This summer the plan is to write stories.

Shocking, yes, but I hope not entirely unpalatable to the majority of my audience. Of course, you may want to know what kinds of stories, how long they’ll be and things like that. Worry not! I have actually put some thought into that and I have plan. Of course, I had a plan last summer and things wound up going awry more than once. Hopefully this time things will work out better.

The current plan calls four a total of seven short stories, one of which was posted last week in honor of Memorial Day. Memorial to a Saint was a Sumter short but only one of two that I’m planning for this summer. The second will come at the end of the other five and will in no way serve as a prelude to Thunder Clap. Seriously, it’s related in only the most tangential fashion.

That gives us five stories to spread across three other sets of narrative worlds. We’ll start next week by going back to the divided futures and seeing what the crew of Erin’s Dream is up to and what Port Darwin looks like in a hundred years. Then we’ll jump a couple of hundred years further into the future and see how of the most powerful families on Mars lives. In three weeks we’ll be back on Earth, visiting a group of the Weavers of the Heartlands that live right here in my home city of Fort Wayne. Finally we’ll abandon Earth as we know it entirely and tag along with Dmitri Dostoevsky on the business of empire for a couple of weeks before we jump back to Project Sumter’s neck of the woods. Of course, with all that world hopping going on there’s no telling where in time we might come down, so be prepared for anything.

With all that out of the way it will be time to start the third and final novel planned for this visit to Project Sumter’s timeline. Thunder Clap is the culmination of all the work I’ve been putting into Circuit and Helix over the past couple of years and I’m excited about it. Further, there’s not much I could say by way of introduction that wouldn’t steal from the story itself so I don’t plan to write an introduction so we’ll be swinging straight into the meat of things. By my count that means that, if everything goes as planned (ha!), the first chapter of Thunder Clap will come out some time in early August. I hope you’re looking forward to it. I know I am.

In the mean time, please enjoy the short stories and let me know what you think!