A new Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure is coming this fall! I have completed the first draft of The Aerie of a Pirate Prince earlier this week. It has been a long journey.
I started writing this story on 1 November, 2021. By 17 November I was 16,000 words into it. Nearly a 1,00 words a day – a nice steady clip. However by 29 November, I had added only a thousand more words. While I had a beginning written, and an ending in mind, I realized that I was going to need something like 25-30,000 more words to fill in between the beginning and the planed ending, which I had not thought about. At least if I wanted it to be a novel. And I did. So I needed to dream up a long middle series of adventures before continuing on. Faced with this prospect, I paused writing to dream these up. However, the was another reason as well. I really wanted to write a new long, real novel. I had spent all summer trying and failing to come up with one, but I had now the inklings of how I could combine several stories to make one. So I spent the months of December and January dreaming up The Road to Eura, and began to write it on 26 January, finishing the first draft on 27 May.
After finishing the beta version of The Road to Eura, and sent it out to a traditional publisher for consideration, I returned to The Aerie of a Pirate Prince on 20 June. Realizing that the story I had in mind, was basically a novella, and that padding it to make it a novel was probably not a good idea I'm now content to publish it as a novella. Plus, if I'm to publish a book in 2022, this was likely it. The good thing is that you only need a beginning and ending for novellas.
As it turns out, my first draft weighs in at 38,800 words, which is just 1,200 words shy of a “novel” length story, for SF anyway. And given that I usually add words rather than trim them in my second and third drafts, it is possible that The Aerie of a Pirate Prince will end up a very short novel rather than a very long novella. Not that it really matters.
So what is The Aerie of a Pirate Prince about?
Rafe d’Mere and his feathered friend, Kee, return once again. The story is set three and a half years after the events recounted in Shadows Over an Iron Kingdom. d’Mere has been living the life he had originally set out to do – touring the planets of the Alantzia system at his leisure. When he tires of a planet, he signs onboard a ship as a limited time systems’ mate. The story opens with d’Mere aboard Captain Felle Sing’s Rendezvous Moon with his old pal, Chief Engineer Red Tew aboard. In Teire orbit they discover that one of the containers they off-loaded was off-loaded to the wrong lighter, though the lighter had supplied all the correct ID codes to collect the box. In short it had been hijacked. But due to an unexpected event, the original consignee learned of it arrival far sooner than what the hijackers had arranged. So, with only a four hour lead, Captain Sing, and the consignee’s office manager, Lasha Nin, are determined to track the stolen merchandise before it can be reloaded into another contain and sent off to the drifts. Red Tew volunteers to assist Captain Sing, and then volunteers d’Mere as well, pointing out that d’Mere’s an old hand at dealing with pirate princes. So once again, d’Mere is dragged into dealing with yet another ruthless pirate prince.
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