We’re now a month and a half into 2024. I’m sitting on my sofa absolutely miserable—cough, runny nose, fever, body aches, stuffy head, but two tests have insisted I don’t have COVID even though I feel rather like I have COVID.
Anyway, I’ve a ton of interesting projects in the air and a lot of really cool stuff happening this year.
FiErst off, Eunice and I are just putting the finishing touches on Unyielding Devotion, the fourth Passionate Pantheon novel!
The Passionate Pantheon books are far-future, post-scarcity science fiction theocratic erotica, plus philosophy. We use a tick-tock cycle for these novels: odd-numbered books are upbeat Utopian stories, even-numbered books are dark erotic horror, our explorations of how post-scarcity societies can go wrong.
We were pleased to be fortunate enough to get well-known artist Matt Haley for the cover art for the fourth novel, which calls back to the Golden Age of sci-fi book cover design.
Eunice will be at WorldCon Glasgow on August 8-12 in Scotland with this and our other novels, so if you get a chance, be sure to say hi!
And speaking of covers: Black Iron. I’ve won back the rights to the book and the entire universe it’s set in, so I’m preparing to re-release a newly edited second edition of the novel, which will be available next month in paperback and eBook, significantly polished from the first edition and with a brand-new cover.
We also have another novel due out later this year, in a completely new and unrelated series. It’s a contemporary urban fantasy set in London in 2016. Here’s the basic gist:
Imagine Harry Potter meets The Matrix by way of Jason Bourne…with sex. When May, a London 20something infosec tech at a Shoreditch webhosting firm, escapes an abduction attempt, she finds herself in a centuries-long underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a powerful society of Tory rage mages. Now she must learn the ways of magic if she is to survive this new reality.
Springfield bound! I have quite a number of books in the pipe this year, including a literary novel called Spin, currently about 80,000 words into what will likely be somewhere around 140,000.
It’s a post-Collapse magical realism novel set in the Dominionate, a theocracy that has taken over the midwestern United States thousands of years from now. My Talespinner and I have been working on this book for some time, and we’ve reached a point where the timing of events in the novel has become quite hairy and tricky to work out, so…we’re taking a journey, following the protagonist’s path through present-day Missouri, along the roads that will, thousand of years hence, still be in use in much the way ancient Roman roads are still used in Europe today.
I think it will be fun, taking some days to follow the path of our fictional character through the fictional Dominionate, on the run from the Church toward something she can’t even imagine. (We are hard on our protagonists in this novel.)
I should, with a bit of luck, have the Xenomorph Facehugger Gag v3.0 prototype done by the time I leave, so we can test it out (tests of the v2.0 prototype went swimmingly).
The third (and, with luck, final) variant should be lighter and more suited to…err, longer-term wear.