After finishing up In the Leviathan, I certainly didn’t expect I would quickly come up with new projects that weren’t Collider. But I did anyway.
The Children’s Crusade is something I sketched out pretty rapidly once I came up with the idea, tracking a cast of twelve characters across ten sections (two are linked pairs). Using much the track I’ve been riding since first tackling Kindle Vella, I’m pretty confident I can do this. Despite the title, this is not related to the Middle Ages (umm…not technically!), nor Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, but rather that old American chestnut the Fountain of Youth.
And then even more recently I conjured A Centaur Died., another vision of the modern world. These are both very much literary fiction, which I figured was probably a good thing to have in case anyone is interested in publishing Leviathan.
I envision about ten weeks writing Crusade, but I haven’t yet worked out the details in that regard with Centaur. It’ll keep me busy writing in 2023, anyway. Crusade will hit at least 50,000 words (we’ll see how many!), and draws from work experiences both past (as in a decade ago) and present, among other things. By this point I’m pretty clear on how I best approach my fiction, especially long-form. So I would be foolish to back off while the going (at least the writing!) is good. That’s why this is happening.
