Gather round the crystal ball, everybody. It’s time to look into the future … of writing.

My writing, specifically. I have five titles out right now: three TVD recap collections, Sire, the first Vampires of St. Troy novel, and Debutante, a St. Troy novella.

I’ll have at least two more novels coming out this year. Scion, the second St. Troy novel, is complete. The only thing standing between me and publication is the copyediting. I’m working on that right now (I’m actually writing this just to get a break), and I’ll be sending the manuscript out to some volunteers sometime next week.

I’ve also started work on The Wild Hunt, the first novel in The Godless Saint series. TGS is the story of Caden Lyndsey, a man who receives glimpses of the future and wields the power to change it. In The Wild Hunt, he confronts a group of people trying to resurrecting an old Norse religion … and might end up resurrecting an angry Norse god instead.

TGS is a rare instance of maltheist fiction … in this series’ universe, God is real … and he’s the bad guy.

The first novel I ever wrote (which lives now and forever in my desk drawer backup hard drive) was set in the Godless Saint universe. This series has been kicking around in my head for years now, longer even than the St. Troy novels, and I’m excited to finally share it with people. I think people who like the CW’s Supernatural or Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files will get a kick out of this book.

I’ve been writing about ten pages a day on this, which is just about one scene. At that rate, the first draft should be done in two months. I think that the outline is strong enough that it will be ready for publication after a few tweeks and a copyedit, so expect The Wild Hunt sometime in mid-year.

After that … I’m not sure. St. Troy and The Godless Saint are both ongoing series, and there are more books coming from both; Regent from ST and Possession from TGS are the next titles in the queue. But I think I might introduce a third series, just to keep myself form getting bored.

What series? Well, I’m not exactly sure … and you might have a say in the matter. Here are some of the ideas I’m tossing around:

The Witches of Castlewood: On her eighteenth birthday, our heroine finds an old leather book in her college’s library … and can hear it calling her name.

The Werewolves of Port Mercer: A girl finds herself being hunted by a werewolf, and may have to invoke ancient magics in order to protect herself.

Excalibur: This is a more traditional YA story. When a champion falls, the Lady of the Lake – yes, that one – summons a high school boy to compete for a the hero’s mantle. This story ends up with more of a Sci-Fi feel than fantasy.

The Janus Project: When a bully threatens her best friend, the heroine flips out and beats him to a pulp … and starts to remember the truth about her family. This one is also Sci-Fi

Or I could just bite the bullet and write a quick, trashy vampire porn and become rich.

And, of course, there will still be your weekly Vampire Diaries recaps (and, if fortune smiles on us, The Originals, too).

So what say ye, assembled hordes of the internet? Do any of these tickle your fancy?

Update: I’ve disabled the Markdown plugin, because it just ate a (4,500 word) post. I had a backup, but this plugin is officially on my POS list.

Earlier this weekend, I enabled Markdown in the comments. That means you can now style your comments without using (or even knowing) HTML.

Markdown is pretty simple: if you’ve ever used plain text to “format” an email, you probably already know the basics:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re reading this, you’re looking at my new blog, served up by HostGator. Thanks for being patient while I got all of the technical details sorted out.

If you have any problems, please send me let me know.

As many of you noticed yesterday (and thanks for alerting me), my blog crashed due to bandwidth limitations. I was kind of shocked that that was even possible (bandwidth is cheap), but at least I’m not in the middle of a series of recaps.

Anyway, over the next few days I’m going to be moving over to a service provider that can accommodate our new bandwidth needs. It should be a fairly straightforward process, but to prepare for it I’m disabling comments, and won’t be adding any new content until at least Monday.

Hopefully this will all happen transparently. It won’t, but that doesn’t mean I can’t hope.

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to give you all a quick update on how I’m going to be handling comments here on the blog and on Twitter.

One of my favorite parts of running this site is all of the comments I get, and all of the awesome discussions we have. I really, genuinely appreciate you guys taking the time to leave me a note, tell me you liked an article, and share your theories. You all make writing worth while.

