I have six more scenes to write. Then, I’ll be done with the rough draft, which will take a few days to complete. After that, there will be a round of editing, then the read-out-loud weekend. The ROL will take a couple of weekend days, sometimes more, and then I will probably have some corrections to make. All of this means that I’m probably two weeks from publishing, maybe as early as the 19th (or even a couple of days before that).

Book 7, Final Match

Once this book is in the can, I can get busy with the last book. I’m not exactly sure how that story is going to go, but I have a vague notion of how I want it to go.

New Covers

I’m still looking to get the covers re-done. The GetCovers company was not so hot, and I’m not even that picky. I do, however, know a good cover when I see it, and I want these covers to pop. Finding an artist that can make that happen is going to be a real challenge. It looks like I’m just going to have to put down a lot more money to get the quality that I want. Lesson learned.

What’s next?

A lot of things are up in the air right now. I have stories that I’d like to write, but I would like to round out the year with a few shorter books. Maybe I’ll experiment with another sub-genre, like Androids, or a potential mystery series. I have some ideas for a futuristic Android/Borg murder/mystery series where I have a detective who investigates such things. This would be gritty and almost dystopian. I started a short story called “The Robot Whisperer.” It’s about a guy who starts his own business as an emergency robot repair person. He is willing to take the really nasty cases. The book is sort of an iRobot type of theme, except the three laws of robotics were a failure. This would be a future where there are robots with no rules. I drop in the occasional person, asking why they don’t just incorporate the three laws and prevent all these bad things from happening. Our protagonist mentions that the three laws were created so books could be written where the laws were bent or circumvented by the robots. By the time you read the old iRobot series, you come away with the fact that the three laws don’t help much.

So many stories to write, so few hours in a day… back to Hopeless.