A little while back, I mentioned that I had started work on a space opera epic. Well, there’s more to it than just writing books (though that’s the main effort). In true Galaxy’s Edge fashion, I’ve put together a website with some content to hopefully whet some people’s appetites leading up to when I start releasing books (hopefully in the summer). Welcome to The Unity Wars. I won’t be posting about it much on here; it’s its own thing. The books will be published under the pen name P.L. Nealen (because Amazon’s algorithm tends to market things differently for “new” authors in different genres). But if any of my current readers are also science fiction fans (particularly those disappointed in where Star Wars has gone), I’d welcome you over there. Now back to the word mines with me. Got more Brannigan’s Blackhearts to work on, too.
Busy, Busy
I know, I haven’t been posting here much. Need to get on that. Probably need to do some scheduling. But I’ve been busy. Very. I’ve got another new series in the works, and it’s more than a little different from anything I’ve done before. I’ve played around with military action adventure, horror/fantasy, and heroic fantasy (though y’all haven’t seen that much of that yet). But this is going to be science fiction. Now, the funny part is that I originally started tinkering with writing, back in high school, with science fiction. I still have notebooks (somewhere) of notes, starmaps, and starship diagrams from those days. I had an entire sweeping timeline of wars between alien empires and human-alien alliances. It was, to borrow a turn of phrase from Nick Cole and Jason Anspach, WingCommanderNotWingCommander with a leavening of StarWarsNotStarWars. In fact, Task Force Desperate started out as a mil-fic backstory leading into the “21st Century Chaos” that was part of the backstory of what that epic evolved into. (It isn’t anymore; the Praetorian Series became very much its own thing.) What I’m working on now isn’t that particular epic. It’s much more “The Clone Wars meets The Horus Heresy with
More on Realism and Storytelling
This post, while following on from the last one, will be addressing a bit more of a broad problem across genres. It’s gotten a lot more talk in the science fiction and fantasy genres (particularly fantasy) than it has in the thriller genre, but it still applies. The fantasy version of this has been most recently highlighted by the work of George R.R. Martin, though there are plenty of authors working along a similar vein, which has been coined “grimdark,” a term that became at first something of a joke, based on the tag-line for the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop sci-fantasy wargame: “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” Taken to its extreme, it can become so ludicrous that it shades into “grimderp.”