Sunday, January 3, 2016

Status Update

My New Year's resolution this year was to actually publish a monthly status update consistently, so I suppose I'd better get the year's first installment out. This will be my first year as a full-time author, and I've got some fairly ambitious plans in the works. So in theory there should be a lot to talk about.

I'm currently working on chapter 5 of Perilous Waif, my new science fiction novel. This series is my attempt to resurrect the nearly-dead genre of hard SF (as opposed to the soft SF you mostly see today), by updating the conventions of old Heinlein-era stories with the advances of the information age. So this setting has genetic engineering, cybernetics, neural interfaces, robots, ubiquitous AI, nanotechnology and the internet to go along with the spaceships and exotic planets. It also has lasers, RKKVs, Casaba howitzers and other fun toys - one of my goals for the series is to write interesting space battles without having to pull any punches.

But I know all you Daniel Black readers are anxious for the next book, so let me assure you that the sequel to Extermination will be the next book in the queue. I'm taking some time to get all my plot threads neatly laid out and consistency-checked this time, because things are going to get a lot more complicated over the next few volumes. Oh, and as an experiment I'm probably going to release two versions of this book - one with lots of explicit scenes like the ones in Fimbulwinter, and another that's less explicit and does the traditional 'fade to black' on anything that isn't essential to the plot. I suspect I know which version will sell more copies, but it's always good to have experimental evidence.

So, my tentative release schedule for 2016 is Perilous Waif in the spring, the next Daniel Black novel in the summer, and a third book sometime later in the year.