As Tom Petty said, the future is wide open, and I'm a rebel without a clue.
Yesterday, the final book in my cyberpunk romance series was released, and now I'm free to work on anything I want to. Woohoo! Which of course has had be going back through my "In Process" folder and perusing stories in various states of dishabille. People, there are SO MANY stories in this folder. So. Many. But because you don't want to be reading this blog post for the rest of your day/week/life, I'll pick just three to sum up:
1. Twenty years after they allied heroically to defeat the necromancer, all the kings of Eyath are... gone. Disappeared. Missing. Dead? It falls to the next generation, led by a princess who should not exist and a tree who cannot die, to uncover what happened, repair the damage to their land, and confront the sins that led them all to this doom. (I've never pitched this one, so I don't have a back-cover-copy write-up of the story. This little bit will have to do.)
2. (Did pitch this one -- it didn't pass committee -- so here's the extended version.) Metallurgist Gal Gutierrez takes a job to examine and retrieve samples of a material that even the archaeological dig lead won’t touch. But Gal has no such qualms. She’ll touch it, bag it, bring it to her lab, and science the shit out of it.
Until she gets to the site and, uh, meets it.
Ashim, the Destroyer of Worlds, is a prisoner on this backwater planet Earth, strapped to it by a radiation barrier that protects all these pre-evolved life forms from the dangers of space. And keeps him from anything like stretching. He hasn’t flexed his power in ten thousand revolutions of this ball of iron and tedium, and lo, it begins to wear upon him. He’s paid for his crimes, and his sentence is drawing to a close. There’s just one thing he has left to do: blow this place and get out.
But when the human woman steps into his cavern, touches him, speaks to him, all his plans are whatever and he can think of nothing other than touching her right back. Sifting the aura that surrounds her. Listening to her delicious voice and inhaling her intoxicating scent. No matter that those physical things would require him to reduce himself to human form.
For...love?
O, Great Bang, he is lost.
3. My riff off of Guardians of the Galaxy wherein a secret prince busts out of an orbital prison with help from a tech-smart but whiny teenage rebel, a double-crossing security guard, and whatever Olorin is (a science experiment? a cosmic god?). Anyhow, they steal the exact ship they oughtn't, meet a quantum-entangled chinchilla, and hie across the galaxy with all the law on their tails to save Davon's mom, the queen, from an alien threat that wants to kill her and the planet she rode in on. Good times.
As I mentioned, there are others, but these have the most words done, and I should probably finish them. Now that I've done the self-publishing thing once, I'm less worried about what my agent will find sellable, which frees me up to write whatever crazysauce pops into my brain. And hoo-boy, there are some things.
So, hooray for next projects! I just got to pick one.
