Projects and deadlines and demons, oh my!
Originally published at An Experimental Life. You can comment here or there.
The deadline for The Crimson Pact anthology, volume 3 is coming up at the end of the month. I've been planning to do an indirect sequel to Karma, my Quiet World story from volume 2--but from Kai Traeger's point of view as he and Halloween Jack (aka Jaqueline Hallow) investigate how the demons got there to begin with.
Thing is, I'm not sure I can have it done in time. But I've got others on the burner, and one that I'm working on, Prima Vox Audiat ("First Voice Heard"), is a modern dark fantasy also set in my Quiet World setting, but ten years before the supernatural world gets outed, and it'd be just about perfect for the anthology. For one thing, it's a bit darker than the Kai story, and this anthology is all about "dark-darkity-dark." It's also an homage to my brothers and sisters in arms from my old unit, the 123rd Signal Battalion.
I also need to rewrite and polish up the Alex stories (humorous contemporary fantasy) for the compilation ebook . The first one, Alex and the OCD Oracle ("In Jimmy's defense, I'm pretty sure Lederhosen are formal-wear in some parts of the world, the invitation did say, 'and guest,' and there was no specifically stated 'no ferrets' clause...") is a long short, and the second, Alex and the Not-So-Great Un-Summoning ("Just because they were trying to summon a demon didn't necessarily mean they were bad kids...") is a novella. May put a third story in there--We'll see.
Aaaaaand, there are all the rest, like the sequel to my bird story in Daily Science Fiction. I didn't think there'd be a sequel, even though some people asked for one. I honestly thought I'd said all I could about those characters and that world, and there's no point to a sequel unless you have something more to say. Turned out I had more to say than I thought I did, and this new story won't leave me alone until I write it.
And this is all in addition to the novels I'm working on. Oy! Those are going on the back burner for a while.
So yeah. These are the things I need to get done, and soon. Let's see if I succeed.