Creativity Update

For both of my fans out there ...

... the second Endless Wars novel has been shelved indefinitely.

Why?

Most of it goes back to the rampant alcohol consumption that was coinciding with that book's writing. Some of it is because I'm just not in that headspace right now. To write an Endless Wars book, I have to be in a very, very dark place, and I'm just not there right now.

If you haven't read the first book (now available in the iBookstore), do so, and you'll understand what I mean.

For those who don't know, I'm an alcoholic, now six months sober, and that darkness is something that has sloughed away, along with the need to make booze the focal point of my non-work hours.

If the first EW novel, written in 2000, was mildly supplemented by booze, the second novel, half-written last year, was rocket-powered by it.

There's some damn good material in there, but much of it reads like a sugar-high Michael Bay script. The parts that don't are filled with arguments between Taran and Nigel, which I found particularly revealing. What's interesting is that much of the book is devoted to Taran completely falling apart while becoming more powerful, which is an interesting choice.

I don't know. I'm still sifting through my feelings on the book, which is a moot point, because almost all of it was lost.

Yup. I was so fucking drunk so much of the time that I managed to format and write new operating systems onto each of the hard drives it was stored on.

Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, since I have all my PCs sync their 'My Documents' folders all the time, but I managed to have HDD failures in exactly the right order, so that the only left of the book is the first draft of the first couple chapters.

Like I said, I'm still sifting through my feelings about all this.

However, I have two tidbits for you that have me particularly pumped.

First, the second edition of the first book will be hitting Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the iBookstore in the next month or so (the first edition is still available via iBookstore for a limited time now.) It's on Lulu now, and once we all sign off on it, it'll hit the larger retailers shortly thereafter.

Second, I'm working on a brand-new series, and I'm glad to say that I've FINALLY found a science-fiction idea that works for me.

SciFi has always been my favorite genre, but I've never had a workable idea of my own before. My stories usually straddle the horror/fantasy genre, but this is something that's slowly pieced itself together over the last few years, and after letting it germinate for the last few months, it all clicked into place during E3, and I started banging it out then.

I'm toying with several ideas in terms of novel structure and what makes a novel, and may do something new with this series.

I'm a big fan of HBO & Showtime original series, and when they tackle novels, they tend to treat each novel as a season.

I'm thinking about turning that on its ear, and after writing this novel, I'm thinking about either publishing lots of sequential short stories that would be 'episodes' of a 'season,' or writing sequels as short story collections that carry a common thread through them, like a TV season.

We'll see. Let me know what you think of the idea.

Anyway, I'm about to kick it with an old friend, so I'm gonna jet.

Just let me assure you that it feels great to be writing about robots and spaceships.

-Blaine