Dead Will Rise, the sequel to Victim Zero, is growing fat. I've been dealt a bad hand of problems over the last few months and have yet again struggled with anxiety and similar problems, but I'm back to working on it with gusto. The tentative plan is to have it out by the end of November, which is contingent on me getting it done in the next two weeks and edited *super* fast. Whether that's possible I don't know, but I'm going to try. Assuming I manage that, the print edition will be out before Christmas.
After DWR is published I'm going to take a break from the Living With the Dead universe. After seven collections of the blog, two parallel novels and a collaboration also set in a zombie apocalypse, I need to work on something else.
Fortunately, that isn't a problem. After I send out DWR to be edited I'm going to spend a week or so working on a novella set in Hugh Howey's Silo Saga universe. If you haven't read those books--and I don't see how you could miss them considering their immense popularity--then you might want to read the trilogy. Hugh is very permissive in allowing anyone to write fiction in his universe and to make money with them. I'm going to try to get mine published through Kindle Worlds, which is a fan fiction section of the kindle store. Failing that, I'll publish it on my own.
My next novel will be the much-talked about (by me) superhuman story, Next. Though a glut of superhuman/superhero novels have been released over the last few years, I've seen few that tackle the ideas I'd like to read about. That's the same reason I wrote LWtD in the first place; I wrote the story I wanted to read. So Next isn't going to be the tights-and-heroism story of people who have secret identities or who hide from society. This isn't a world where superhumans exists as some fringe subculture most people don't know about. It's a balls-to-the-wall examination of what the most dangerous power--superpower--would do the to world if it were exposed to everyone. All of that conveniently framed in the story of one main character and several secondaries. It's different than anything I've written and I have a hard time putting a genre label on it.
The really good news is I wrote about 30,000 words before switching over to write VZ. So I can get this baby done in a relatively short time once DWR and my Silo novella are done. The novella shouldn't take that long considering how short it is and how fast I write. I look to be working on Next full-time by the second week of December, give or take a week.
After that I'll decide which project I'll take on next. For purely business reasons the smart thing to do would be the third book in The Fall. It's going to be a bit trickier than books one and two, and maybe with another novel and a novella between books two and three I'll feel refreshed and ready to go back to that world.
So many things I want to write, so many genres! Some of you have seen the list before, some haven't, but I'll post again soon and maybe do a poll on the facebook page about what book you're most interested in.
Until then, keep reading. I like paying my bills.
Josh
