Happy Spring and My Next Book

I hope you’re having a beautiful spring season. I wanted to update since it’s been a couple of months, and because I’ve decided what my next book is going to be.

I mentioned in my last post that I have several non-fiction projects I’ll be doing this year, but they’re going to take some time to outline and really think through. So my next book will be the one that I am best prepared to write at this moment... Tales of the Queendoms.

Right now is a good time to start on it too, as Camp Nanowrimo begins on April 1st. You’ve probably heard of Nanowrimo, where people write 50,000-word novels every November. Camp Nanowrimo is the same, only held in April and July. As with Nanowrimo, you try to hit a word count of 1,667 words per day for 30 days to achieve the final word goal.

I’ve participated in Nanowrimo and Camp Nanowrimo many times. Sometimes I reach the final word goal and other times not, but I’ve finished the large part of many first drafts this way, including for a number of books in The Queendoms Series. It’s a great tool because you can be very social and comment in the forums a lot, or instead simply hunker down and write, and log in to the site at the end of the day to put in your daily word count. In a sense, it’s a simple word count tool with a whole community built around it (lol), but it works. You’d be surprised how compulsively you write when it’s approaching midnight and you are at 1,500 words!

Tales of the Queendoms will be a collection of eight short stories, two for each of the four queendoms – Califia, the Kashaya Sky, Madrona, and Rio. The first story will be a kind of origin story, set in the beginnings of that queendom, with the second story being set after the end of the series, i.e., after the events in To the Farthest Shore. In between each story, there will be a quote from the Teachings of Gaia.

As I’ve said before, this will be the happy ending that Second Bond was originally intended to be. The characters and settings are still very much alive in my mind and I’m looking forward to writing it. Enjoy the new spring season, and I’ll update again soon.