I am currently working on the fourth installment of the Mackenzie Steele series. The tentative name for the next book will be “The Hive.” Here is the initial cover that I’ll be using:

I just started the rough draft (after a couple of weeks of working through the outline). My first day netted over 3,000 words and I’m targeting 60k to 80k words for the final book size.

One other note: I tried to tweak the size of the first two paperback books, but the minimum price that Amazon is charging per book is due to the jpg files I use for the orders and intelligence briefs at the beginning of each story. Fortunately, for the remaining books, since they’re novels, I will not be using images inside. This will make the paperback versions cheaper.

• Current rough draft word count: 65,070 as of 9/12 – Complete
• Edit story structure – started 8/14 – Complete.
• Edit for “show don’t tell”, awkward sentences, etc. – started 9/3 – Complete.
• Edit for grammar and spelling (multiple passes) – Complete.
• Prepare book for Amazon Kindle (Paperback and eBook). – Complete.

Update 9/28

I have one more pass to check grammar and spelling. I’m still on schedule to release this book at the beginning of October.

Update 9/30

There will be a title change to “The Hive Sphere.” When I submitted the eBook for review, Amazon reported that my title was too similar to other books in my Genre. I did some research and discovered “The Hive” is a very common book title in the SciFi category. I usually check to see if there are other books with the same title, but I must have skipped that step when I came up with the title. Oh well. Let’s see if Amazon accepts my new title. If it clears their review process, then the book will be ready tomorrow. I’ll create a new blog post as soon as the book is available. The paperback should follow soon afterward.