What’s next?

Now that CLOAK OF BLADES is out, what’s next?

My next two big projects will be DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE, the first book of the DRAGONSKULL epic fantasy series, and GHOST IN THE SUN, the final book of the GHOST NIGHT series.

However! Before I start on them, I want to clear the decks. I have numerous projects in various stages of completion, and I want to wrap them all up before I start on DRAGONSKULL and GHOST IN THE SUN.

So, here’s what I want to do the next two months:

-First, COVERING FIRE, the sequel to AVENGING FIRE, my mystery novel from earlier in the year. The rough draft is about 80% done, and I’m hoping to have it out sometime in August.

-Immediately after that, SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND, which I have been trying to finish since 2018. I keep getting interrupted, so I’ve decided to blame COVID, because I’m going to blame everything that goes wrong on COVID until at least 2027. The rough draft is 90% done, and if all goes well, it should come out shortly after COVERING FIRE.

Additionally, SILENT ORDER will be leaving Kindle Unlimited and returning to wide distribution in the first week of August. I read an article from Written Word Media pointing out that science fiction isn’t in the top fiction genres in KU, so SILENT ORDER and ROYAL HAND will be available wide.

-After that, I was persuaded to write a novella for Kindle Vella, so I will finish that up. The novella is called POSTHUMAN: DARK IRON, and it’s a science fiction novella about the armored bounty hunter idea I was considering earlier in the year. I think it will be about 25,000 words long or so.

I have no idea if Kindle Vella will be worth the effort or not. I’ve tried a lot of new things in the last ten years, and quite a bunch of them didn’t work. But some of the new things worked really well, and the only way to find the ideas that work really well is to keep trying new things.

-Finally, people have been asking for an anthology edition of the SHIELD KNIGHT short stories for a while. I counted and I’ve written seventeen (seventeen!) of them, so it’s time for an anthology. It will be called TALES OF THE SHIELD KNIGHT, and I think I’ll sell it for $3.99 in ebook, though I’ll probably do $0.99 for the first week since I’ve given every single story in it away for free at one point or another. You can see the cover at the bottom of this post. I’m not sure when I’ll do it – I just have to find a few hours to sit down and combine the 17 short stories into one big old ebook, but it will probably be sometime in August.

So, that’s what I’ve got on deck. It sounds like a lot, but most of it is nearly done and just needs a couple of good pushes to wrap it up. Then it will be on to DRAGONSKULL and GHOST IN THE SUN!

-JM