The act of writing isn’t something that you can really give up on ever. It’s not something that you just do and find yourself “done” with. Right now it’s difficult for me to talk about my “next book” because in my mind my “next book” is the one that I’m writing right now. The book that I’m releasing next, the one that I’ve been speaking about for months and months on end, that book is my last book. Confused yet? Imagine trying to have polite conversation with people about what I do.
The next book that I’m releasing, which is titled Terminus Cycle (yes, I am finally confirming the title) will be out in the next month or two and is currently being lovingly tended to by my editor at the moment. The book that I’m working on is the followup to Terminus Cycle and it has me all excited again. I’m not saying that Terminus Cycle doesn’t have me excited, because it does, but most of that excitement was from a while ago when I was crafting the world, the characters and their stories.
What is exciting to me is that I’m writing the second book in what will become a series. I don’t want to make any sort of wild commitment as to how many volumes there will be in the series, but there was a lot of groundwork laid out in Terminus Cycle that I get to work with in the second book and I’m really excited about being able to do that. Terminus Cycle is where I got to build a world, introduce some pivotal characters and then show the reader the struggles that they went through to help make their galaxy what it turned in to.
A story like The Godslayer was pretty self-contained, which was how it was supposed to be. There is a very low chance that I ever revisit Alek Turner or his world mostly because I’ve already told the story that I felt was most important to his character. He was the central figure in that story and at the end he was the character that you grew to know and follow around, who cares about the other guys, really?
Growing up I was always into telling long stories and creating intricate worlds that would go on for as long as they kept my interest, so being able to once again build a “world” (quotes because this is science fiction and inhabits more than one planet) up from nothing and finding myself wanting to see the inner workings of it is really fun. There will be characters in Terminus Cycle that you get just enough of to make you say “well, I want to know more about this character, why isn’t there more?” There might even be characters that you don’t particularly like very much, but that will be in the second installment and you’ll get inside of their heads to better understand their motivations.
Essentially I am happy to be back to creating characters and storylines that arc over a long period of time and will be allowed room to breath and grow.
Now, the other thing that I wanted to talk about is the title to my book. I had initially settled on the title of Omega Destiny, which isn’t a terrible title, but I wasn’t really super happy with it. Titles and names are the things that I hate the most because if they don’t come natural to me they tend to be obnoxious. I settled on Omega Destiny and was prepared to use it until a simple Google search last night popped up a relatively new book on the Amazon marketplace titled Omega’s Destiny. Usually this wouldn’t be that big of an issue except for the fact that it’s male werewolf-on-male-werewolf erotica. I don’t have a problem with that by any stretch of the imagination, if you are into that, more power to you, but a recent release with a similar title plus the strange subject matter was just too much for me to handle.
The idea of someone searching Google or Amazon for my book after hearing the title and thinking, “well, I guess it was this” and giving someone else money is just too much for me to handle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mylH5rtoBao