Oops! Is this my Friday? (peers at calendar) Yes. Yes indeed it is.
So, what to talk about?
How about my next project. You don’t know what that is? Funny thing, neither do I.
Oh, I have some books to finish up, on the current one, but I’ve pretty well covered the inside look at a crumbling empire. There’s not a lot more to say.
And since these were the biggest, baddest bad guys of my Wine of the Gods multiverse, there’s not much reason to go back there . . . Okay, I swear I will finish Who Counts. But really. Stick a fork in it. It’s done.
I do have ideas, stacks of them.
A near future Space Opera, with asteroid miners. A far future SF with refugees fleeing a supernova encounter aliens. I’ve got Urban Fantasies, Rural Fantasies, Epic Fantasies . . . Some weird stuff . . . Time Travel . . .
And if one of them doesn’t catch my muse’s attention, I’ll no doubt come up with another one. But now? I just might kick back and catch up on my reading . . .
Mad Genius Club 
13 responses to “Oops!”
Congratulations! I don’t envy you the process of writing a 30+ book series, but I think I kind of envy you the experience of ending it 🙂
It was pretty much just writing one book after another. I never had an overarching view of the series as a whole. Which probably explains how large and out of control it’s gotten.
How about some more Fall of the Alliance books? I’ll buy ’em.
Squirrel
One? Amateur. 😛
What is this “catching up on your reading” of which you speak? I have never done it in my life. And if I did, all it would take is seeing another book I haven’t read yet, and boom, it would vanish like tears in the rain.
So long as it’s a goal, and not a final destination. A few hours off, before heading to the Bookstore/library/Amazon to start the glorious rebuild . . .
2000 book boxes in storage, and counting. More bookcases in the cabin. 5300 in my Kindle library (Calibre).
I plan to enter Valhalla on a rising cloud of smoke and electrons.
There must be a name for this sort of ambition with reading material… but my inner child, always desperate for her next book, is delighted.
mathematicians have hypothesized a situation where one has successfully studied everything that one needs to study within one’s specialty, and does not need to study any of it again more thoroughly.
However, there are two schools who have a conflicting view.
One school says that it can be shown that this would require more than a human lifetime.
The other school says that such a state is equivalent to being dead.
I don’t know. Maybe I can finish some urgent projects, and move on down to the lower priority stuff?
“Stop reading and go to sleep.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
You may need some time away from the Wine of the Gods multiverse to let it stop feeling stale, but I feel that there are still more interesting stories you could tell there. There’s a whole corner of the multiverse that you only have one book exploring so far: the elves that Ebsa and Paer met in Project Dystopia. It seems to me that there’s room for quite a lot more stories there, with some potentially very interesting possibilities inherent in having such different characters.
As for the DMB being the biggest bad guys, so when they’re done you feel the series is done — not all threats need to be multiverse-shaking to be interesting, I feel. A long time ago I read a line about why Doctor Who had such good writing (this was in the 90’s, pre-revival, so it was referring to old Who). It went something like, Star Trek usually has threats that threaten the whole galaxy or universe, and that is too large a scale to relate to, so it can end up being boring. But the stakes in Doctor Who are usually smaller and thus more intensely personal: “Doctor, if we don’t do something, the landslide will wipe out the whole village!”
I feel like there’s still plenty of room for intensely personal-sized stakes, and a whole undeveloped side of the multiverse, in the elves. I’d love to see Paer and Ebsa go visiting the elves sometime, and get caught up in helping them fight off a nasty infection, or deal with a localized famine (that turns out to be encouraged by someone else in a power play of some kind). Smaller stakes, but that threaten beloved characters, would lead to very engaging stories.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy some time off, and that reading something else for a while gives you a sense of fun. Because your books are the most fun for me to read when it seems like you’re having fun writing them. I’m looking forward to whatever you end up doing next.
Left a comment that seems to have been spam-binned. The gist of it was that I hope you enjoy your time off, and that if you do come back to the Wine of the Gods series, that books with low stakes are fine, too: not every villain needs to be multiverse-threatening. (And that I hope to read more about the elves that Ebsa and Paer met in Project Dystopia sometime).
Your comment is rescued. I think we are all taking turns getting caught in the spam-trap.