In the past I’ve tried to respond to every comment left here, and I’ve been pretty successful. It’s getting to the point, though, that I just can’t keep up. The TVD recaps alone generally pull in somewhere around a hundred comments a week, and I spend a large part of my weekend trying to respond to all of them. Add it the TSC recaps, all of the miscellaneous articles I link to during the week, and all of the @tags I get on Twitter, and it’s kind of overwhelming. Like, I’d have to stop writing new stuff in order to respond to comments about the old stuff overwhelming.

This is kind of a great problem to have, because it means we have a great little community going here. But it also means I have to stop replying to every single comment. I’m going to try to keep responding to most of the TVD and TSC posts, but the other articles and Twitter comments won’t all be getting individual replies.

I do promise, though, that I read every single comment, even if I don’t respond to it. I love hearing from you guys, so thanks for taking the time to write.

-thomas

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to give you all a quick update on my writing schedule. Things have been crazy around here lately, and my writing (and my writing time) have taken a big hit.

The biggest hurdle lately has been travel. Every once in a while I get tagged as a customer rep for my company, and that means I have to go on the road helping them install our software, work through some bugs, collect feedback, and so on. I was on travel all last week, so I basically had no time to myself … I didn’t even get to watch TVD live, which pushed back the recap by at least a day, which pushed back the TSC recap by a day … and so on.

Last night, NewCorgi (whose name for the moment is Neville Shortbottom, but that’s subject to change at a moment’s notice) found a chocolate candy bar I had left on my desk. Since chocolate is about as good for dogs as arsenic is for us, we kind of freaked out. The emergency vet told us to give him some hydrogen peroxide to make him throw up, then watch him over night. The good news is that Neville is feeling fine (he murdered a box of cat food over night), but I wasn’t in much of a mood to write after all that happened.

So, the TVD recap will be up some time after work tonight. The TSC recap should be up tomorrow.

I also plan to get back to This Week on the Web and Sire Book Club, now that I will actually have some free time at night. Scion, the sequel to Sire, is still in progress, but I underestimated how much effort the TVD and TSC recaps were going to be, so it might not be finished as quickly as I want. I’ll let you know when you can expect it as soon as I know myself.

As you can see, I’ve created a shiny new layout, with a shiny new banner image courtesy of The Lady. So what do you think?

Also, I’m thinking about taking the Facebook and Google+ links off the banner; I’m not shy about my profiles or anything, but I honestly don’t use those sights anywhere nearly as often as Twitter, and they just seem kind of unnecessary. Opinions?

Hey everybody,

Thanks for being patient with my somewhat irregular posting schedule. As you probably know, The Fiancee recently became The Lady of the Manor, and we jaunted off to Maine fore some fun and frolicking.

We’re back home now, and I’m going to start posting more regularly again. Here’s how I think it’s going to look:

• Mondays: My Secret Circle recap. I’ll write these over the weekend, so expect them to be posted early in the morning, New York time.
• Tuesdays: A This Week on the Web style link blast
• Wednesdays: Another This Week on the Web style link blast, or maybe a post on whatever is tickling my brain at the moment.
• Thursdays: A Vampire Diaries and Secret Circle recap roundup
• Fridays: My Vampire Diaries recap. I write these when I get home from work, so expect them some time after 6pm, New York time.

I’ll also be dropping in news about upcoming novel, and giving you some hints about my works-in-progress. Thanks for reading!

After constant heckling from dozens one of my readers (you’re welcome, Candice), I’ve finally gotten around to updating my blog’s theme. And by “I”, of course, I mean AJ Wiswell, also known as The Girlfriend, who went to art school and everything, and as a result has a much better sense of design than I do.

So, how do you like the new layout? Is it easier to use and read? Is there anything missing?

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. I hope your day was filled with tryptophan and mirth.

My blog has pretty much been consumed with The Vampire Diaries lately (and don’t worry, the recaps will keep coming), but I want to spread out the rest of my content a bit, and write a bit more, so I’m going to try to keep up with the following posting schedule:

Monday: This Week on the Web. A collection of fun / interesting / maddening links I find over the course of the week.

Wednesday: Radom blog post. A quick post on something that strikes me as interesting. I’m open to suggestions, so if there’s something you want me to write about, hit the contact form.

Friday: The Vampire Diaries recap. Though this might get pushed to Saturday, depending on how long it takes me to write, and how busy I am.

Thanks for reading, everybody!