Three Novels in a Year* (& One on the Way) What's With This?

I wish I knew. To tell the truth, I find it a little spooky. Part of it can be explained by the simple fact that I've been able to come up with stories to write. When I have one, I can set it down in words, at about a thousand words a day. And I write every day. Those words add up. Still, coming up with stories has been, in the past, a problem for me. Unlike some authors, I don't have a head full of story ideas, and never have. Nevertheless, you only need one idea at a time, and, at the moment, I've had one idea after the next. I can't fully explain exactly why that is. 

I do, however, have several ideas...

One is that I have returned, in a way, to my roots when it comes to telling stories. My first two stories, Some Day Days, and A Summer in Amber, which, while set in the near future, making them science fiction, were basically light novels with an element of romance. Some Day Days quite explicitly had a romance as its focus, though not, strictly speaking a romance novel. I considered myself a science fiction fan in those days, so it was natural that I would write and market those stories as science fiction. But fact is that they had little more than the future setting to make them SF, as they weren't built around some wonderful new idea to explore, typical of true SF. 

Since A Passage to Jarpara, I have been writing novels like those again. Novels about people. They're speculative fiction only in their settings, and that only because I don't care to write contemporary or historical fiction. I don't want to try to fit my stories into this world. I read and write to escape it.

I must admit, however, that I still used some science fiction elements in these last three stories, mostly to explore the history of those Earth colonized worlds. If I'm honest, that has been something of a crutch. I used them to create some sort of an interesting ending. Still, since Passage to Jarpara, I have all but eliminated "adventure" from my stories. They have gotten more and more mundane, save for those endings. 

My newest novel, The Daval-Mers Dossier is, on the surface, a mystery story. But again, that's sort of a gimmick. The mystery, a low stakes one, is the excuse to introduce a fictional character from Chateau Clare, just for fun. This story has no science fiction elements, save for its locale, the world of Chateau Clare and Glencrow Summer. And my Project 2028, is going to be 100% a light fiction novel.

In short, I am no longer writing genre fiction. Oh, I may use a science fiction or fantasy tag when listing the books, so that my readers can find them, but that's just marketing. The heart of my stories going forward will be everyday stories of ordinary people, on a world much like our own, or rather, as it was, a hundred years ago. Those are the stories I like daydreaming about, and can get me motivated to put then into words. There will no doubt be a price to be paid for this change in direction, since many of my readers are science fiction and/or fantasy fans, and my new books aren't science fiction or fantasy. Oh well. 

But that brings us to my second idea about what's going on, which is doubling down of what I've done throughout my writing.

Which is to say, writing my stories to entertain myself. This has always been true. However, I have occasionally taken into account what I think might appeal to readers when coming up with a story idea.  Beneath the Lanterns, was my attempt at writing fantasy, and my Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure stories were a return to the setting of The Bright Black Sea, my most popular book. The Girl on the Kerb was my attempt to branch out into espionage stories. But all my stories have to appeal to me, and those story ideas are rare.

I've now gone all in on this mindset since I started writing Passage to Jarpara, which is to say, writing the stories with no regard whatsoever for their commercial prospects. I wrote Passage to Jarpara because I liked the character and the setting, and really wanted to get Taef Lang to the job he always dreamed of. If it mean writing a glorified travelogue, well, so be it. Chateau Clare was, in part, a rude gesture to the popular modern fantasy novels, with their wars, magic, bad or morally grey characters, blood, and guts. I wanted to write the opposite, but not cozy fantasy either. I wanted something different, I think it is and that was what I set out to do.

I expected sales its reception might not be great. So when four of my seven beta readers never sent back any feedback on it, I took that as a glimpse of its future prospects. And to tell the truth, I found that encouraging. It meant I written something different, and had fun doing so. Indeed, I went directly on to write Glencrow Summer, a story even more "just a novel" than Chateau Clare, before Chateau Clare was even published. Like a Zen archer, I was content to let my arrow land wherever it was meant to.

The Daval-Mers Dossier now builds on that tradition. It's inspired by a suggestion from one of my beta readers, and it includes a dog, since another beta reader likes dogs. Why not? It has something of a mystery story format, but has the same, leisurely paced, low stakes story, with too many words style that has become my own. Only its setting makes it maybe science fiction or fantasy. Otherwise everything is very everyday normal.

And I can report that I have already written over 15,000 words of  my Project 2028 novel, which once again set in Lorria, a year after Glencrow Summer with a new set of characters, along with a cameo or two. This one also won't have a whiff of science fiction or fantasy, save for its setting.

As I said above, I think all this creativity comes from letting go and not worrying about pleasing readers, Instead, I trust that if I like it, there'll be readers who will as well. This approach frees me to just have fun writing and publishing. 

And finally, I think doing something different for every book makes writing interesting, even if it is somewhat disconcerting for regular readers. It's producing art rather than a product. 

Still, the thing is that you can't fail when publishing your own individual work, because you can't succeed. Oh, some are making money writing and publishing, a few even a lot of money, for a while. But the statistical chances of this happening are so remote that you need not concern yourself with the possibility, even if that's your goal. Writing and publishing are worthy ends in and of themselves. It doesn't matter how accomplished, or unaccomplished you are, it's your creative expressions that count. 

So, I guess I'm writing a lot because I enjoy writing. I love dreaming up people and their world. I want to see where I can take them, and them, me. I love playing and painting with words. Writing, for me, is not the work you hear people saying that it is. It's fun and that's what makes writing easy for me, and in the end, what makes me as prolific as I am.

*Published. I had written half of Passage to Jarpara before going back and finishing it, starting in Oct. 2023.

The one on the way... Late May, Early June