Holding Pattern
So last week I finished the rewrite of "Invisible Sun", the third Empire Games novel, which feels as if it's been going on forever (I began it in mid-2014). The delivered manuscript is about 30% longer than the previous draft and 25% longer than the two earlierbooks, because of all the loose ends I was trying to tie up, and it all took longer than expected.
On Tuesday I'm off to Toru�� in Poland as a guest of honour at Polcon, the oldest Polish science fiction convention. I've got a relatively quiet summer (although I might be doing a panel at MCM Comicon in Glasgow in mid-September and doing a reading in Berlin earlier in the month, subject to venue). Then in October I'll be a guest of honour at Vcon 42 in Vancouver; I may also be wandering around Canada for a couple of weeks before/after Vcon, but won't be visiting the USA on that trip.
Anyway, the blog is going to go quiet while I'm in Poland, but I hope to start updating it more regularly once I get home around mid-month and am no longer on deadline.
As for why I've been so quiet:
My father died on July 20th, last year. (He was 93.) During his final illness I was trying to rewrite a space opera, "Ghost Engine": but as with other creative pursuits, writing novels doesn't go smoothly when the writer is stressed. In my case, dad's terminal illness soured me on the book, so I put it on the shelf for another year even though I'd just sunk 12 months' work into it. I then squeezed out the ninth Laundry Files book, "The Labyrinth Index", at high speed—it's coming out this October 30th—and flamed out. But there's no time in the schedule for flame-outs, so I had to tackle "Invisible Sun" while burned-out and exhausted ... and I still need to get "Ghost Engine" into shape for submission in 2019 and publication in 2020.
My mother is now unwell, so I've been making weekly trips to visit her in hospital. This is stressful and isn't helping with the exhaustion: it has also prevented me from making any long-term plans. I'm therefore downing tools right now in an attempt to claw back enough "me" time to recharge my creative juices while dealing with the kind of unhappy family issues that come to most of us with time.
As a side-note: I last took a sabbatical in 2007, and planned to have one in 2015 or 2016. But stuff kept happening and I'm now about 2 years overdue for a break. This time off is essential: if all goes well I hope to get back to work as usual some time in 2019, but I make no promises.
What I can say is that I'm finally nearing the end of two gigantic projects dating back approximately 20 years. (There are going to be more Laundry Files novels after "The Labyrinth Index", and possibly even another Merchant Princes/Empire Games standalone novel, but I don't intend to keep the series on life support indefinitely.) Going forward, I want to reduce the number of novels I write to roughly one per year, but to write more short fiction—especially novelettes and novellas—and most importantly, to find the time to break ground and star entirely new creative works: "Ghost Engine" will probably be the first of these to come to fruition.
TLDR: Rule #1, "don't die", is in effect for the rest of the year. Beyond that? We'll see.
