Allan Joyal: Blog

As most of you know, I finished Living a CAP-based future. Yes, the ending is a bit abrupt, but as I had previously stated, my muse really wanted me to just abandon the tale completely, but I refused to do that to all of you. I may return to Crucible in the future, but right now that tale is not high on my priority list.

I had a plan to work mostly on a science fiction tale that has been in the back of my mind for a couple of years, and to finally get Seafaring on Jord finished. (Seafaring is stuck just a few chapters before the conclusion. I just can't get it to flow the way I want.)

However, after the response to A Living Dungeon my muse appears to want me to add to the universe.

Now, I make no promises on when I'll finish. I do want to offer my readers more scenes from Faestari's life, but my writing tends to be erratic at best. All I can say is that I'm hoping I'll have something to send off to my editors in September.

I'm sure some won't like the ending for Living a CAP Based Present. It isn't a definitive, there will be no more ending. Unfortunately, as I said in an earlier blog post. My muse just doesn't want to touch this tale right now, so I brought the main plot thread to an end and left open the possibility of a sequel.

I will warn, it will likely be years before I return to this tale. I feel I need to get far away from the Swarm cycle for a while. My stories in that universe amount to more than 1,000,000 words, or 10 full length novels. It's a lot of writing and I just need to do something else for a while.

Sorry that it isn't a great ending, but the truth is that in the last 2 months I wrote a grand total of only 19,000 words. That is after several months of more than 50,000 words per month. There is no question in my mind that it was time to change pace.

I do apologize to everyone I haven't responded to who has mailed recently. Honestly, I'm not the biggest fan of the new mail system. It was always a lot easier for me to go into my e-mail and answer. I do appreciate every mail I receive.

I do have to apologize for not posting many chapters recently. My company has been ordered to send a bunch of people to a factory in Mexico to fix a problem and I ended up on the list of those who has to go. It's disrupted my writing schedule more than I would have liked. I probably won't be posting more chapters until Memorial Day or later.

Sorry.

I must once again ask for a thousand pardons from all my loyal and disloyal fans who are waiting to find out what will finally be the end of Mark Parker and his family and friends.

It's not that I intended to suddenly drop the story. I had been trying very hard to get it done. And as I've posted, February and March were reasonably good months writing wise as far as I was concerned.

And then there was April. You know with 7 days left in April I posted about having finished 57K words. I finished the month with over 80K words written. The last few days of the month saw me regularly exceeding 3,000 words a day. Mostly on my newest story idea, which has been growing by leaps and bounds.

Well, May has started unbelievably. The story that I started mid-April is now almost complete and has more than 80K words written. Yes, in less than a month I've almost written a complete book. That has been helped by a 5,000 words per day pace I've been able to maintain since May 1. I find I'm hyper-focused in the new story. Which sadly means that Living hasn't had any chapters added to the file in a couple of weeks. I am going to keep posting as I had a few banked, but until I get the current story finished, I doubt I'll have time to write more.

I'm not sure why my muse is pushing so hard, but I'm not going to look a gift tale in the pages. I'm going to write, write, write.

Hopefully I'll have something about the story for you all soon. I can say its a bit different from my normal fare."

Well, as I told my friends among the fraternity of Swarm Cycle authors, my muse managed to wander off into the fields of 'WTF' and found an entirely new and unusual idea for a major story. And this is not a quick story. I expect I'll get a 120K word novel out of it.

What is more scary is how hard my muse bit down on this tale. Last weekend was not a good weekend for me in writing. I barely wrote a word, and on April 17, had maybe 32,000 words written so far for April. (When I'm writing regularly I try for 2,000 words per day so I was about 2K words behind my preferred pace.)

As of 10 minutes ago, I had 57,956 words written for April. Yes, I've written more than 25,000 words in a week. All in the new story that I came up with. It seems that it grows 4-5000 words per day since I got inspired.

Sadly, its completely non-erotic, so I really doubt you'll find it here at SOL. I am tempted to post chapter 1 as a teaser, but I'm not sure that it would be proper or right. But that would happen when I was closer to completion.

I do still plan on finishing Living. The break actually has given me a chance to send the chapters that are complete for editing. I'll be replacing the posted chapters with edited versions sometime in the near future. I'm sure that many people are looking forward to that.