Well, it’s a new year and that means it’s time for a new project. I had a number of possible projects to work on after the end of The Sidereal Saga, which is the usual way of things as I get ready to write a new tale. It’s pretty rare for authors to lack ideas to develop, although it does happen from time to time, so when it’s time for something new the biggest challenge is deciding on what you want to do. The second biggest challenge is sticking with the idea until it’s fully written.

One of the simplest ways for me to determine what a good idea to focus on is to look through the stuff I’ve written in the last year or so and see how well it matches up to waiting ideas. That is one of the reasons I publish a number of short fiction projects before launching another large one. The short fiction helps clear my mind and determine what I’m really interested in versus what I only have a few hundred or thousand words worth of story for. If I can write two or three short stories about a character or a world I can undoubtedly write a novella or a novel about it.

So no beating around the bush – if you read my previous short stories last year you may have noticed a couple revolving around the world of Nerona, a place based on medieval Italy in the Borgia era. My next project, The Drownway, will be set in that world. To go along with it there will be two Nerona short stories, including The Shadowed Canal, which originally appeared in Issue #2 of Anvil Magazine. There will also be a couple of other stories going up as well, so we will not really get into The Drownway before February. However, before we begin I wanted to take a little time and give a brief overview of what inspired the story.

That’s kind of difficult in this case because the idea behind The Drownway is actually pretty simple. There is a rich and deep history of telling stories about people that go to dangerous places, explore them and make them a little bit safer for anyone who follows in their footsteps. In most cases those stories are just that – history. However history is a great model for the fiction writer and I, for one, find it a very rich one. Yet there are other forms for this story to take.

The great exploration tales of the past involved huge expeditions, ships and provisions, casts of characters to wide and varied to encompass in a single tale. You can, of course, focus in on a handful of characters. I did just that in the Triad World novels. However there is another model.

The pulps often presented explorers as a handful of adventurers who went into the frontier or into ancient places and mapped out the dangers. They fight the monsters, they mark the dangers and they come back to accolades. Now I have my issues with the pulps in both their modern and classic incarnations but the style has endured for good reasons. The real perk of this kind of pulp exploration story is in its focus on pure entertainment. It offers a chance for a larger than life personality to reshape a little part of the world for the amusement of the audience in addition to reminding us the world can be made a better place by courage and vision. That is what I hope to do with The Drownway. I hope you will join me for the ride!

If you’re curious what my writing is like there’s a large archive of it available here. If you’d like to support this endeavor the best way to do so is by picking up a copy of my book, Have Spell, Will Travel. It’s available through this handy, dandy link:

Fiction returns next week! See you then.