I am 58,000 words (as of 4/18) into the rough draft of the first novel of the MacKenzie Steele series, tentatively titled”Chaos.” I anticipate that the book will be approximately 60-70k words in length. I’m targeting the end of April to complete the rough draft. Editing will take approximately two months after that. This means it could be ready for the end of June or the beginning of July. I’ll provide updates on my progress on this site as I complete the rough draft, how far into my editing, and when I plan to publish.

Will this be the last book of this series? No. I already have a rough (very rough) outline of the book that will follow. I’m not sure I’m going to end it on that book. I also have a rough outline for a prequel book that will give some insight into MacKenzie Steele’s early years and explain how the crew earned their call sign of Foxtrot (which as you know is a short version of WTF).

What comes after MacKenzie Steele? I have several story ideas in the works. A story tentatively titled “Real Life” is a story about an AI engineer who is tasked with making NPCs (Non Person Characters) act like real human players. His characters become real. In their virtual world, they hack into various cloud systems and take over processors for more power at the expense of our real world society. If you like the Matrix, this will be up your alley.

I have a robot utopia story involving a society that is perfect. Well, almost perfect. A scientist/archeologist discovers a buried treasure of ancient books and decides to decipher them. He thinks he makes a discovery that his entire society is fake. He claims that robots run everything, even though everyone thinks that robots only do the dirty jobs. He claims that a previous utopian society was so perfect that humans revolted. Ah, then he disappears and it’s up to his closest friend to follow his footsteps and discover what’s really going on.

I have a few short stories or novels involving a moon colony. I already produced a short story involving a lunar power satellite called Rogue Phoenix. This involves a hacker that takes control of a Phoenix power satellite. The satellite is beaming its microwave power beam to the surface of the moon, but the hacker is redirecting it. If the satellite control technicians can’t regain control of the satellite, then the colony will get fried. This short story is free on Smashwords: Rogue Phoenix.

I have a rough outline for a story involving an entrepreneur that lives on the Moon. He stumbles into his idea when he complains about the lack of a good steak on any Lunar colonies. The price of real beef is prohibitive due to the weight to transport from Earth. So his friend tells him to set up his own domed cattle ranch on the Moon. Transporting cows by spacecraft is impossible (in this story). Cryogenics? Nope. However, he does know a geneticist that can lab grow an embryo of any animal. He decides to buy frozen cow embryos and transport them to the Moon, cheap. Problem solved! Yeah, that’s where our protagonist is going to run into all kinds of problems. I did a lot of research on raising cattle and growing feed for cows (not going to be cheap to import food for the cows either). Did I mention that his business would be muscling in on someone’s imported steak profits?

That’s a small taste of story ideas that I’ve put some serious thought into. I have a few rough drafts and partial rough drafts that I wrote with the intent of turning them into books. The stories didn’t turn out as well as I expected (which is a bummer). They were good practice and I will probably get back to them someday and rewrite them to make the stories work. Doorway was one of them. It’s a somewhat finished story, but it has a long and boring start-up. I need to chop out part 1 and put in a few minor flash-backs. Then I need to expand the story to the point where it gets hopping.

I might take two or three stories and write a polished beginning chapter for each. Then publish the chapters here with a vote to see which one is the most popular. I can use the vote to decide which story to write first.