Next Books / What I’m working on.

Colours of Death: Sergeant Thomas Casebook will be out next year (provisionally, around Easter). This collection of detective stories features several characters from Incite Insight. While the stories are set after the events of Incite Insight (ie Brad Thomas is now close to a Sherlock level sleuth), they are independent of that novel. Each story has a colour theme, hence the title. It’s about to come back from the editor so is on the way to getting ready. The cover is all set though. I like it a lot. A chance meeting by Tale Publishing with a cover designer at a convention has really paid off.

Before that one, Mug Punter will be released (probably in November). It is a collection of three short stories which were culled from Movemind and Colours of Death as they didn’t quite fit in with the rest of those books. For more information on that see my post Mug Punter.

I’m also working on my first non-fiction book. It’s about fear, or perhaps more accurately, fearlessness. It is really tough to write, not because I can’t write a clear account of scientific or complex concepts (it’s pretty much what I do in my fiction writing and I’ve written the equivalent of over 300,000 words in my academic degrees), but because it’s so much slower to write when you can’t just say what you want to say without explaining where the concept came from.  Although, the biggest barrier is that I keep trying to write an essay rather than non-fiction prose, so I spend a lot of time rewriting what I’ve already written to have the right tone and style.

Short version – I’m probably giving myself too many projects, but writing down what’s planned helps me turn it into a reality. Before anyone suggests it – it’s not a ‘vision board’ sort of thing, more a stubborn desire to be seen to be achieving my goals.