For those who follow me on Twitter, you might have seen my tweet yesterday about the progress of the upcoming Bridge Chronicles cyberpunk novel, Reclamation. For those who didn’t, I’m here to announce that the first draft of Reclamation has been completed! It’s gone off to my alpha reader for the once-over, then it will come back to me for three or four more rounds of edits and tweaks. I’m really happy with this one.

I technically started it back in Septmeber of 2014 as a new volume of short stories, a Volume 2 of Tales from the Bridge Chronicles. The more stories I wrote, though, the more it occurred to me that I was really writing one narrative with multiple parts and protagonists. Finally I decided back in August that it really should be a novel and I began stitching the pieces together into one long story. The first draft has topped out at over 62,000 words, so it’ll be a decent read. I’m really happy with it but it’s a bit of a departure in the series. The previous novels have all centered on the viewpoint of Artemis Bridge with a few interludes told from the perspective of various members of the supporting cast. For Reclamation, that is reversed. I’d say Bridge is actively featured in about 1/4 of the novel but his presence is felt throughout. As a fixer, Bridge’s main action is generally about setting up the logistics for other operatives to act and you’ll now get to see the other side of that equation. There are a familiar characters in this book, such as Far-El and Johnny Cloud of the Bottle City Boys, and what seems like everybody’s favorite, Aristotle who is now known more as The Prophet. He gets a few chapters all his own in the middle of this one. I’m excited to see the fan reaction to the new characters as well. There’s a lot to unpack in this book and it sets up the future path of this universe for a while to come. I expect Reclamation to be released by the end of January or the beginning of February 2016.

So what’s next after Reclamation is released? I have two writing projects in mind before I come back to the next Bridge Chronicles story. The first will be finishing up a project I’ve been noodling with for a while that I finally want to bring to the forefront. That project is a screenplay. In fact, it’s a screenplay adaptation of Under the Amoral Bridge. I plan to adapt the first Bridge novel and then try to shop it around for a movie or television pilot. I’m a huge fan of long-form television shows and frachinse movie series and I would love to turn Bridge into one of these. And just economically speaking, the real money isn’t in selling novels but in selling either the rights (little money) or the actual screenplay itself (more money than just selling the rights).

Once the screenplay is finished, I’ll be returning to my other series, the Cthulhu Mythos series called The Stepping Stone Cycle. There are 3 more “episodes” or novellas I want to write and I expect they’ll take up most of the rest of 2016. Once that’s done, I’ll be back to the Bridge series – at the very least, I have four more novels to write in the series as well as a prequel novel. And I may even finally put together another Tales short story compilation at that.

So that’s where I am. If you’re a fan of my work and of Bridge in particular, you have things to look forward to and if you aren’t, you can start reading with Under the Amoral Bridge and get caught up like the rest of us. You can get all of my works on my Buy My Books page.

Let’s have a Happy New Year!