Letters to Kel: UNDER CONSTRUCTION

I don't know what to tell you here.

Maybe the lesson is that you gotta do what feels right for you -- and you gotta be willing to admit when you need to change your approach.

Here's the thing: with my Commonwealth Universe, it's been growing kind of "organically." They started out as individual books, and as I rough drafted them and put them aside to work on something else and came back to them and made revisions and put them aside again ... I realized that some of my SF books kind of fit together, belonging in the same "universe," sharing the same history. Sometimes I "discovered" that one book was ancient history for another book. All it took was some tweaking of details, changing names, adding other details, and ... viola! ... the Commonwealth was born.

As I wrote some of the books, I mentioned historical events, which gave me ideas for more books, and as I got to know my characters better, I was "introduced" to their friends and relatives and ancestors, who had their own stories to tell.

Right now there are nearly 30 Commonwealth books, either published or waiting for publication. I have titles and outlines -- sometimes just a thumbnail sketch -- for a total of 58 Commonwealth books. At this point, I am announcing that the Commonwealth is UNDER CONSTRUCTION. What does that mean? Well, for one thing, I'm gonna stick with the planned titles, and I'm going to write in chronological order from now on. If I get ideas for books that happened earlier ... well, I'll have to think seriously about writing them. Maybe I'll do short stories, shorter episodes in Commonwealth history, and kind of insert them into the timeline.

My longsuffering publisher, Writers' Exchange, is going to re-issue the books as we go along, some of them with new cover art, but more importantly with a new numbering system to make it easier for people to know exactly where each book is in Commonwealth history. It seems some people haven't been too happy not knowing where in time they are, and hearing that there are other books that happened before the one they just read ... but those books haven't been written yet. (some people .... there's just no pleasing them! )

I'm a big proponent of being flexible, but sometimes you gotta set out a plan and stick to it, no matter what. In the next few years ... probably the next 5 or 6, we'll have all the "holes" filled in. Then I guess we'll be writing forward in the Commonwealth instead of jumping all around in history. A new adventure! I hope everybody will stick around -- and feedback is more than welcome. If you meet someone in a book and want to know what happens to that character later, or what happens to their descendants, ask! Give me more ideas for the Commonwealth. I don't want to leave it any time soon.