verus #12 is still with my publishers. They’ve told me that I should be getting the first-round edits back around the end of the month, so probably not much longer to wait. Release date is unchanged – it’ll be coming out December 2021.
Short Stories
I’ve plotted out one Alex Verus short story, and done some thinking about templates and models for distribution, etc. I’m leaning towards sticking with this website at the moment and just using a Paypal link or something, since on consideration I’m not sure that Patreon (or whatever) really adds enough that it’d be worth asking readers to sign up for an account there. I haven’t started work on writing any stories, yet, because of my other projects (see below).
Terra Invicta
Normally once I’m done with an Alex Verus novel I get to work on the next one. This time I’ve been spending my post-book lull a bit differently – I’ve been doing some for-contract writing on a computer strategy game called Terra Invicta. I’ll write more about it in a future post – it’s been fun to work on a team for a change instead of doing everything on my own.
New Book
. . . of course, writing books on my own is still my actual job. New book is still in the planning stage, with 100+ pages of notes. I’ve got a fairly good handle now on the world, story, and characters, but there are a lot of details to figure out before I’ll be comfortable starting. Still, I’m a lot closer than I was two months ago. Once I’m done with Risen’s first-round edits, I’ll start planning out a timescale.
I play FPS games mostly (and a few RPGs), but the storylines and dialogue frequently suck. So, I’m happy the game developers for Terra Invicta had the good sense to hire a professional writer to help!
I don’t usually play strategy games, but this one looks like fun. It reminds me a bit of the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor even down to mining the solar system for the raw materials to build a space fleet & the reality-based physics of space travel & space battles.
Are you alpha testing the game too or just working on the story & dialogue elements?
I’ve got an alpha test copy, but I’m really struggling to find the time to play it! At the moment my job is writing the storylines for the various factions.
Benedict, thanks for the response! I know you must be busy.
But, this sounds like a fun kind of busy. 🙂
I would love to see a short story/several short stories finding their way to your readers (including me here). I share your thoughts on Patreon and other services of that kind. Artists I know have those but do not rely on them, they see it as an “extra” from what I understood.
Have you thought of a model the music industry has picked up for all the artists who are not “big players”: bandcamp lets independent artists put a pricetag to their work and people can then decide whether to pay that or add a little extra on top. Don’t know if the publishing industry has something along those lines though.
On a slightly but not completely unrelated note: thanks for all the hard work! No matter if there’ll be short stories or not, I loved all eleven installments in the Alex Verus series so far and I must say that reading them in English was such a great experience after having started the first one in German and having the feeling that something’s off.
Cheers from Freiburg in Germany,
Marco