Some Longer-Term Planning

Saturday, July 12, 2025 at 9:00am

For the last four months, I’ve been doing regular updates on my near-term publishing and how I plan on catching up from my nearly-four-year hiatus into the realm of video game development. In my most recent post, I shared that I’ve begun re-reading Voyage Embarkation and working on the expanded front- and back-matter for that edition.

At the time of this writing, I’ve read the first four chapters and written the additional back-matter for each of them (even more will be complete by the time this post goes live on my blog). It’s become apparent that this already hefty novel is going to get even heftier with its expanded back-matter. The same thing will happen to Insomnium. For many other works, this is less of an issue, since all my subsequent books are much shorter, but I realized that I will be growing a large corpus of “meta-writing” (writing about my writing) as I work through this project.

And so, this brings me to some longer-term planning.

I expect that by 2035, if the world hasn’t completely fallen apart, I’ll be ready to do this all over again, leading to even more back-matter. But, there’s a solution that’s more elegant than simply bloating each individual work further: leave an updated introduction in each novel, and extract all additional back-matter (essays, development history, meta-analysis, etc.) into a single, stand-alone non-fiction work. So, the idea is to proceed with the 2025 editions as planned, but to execute the described reorganization whenever the next round of new editions happens (tentatively, 2035).

This also gotten me thinking about what the next decade of my creative work might look like. I’m currently planned out for a few years, but what might come after that?

2026: When the Gods Wish to Punish. This is a finished draft and just needs to proceed to publication after the new editions are complete.
2027: The Many and the Few. This novel is currently an idea, but a very strongly-formed one and has a high likelihood of being my next writing project after When the Gods is wrapped up.
2028: Artifice. This was a game I was working on in 2023 and 2024. I will no longer be pursuing making a game out of it, but I will attempt to find a way to tell its story in the format of a novel. Stories don’t necessarily cross media well, so this is currently a strong idea that may or may not end up working out.
2029: TBD fiction work.
2030: TBD fiction work.
2031: TBD fiction work.
2033: TBD non-fiction work. This is a particular idea that has been floating around in my head for some time. It has a definite shape and idea to it, but I don’t want to say anything more about it publicly at this time.
2034: Preparation for the 2035 re-releases.

I’ve stopped trying to plan out my future writing projects, because these tend to change on me beyond a certain time horizon. I can’t say what any of the 2029-2031 works will be exactly, but I can say that there are some strong candidates among partially formed ideas of old:

Voyage Redux. This is a very strong contender, particularly since the “altered” Kal of this world will show up as a minor character in When the Gods. The idea is that there is a version of Kal who is older, in his thirties, and inhabits the world of Intersection Thirteen rather than that of the original Voyage Embarkation. This novel or collection or whatever it ends up being would be new adventures for him in that universe.
The Ghost King. This is also a strong contender, because I wrote 12,000 words of it in 2021 before becoming absorbed in When the Gods. I still think that the idea has merit, although the advent of generative AI in the intervening years may blunt some of its conceptual weight. Although it’s equally possible I could find a way to use that to my advantage.
Land of the Free. This one would take quite a bit more conceptual work. It’s currently a single scene and very imaginatively developed world without main protagonists or any “point” beyond its central allegory. But, if I did find a story I want to tell in this world, it would end up being quite a cool novel, perhaps even on the level of Schrödinger’s City cool.
Divinity. This is currently just an idea. It’s got interesting characters and the rough shape of a plot. However, I’ve always felt (and still do feel) that this novel would make an excellent “capstone” to my creative fiction work, and I’m not sure I’ll be ready for that even in 2035. If you ever hear about me working on this, it will mean that I’ll have said all I have to say in the form of fiction.