New Writing Project

Alas dear readers I have had to catch up with the times recently. Despite work on an old manuscript I have been working on recent events and old prejudices have made me realise that I'll have to face the facts and work my way into the writing industry by following some trends.

Despite two years of work and revision, my untitled young adults manuscript will have to be put on the shelf due to constraints, changing trends and a lack of creative juices. You see the market for young adult supernatural authors is rapidly diminishing. In the wake of the Harry Potter and Twilight mania and JK Rowling and Stephenie Meyer started, and multiple knock off authors like Cassandra Clare took to heart and helped keep the genre alive for over a decade.Though in recent years sales of such works have dropped and interests have waned.The near constant Twilight knock offs and hate that is being directed at this genre is also rather unsettling. Indeed with the release of the Hunger Games and some other young adult steam punk works I have been forced to reconsider my position. Though the genre has run strong and offered a gateway to emerging authors, sadly I have missed that boat and the time has come for me to shelve the project and await its resurgence.

It strikes me that I am going to have to pay great attention to the newer novels coming out and the 'hot' items that go on the market. Classic fantasy is timeless, and science fiction seems to be going strong depending on where you market it. I'll need to keep a look out.


In the meantime I have two other projects that are work in progress. One is the short novella, The Hands of Men and an as yet untitled science fiction series which is tenatively called Service to the State as a whole currently (name subject to revision) which I am currently putting alot of energy into.

The Hands of Men is currently not very long (only a few pages) but I do have the entire story penned out in rough. The story is a post apocalyptic novel set in a world locked in a great depression, similar to Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand but focuses more on self-sufficient living, the cultural effects of a more rural and agricultural world, as well as the threats that might emerge. The setting will be on a small rural town in southern Ontario that is isolated and has only one major link to the outside world via the old highway. It will focus on a former suburban family moving in with an extremely rural family and followng their struggles, triumphs and journey in adapting to this new world. I intend for their to be hardship, but also some very heart warming moments.

The other science fiction work focuses on a more broad scope, and interplanetary scope in fact. The story will be following two main characters, Jessica Alberton and Laurent Gavon. One is a fugitive (which is where the working title of Fugitive to the State comes from) while the other is an elite military commando who will be taking on the enemies of his own nation. It will be set in the fictional star nation of the Commonwealth, a socialist state which is being opposed by a slightly larger nation, the Republic of Grant. Set fifty years after a war between the two tensions are once again high and Jessica is fleeing retribution from Grant's authorities. Laurent is a commando who is having a personal crisis about his own state while trying to prevent an oncoming war.

I've currently done three chapters and over 14,000 words for the science fiction story in just over the space of the week. Well The Hands of Men has been sadly neglected due to conflicts of interest. I'm going to be attempting to complete the science fiction story over the summer while getting The Hands of Men in order so I can hopefully get it published as either a novella or an ebook in the future. That will be my first choice for publishing, while the State books will probably be run by Baen.

I'm hopeful that the time and effort put into these works will be successful and pay off sometime in the future.