The Stormriders manuscript is currently just above 39K words.
The author does not write standalone stories: As I’ve said before (lots and lots of times, and maybe eventually all the people who enjoy “the Tebrey stories” so much will read the other books), there’s a bit of overlap between The Awakening and The Endless Realms series, and although it’s not necessary to read everything else to get what’s happening in one series, readers will find the story much richer for having that additional information.
(“Spoilers”: Geoffrey and Deegan are both in Project Brimstone, although they’re not major characters. Erin, who has thus far been seen only briefly by readers — she’s in the “prequel series,” too, but those haven’t been published yet — makes an appearance in Stormriders. We even have recurring villains: the Urkenze continue to be a threat, and now they’re getting ready to steal the Golden Kingdom’s moon-that-isn’t-a-moon. The main plot thread of Stormriders is about Harrison and company trying to track down the cause of the increased reality storm activity and stop it if they can. They’ve reached the realm that seems to be the center of the storms, and they’re about to find out that an ancient device there is creating the storms. A local thinks the device was created by a “sorcerer king” from centuries ago… This same local very much wants to find this sorcerer king and kill him if possible. After making him turn off the storm machine, of course. Fun times. 🙂 )
Anyway. We still intend to publish both The Dark Plaza and Instruments of Faith (which is peripherally connected to Project Brimstone, etc., because Harrison and Delling were friends ever since they served in the army together) this year. What comes immediately afterward… Who knows? Paul says the prequel series needs to be published before “that novel” (which is actually going to be a series, although we’ve never settled on whether Wooden Ships is a novella or a full-length novel), and I agree — people tend to care a lot more about the “after” of something if they know that the “before” looked like, and this isn’t the sort of thing that can be handled with a few brief flashbacks. (“Brief, he says,” mutters a figment of my imagination.) So, everything from ‘interdimensional ninjas on the front lawn’ to Utah and the feral plague and… Well, you’ll see.
I’ve heard/read that some fiction writers worry about running out of ideas and eventually not having any more stories to write, but maybe that’s a problem that only applies to humans. 🙂
North of Andover 