It's been awhile since I've posted an update on my current projects. However, I saw that Chris Nuttall had done that and that reminded me. So let's start with my current primary focus...
Serpent Sword: Battle for the Wastelands #2-There are ten completed chapters, and between those and the partial chapters later on, I have a total word count of 53,694. I think the finish product will be somewhat longer than the original Battle for the Wastelands' 89,000 words, so I'm about halfway through perhaps? I already have the cover art (see below) and have written the book copy, but even if I complete the manuscript in, say, October or November, tasks like hiring a professional editor, revising, formatting, finding another author to blurb it, etc. will take time and then releasing it in December might not be a wise idea. It might be better to hold off until early 2022.
I've noticed that at conventions and on Amazon (especially after the BookBub featured deal), the "Long War" novels The Thing in the Woods and The Atlanta Incursion sell significantly better than Battle and its prequel novella "Son of Grendel." Consequently, once I have Serpent Sword out the door, it is my plan to swing back to that series and put out the third novel The Walking Worm (book copy here) and then the fourth novel, Shadowmen before returning to the Wastelands world with the third book, tentatively titled Escape.
(Once Serpent Sword is published, I'm going to try for a BookBub featured deal for Battle on the grounds that an available sequel would make it more likely to get approval and ultimately more profitable--people might get Battle for $0.99 and then pay full price for Serpent Sword and "SOG." If BookBub does for the Wastelands series what it did for Thing and TAI, I might do Escape before Shadowmen, but the Wastelands world is weird--it's secondary-world fantasy without magic, it's steampunk and post-apocalyptic but it's not in our world, etc. And generally horror sells better than steampunk.)
I have already started writing TWW and Shadowmen, although I don't think I have any completed chapters. TWW's current word count is 16,504 and Shadowmen's word count is 11,236. I can definitely complete TWW in 2022 and I could potentially complete Shadowmen in 2022 as well, given how the "Long War" series is less research-heavy than Wastelands and in particular Shadowmen takes place in the same town as Thing.
Like Serpent Sword, I already have the cover for The Walking Worm made. Here you go. That's MJ-12 agent Thomas Bolton (who first appears briefly in Thing but is in TAI a lot more) on the left and our hero James Daly on the right.
Finally, in April I completed the short story "Run, Hide, Feed" and submitted it to a modern-monster collection. They chose not to include it and it was rejected by an online horror magazine soon after. There are still some pro-rate horror publications I haven't submitted to, although the subject matter (it was written to comment on U.S. mass shootings, in particular the amount of media attention paid to the shooters) makes it a bit of a hot potato. We shall see.
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