This Year Is Moving By Too Fast

Good Grief, it’s October already.. Where has the year gone?

Am I the only one who feels this way?

So, things have been hectic lately. I started writing the sequel to Dead Station back in June. Then I put it down for a bit while I worked through getting the Audible version of Dead Station launched. Things have been flowing pretty well lately, so I have been back on the writing train. I am now sixty thousand words into the follow-up story. I hope to be done with it in a matter of weeks.

Productivity comes in spurts for me. I have super productive weekends, where I may write over five thousand words, and then I have weekends where I get nothing done. Lately, as the story has continued to develop, I have become more productive, and I plan to maintain this momentum until I complete it.

Then I will put it down for a couple of weeks and let it marinate a bit before I pick it back up for the editing process. I need a separation from the writing before I move into editing mode. The editing process last time around was the most challenging part for me. Now that I have a process and am not developing one for editing, I hope to move through it quickly.

All this means I plan to release the book by the end of the year. Hopefully. Once I enter the editing phase, I will issue a pre-order announcement, but I don’t want to do that until I feel like I have a solid grasp on the entire project. Oh, and somewhere in there, I will be sending it out for some advance reader feedback.

I have also begun compiling notes for the third book. Wait, did he say third book? Yes, I did. The story will continue after the second book. Do I know how many books will be in the entire series? Nope. Right now, I plan to write stories for this series as long as they feel interesting and there are things to explore. I don’t want to put it in a box. We are just getting started, and there is so much more to explore here.

There are a couple of tenets that I adhere to regarding the Humanity Shattered Universe. One, Things will only continue to degrade from here. Two, it’s a big universe, and there is space for a lot of stories that can be told there.

Oh, I also quietly did some updates to DEAD STATION and VEHO: A BACKSTORY. I had a running list of typos and editing problems that have been bugging me lately. I had largely ignored them, but eventually it was more than I could handle. If you were to go back and read VEHO now, it is a much leaner and more suspenseful story. I also updated the cover on Amazon Kindle for it. I wanted to cover to feel more like DEAD STATION’s cover.

DEAD STATION had a few errors that were just driving me nuts, so I fixed them. For some reason, in Chapter 33, Franks turned into a woman for a few paragraphs. Honestly, I have no clue how that even happened, or how I never saw it in all the editing passes. I also had a reference to an energy weapon near the end of the book that I missed removing. In my first draft of DEAD STATION, I had initially had the characters using phaser-type weapons, and the more I wrote it and read it, the more I hated it. It just didn’t feel like the gritty combat that I wanted. I wanted it to feel more like Aliens and a lot less like Star Trek. Given how often people say it reminds them of Aliens, I feel like I hit the mark with that change.

Shamon

P.S. The image is another concept image for the second book.