Chateau Lloyd

Given that I'm on furlough, I probably should blog here more, but I've been busy around the house and wasting time elsewhere in the interwebs.

I've also been getting some writing done, which I will address momentarily.

But first the big news is that my latest project (Three Weeks with the Coasties, a Tale of Disaster and also an Oil Spill) is done and waiting review by the Dept. of Defense.  I submitted it at the start of the month, but it takes weeks for things to get processed.  Once that's done, I can go ahead and publish. 

It's an odd step for me, but because I was on active duty during the period in question and am in fact still serving, I gotta follow the rules. 

Until then, I've been keeping myself busy on a short story set between books three and four of the Man of Destiny series.  It's for one of those short story anthologies.  I'll let you know if it gets picked up.

Finally, I'm putting together the plot for a new series of books that share a background but aren't necessarily sequential.  I can't really say more about it because I still go back and forth on key details.

When the furlough began, I figured I'd be able to knock out a bunch of writing projects I'd put on the shelf for later, but going through them I see that some are hopeless while others need a lot of reworking. 

For example I had the beginnings of a tale of intrigue, politics and ambition that basically was rendered redundant by Man of Destiny.  The setting might be salvageable but it needs a totally new plot.

I also admit that things that interested me six or seven years ago don't necessarily interest me now.  In addition, I think my writing style has gotten quite a bit better and much of my older work would need to be entirely re-written.

All of which is to say: a lot of the 'future projects' I put on the shelf are likely to stay there - or simply go into the circular file.

Still, I'm hopeful that I can get some things worked out and then plow ahead with unprecedented speed.  The hardest part of writing for me has always been the building the premise and figuring out generally where it's going to go.  Once I get that, it's off to the races.

I suppose some folks might wonder why the Man of Destiny prequel hasn't been mentioned, and my answer is that it's in the mix, but not a priority.  I spent three years working on that project and the short story has actually got me thinking about it again, but I'm not yet ready to fully embrace that madness again.

Maybe after another Star Wars movie comes out.