The sweet and talented Stewart Bint nominated me for the work-in-progress blog tour challenge. I am to reveal something about my current work-in-progress, ask you to check out the two books Stewart is working on by following this link, and nominate four other writers. I love challenges and what a great way to see what everyone is working on (and some great forthcoming novels), so where we go!
My current WIP is a dystopian series entitled Friends of my Enemy. I’m finishing up my final edits on a set of eleven, interlinked short stories named Stories from the War before sending it along to my publisher, Creativia, towards the end of this month. At the same time, I’m seven chapters away from finishing the first of two novels in the storyline, the first called After the War!
This story started life over five years ago as the single novel Deliberate Actions, which I hand wrote in a month during a fit of inspiration. I took it through a writer’s group, tried to find an agent, and eventually put it aside to move on to my epic fantasy series the Rise of the Fifth Order.
But something that drives your passions enough that you hand write it in a month… well it doesn’t go away.
I played with scenes, outlined the plot, found the zillion novice mistakes I made, and, as I began to wrap up writing Spirit of Life – the final book in my epic fantasy series, I challenged myself to write short stories set before Deliberate Actions to really understand why the world had become so screwed up. By June, I had eleven short stories and had jumped into rewriting the novel into After the War, though rewriting isn’t really the process. After the War and the final book, Battle for Europe, are only loosely based on Deliberate Actions. It really is a new story with strong characters that carry the plot to places I hadn’t realized I’d be visiting!
The short stories, which will be released first, begin in the year 2055. It is our future, though a future that has gone wrong. Events have already unhinged the world as we see it in 2014 and set it on a downward spiral. Violent storms, governments fighting for resources, citizens demanding lost freedoms, terrorists capturing control, and diseases rippling across the globe have created a mire of dark chaos. That is where the first short story begins with husband and wife Michael and Arinna Prescot when they arrive in the US embassy in Spain as representatives of the newly militarized government of the USA. They are there to smooth the rather rough transition from democracy to military control with the USA’s allies. Former allies? Things get sticky quick and the one person who offers to help spawns trouble of another sort. I’m looking forward to the release of Stories from the War, which should be this fall if I can get my editing act together!
Meanwhile I’ve realized how many past events I hint at in Stories from the War. It seems my short stories to explain what happens before the novels have some backstory of their own. So I’ve begun releasing Monday blog posts on some of the larger of those prior events, like Harvey’s flu – the pandemic of 2039.
And like Stewart, I do have a second, side work in progress that is back to the epic fantasy genre. I’m hoping that Sparks of Defiance, the first novel in the trilogy Games of Fire, will be released sometime in 2015. I’m only on chapter 8 at the moment and if you want to learn more you’ll have to wait until the next time I join a work-in-progress challenge!
So now on to my nominees!
I’m not good at following directions, so I’m nominating five great authors instead of four! 😀
Michael Cairns who is an awesome prolific writer with two series out: the Planets and Games of War!
A.M. Justice is a fantastic epic fantasy author with two books released in her series the Woern Chronicles
J.M. Northup is a wonderful fellow Creativia author with the Fears of Dakota Series and the novel a Prisoner Within
Elizabeth N. Love is a brilliant fellow Creativia author with Stormflies Book 1: Pouring the Cup and Through a Window: a Short Story Collection available.
Doug Lamoreaux is another amazing Creativia author with seven books listed on his Goodreads shelf, including Dracula’s Demeter, which has been optioned for a movie by ThunderBall Films!