Well, technically I completed the first draft of my latest novel a week ago, but only now am I talking about it here.

This is the next novel in my military/sf adventure series. My agent is shopping the first book in the series and I went ahead and produced the second. The title and synopsis is of course under wraps but it deals with an American officer serving in the 3rd European Union’s interstellar forces. I refer to the setting of these stories as Nationalized Space as this is an imagined future where mankind spreads out into the cosmos without ever having unified. In addition it is a future where sometime in the early 21st century the United States took a wrong turn, never recovered, and ended up a minor power. After all, all empires fade.

Now that the draft is done, currently at 99,000 words, I am going to take a few weeks off from working on the novel. First I am going to play on my new Xbox One S and lose a lot of matches of Player’s Unknown Battlegrounds. Second I am going to work on some short pieces, including trying my hand at a pulp styled adventure, but in short story form, and then after I have achieved some distance I will return to the novel for the revision processes.

I’m confident that the book has no major flaws that will require a complete rewrite, but I have been wrong on that before. I anticipate that the revision will be principally tightening, clarifying, and of course hunting and killing the dreaded spelling and grammar flaws.