Help I Accidentally Started Another Book

I have things to write. I have lots of things to write. I have Salvage 7 to redraft – which I am doing – I have several short stories that need finishing and editing. I have the finale sessions for my Warhammer-ish RPG to plan and write up. I have the second draft of an audiobook to proof, too. And I already have two other books, or at least much longer stories, that I’ve been semi-regularly poking at and adding to bit by bit. And these are of course only the ideas that I’ve actually started; there are dozens more waiting in the wings for me to get started on them.

So of course this week I started another one.

It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t from an idea I had lying around already. It was a thought I had on the train home on Wednesday, apropos of absolutely nothing. I noted it down, let myself sleep on it, and the next day just… started. And it worked. It worked well, I think. So well that I reckon I have another novella in the pipeline once it’s finished.

Maybe, anyway. There is no questioning the fact that I’m going to write this story; ever since I set my hands to the keyboard it’s been nibbling at the back of my brain, luring me away from the rest of my work: write this, let it out. But it’s a bit of a weird idea, truth be told. It is, in fact, a sequel to something I’ve already published, but very much not the sequel one would expect. (I realise this narrows the possibilities down a fair bit; it’s not the Boiling Seas because I already have too many ideas for more of that, it’s not quite a few other options… you can probably figure it out, I’m just not going to outright say it.) It takes a concept that worked very well and… throws most of that concept away. It takes a world that I spent a long time crafting and moves far away from it, in time and space and feeling. No returning characters – not really – no returning environment, a very different overall feeling. There is more melancholy to this one, at least to start with. I think it’s going to be a build towards the feeling of the original story, if it ever truly reaches that point.

It’s just the concept, really, in a different setting and in a different character’s hands. And while I have to get this story out I am already nervous about how it might be received. Because it’s a sequel, to something that people really liked, but it is such a departure from so many aspects of that thing that I have no idea if it’ll be liked in the slightest. I do not want to make that first story worse by adding to it.

Do I even publish it? Do I just take this story for myself and let that original story be? Or do I give it to all of you lot and brace for feedback?

I don’t know yet. But I do know that I’m going to write this. And there’s no point wondering about anything else until then, honestly.