Progress report

I'm currently working on Mind Games, the second book of the Wheel of Fire series.  I'm about a third of the way through the second draft, though I still want to go back and do some major changes to chapter 1.  My hope is to finish this second draft before, say, mid-November, and then put it aside until after Christmas.  Then I'll use the second half of November and all of December to start on the first draft of the third book, Fever Pitch.  Then I'll return to Mind Games in January, try to polish it up, and hopefully publish it that month.  I'm sure something will happen to interrupt this plan.  Life tends to do stuff like that to me.  But I'm attempting it anyway.

I've submitted The Lattice to Alasdair Shaw in the hopes he'll include it in his next anthology.  I hope he does, since it was his call for submissions that inspired the story in the first place.  *fingers crossed*

I'm getting a steady stream of sales of books 2 and 3 of the Free Space trilogy.  Amazon and Apple are both delivering, but Apple is still leading.  Thanks for your support, Apple readers.  :)

For the Wheel of Fire, I've tried to keep the world-building at a minimum.  I simply can't handle a Robert Jordan-esque cast of characters and places and whatnot.  Even so, my lists of characters, ships, and planets is bigger than I thought it would be.  There's a lesson there: aim small, because "scope creep" is a thing.

I've been thinking about what I want to do after the Wheel of Fire is complete.  I'm still undecided.  Options include another SF series, perhaps with aliens this time; an urban fantasy series; or an epic fantasy series.  The epic fantasy is the least likely, since that requires extensive world-building.  I've also got an idea for a standalone SF novel, so I may go with that.  Anyway, nothing's decided.

Now, back to Mind Games...