Well…

…Happy New Year?

A busy month, nearly at its end, that included way too much time spent shoveling snow and shivering. After two winters so mild that I thought I’d been transported to the Carolina coast, Midwest winter is back, baybee. We’ve reached the point where the prospect of daytime highs in the 30s (F) sounds like heaven, and the first of those is still a couple of days away.

::thinking warm thoughts::

Work on Chaos Agent continues. Not as far along as I’d like to be, but that’s pretty much how it is these days. I continue to work out scenes for the next couple of books at the same time, which in a way is helpful—I know which breadcrumbs to scatter about in CA. But in another way, it feels like I’m standing facing three walls of floor-to-ceiling notes with string connectors and keywords scribbled in black marker. You know, like this guy.

A hint about the plot? Okay. Newly-appointed Speaker of Humanish Jani Kilian, Lucien Pascal, and a small group of hybrid support and medical staff are on their way to Shèrá when a plea from John Shroud causes them to detour to a Channel Worlds Neoclona facility. Complications are the last thing they need, but John hands them a big one. On to Shèrá they go, where even more await. A couple of old faces return, one as a POV. An old enemy from Jani’s youth surfaces. Whole fistfuls of breadcrumbs.

In other news, I have a collection entitled Breakaway coming out on March 10. I gathered together all the Del & Gia stories, and added a related story, “The Repairer of Lost and Broken Things,” that appeared in the ZNB anthology Solar Flare.

I enjoyed writing these stories. I’m glad to have the chance to gather them in one place.