People will believe what they want to believe. That’s something about humanity that will never change.
Gunslinger to Earth by Joe Vasicek.
And a bonus quote, just for fun:
To be honest, I think Antarctica may have actually thawed the cockles of her frigid little heart.
At its core, Gunslinger to Earth, the space-opera finale of the Gunslinger Trilogy, asks a simple but lifelong question: What do you choose to believe when the universe refuses to give you certainty? When Earth vanishes into an impossible anomaly—and later reappears transformed—no one can prove exactly what happened. The characters must decide for themselves what is true, what is worth fighting for, and who they will become in the face of the miraculous.
The theme grew out of a major turning point in my own life. I started this book just after I began dating the woman who would become my wife and while I was reinventing my writing process to tell better stories. It was a season of uncertainty, hope, and change, full of questions I didn’t know how to answer. That personal crossroads naturally shaped the theme of the story into one about faith, conviction, and choosing a future even when you can’t see what comes next.
Throughout Gunslinger to Earth, every major character is confronted with a moment where proof is impossible, but a choice is required. Rex must decide whether to trust Charlotte, whether to follow Sam and Jane, whether to cross the wormhole, and ultimately whether to stay in paradise or return to a mortal life with someone he loves. No one can make these choices for him—not Sam, not Jane, not Charlotte—because the heart of his journey is learning to choose his own truth instead of waiting for certainty that will never come.
On a cosmic scale, the entire plot turns on the same dilemma—an end-times science fiction mystery wrapped in the language of prophecy. The anomaly that swallowed Earth may be the fulfillment of ancient prophecies, or it may be an alien event we don’t yet understand. Mahijah may be exactly who he claims to be, or something else entirely. No lab test or political briefing can answer those questions. Sam, Jane, Rex, the empaths, and the remnants of Earthfleet all have to decide for themselves what they believe—and those choices lead them to the endings they earn. The story isn’t about proving the miracle; it’s about how people respond when the miraculous breaks into their lives—the heart of the choice to believe.
We all live in a world where certainty is rare, where conflicting stories demand our loyalty, and where the most important truths—love, faith, family, hope—are things you commit to long before you can prove them. Gunslinger to Earth reflects that deeply human reality in a character-driven science fiction way. It suggests that belief isn’t about having perfect evidence; it’s about having the courage to choose who you’re going to be and what kind of future you want to build. At the end of the day, the world is shaped not just by what happens to us, but by what we decide to believe about ourselves, about others, and about the meaning of our lives.
When I wrote Gunslinger to Earth, the closing volume of the Gunslinger Trilogy, I was learning to make those kinds of choices in my own life—about faith, about love, and about the kind of writer and person I wanted to become. It was a moment when I had to step forward without seeing the whole path. That experience shaped the story in ways I couldn’t fully articulate at the time, but I can see clearly now. This book matters to me because it’s ultimately about hope: the hope that even in chaos, even in uncertainty, we can choose what we believe—and those choices can lead us somewhere good.
Explore the series index for the Gunslinger Trilogy.
Return to the book page for Gunslinger to Earth.
Gunslinger to Earth is a character-driven space opera adventure about crossing a cosmic no-man’s-land to discover what happened to the home you thought was lost forever. It blends gunslinger-style starship action, found-family dynamics, political revolution, and end-times mystery as Rex Carter, Sam Kletchka, and Jane Kletchka risk everything to follow Earth into an impossible anomaly. It’s a fast, hopeful, and surprisingly tender finale that wraps up the Gunslinger Trilogy with both high stakes and a genuine sense of homecoming.
If you love…
…then Gunslinger to Earth is probably your kind of story.
Gunslinger to Earth is a story rooted in space opera adventure, end-times science fiction, and prophecy-driven mystery. The hero of this third book in the trilogy is Rex Carter, a cadet still reeling from the day Earth and Luna vanished into an impossible anomaly. Torn between his patriot girlfriend Charlotte, his loyalty to Sam and Jane, and his fear for his family back home, Rex has to grow up fast as he’s swept into a mission to follow Earth across the “world-bridge” and find out what really happened.
The mood balances tense, boots-on-the-deck action (derelict ghost ships in the anomaly, desperate battles near wormholes, claustrophobic escapes from Luna) with a deep, almost awe-struck sense of wonder as the crew finally confronts a transformed Earth and the fulfillment of ancient prophecies. The style is fast-paced, voice-driven, and accessible—more “frontier adventure with big ideas” than hard-science textbook—with a strong throughline of family, faith, and the search for home.
Fans of classic space opera and military SF—think Firefly, The Expanse, or David Weber—will recognize the starship battles, political tensions, and ragtag crews, but Gunslinger to Earth takes those ideas in a very different direction. Instead of treating religion and prophecy as background flavor, this book leans straight into them: the disappearance of Earth isn’t just a physics problem, it’s tied to the City of Enoch, the fulfillment of Latter-day Saint-style millennial prophecies, and a literal “new Earth” where history has turned a corner.
Where many space war stories focus on winning the next battle or installing the next regime, this one asks what happens when the war is suddenly dwarfed by something much bigger—when the homeworld itself is renewed and taken off the game board. It’s less about toppling empires and more about how ordinary, stubbornly decent people respond when God, history, and politics all collide at once. And because it’s the capstone of the Gunslinger Trilogy, it doesn’t just raise the stakes; it actually lands them with a clear, hopeful ending.
Readers who enjoy the moral backbone of Lois McMaster Bujold, the frontier grit of Firefly, and the cosmic mystery of The Expanse will find familiar elements here—but woven together in a way that feels genuinely new.
You won’t find grimdark nihilism, graphic sex, or wall-to-wall gore here. The story has violence, war, and real loss—this is a revolution and an end-times crisis, after all—but it’s written at about a PG-13 level, with the camera panning away from anything needlessly explicit. You also won’t find a sneering, anti-religious tone; faith and prophecy are treated respectfully and sincerely, even when characters struggle to believe them. This is a cleaner-but-still-intense sci-fi adventure that focuses more on meaning, loyalty, and wonder than shock value.
I wrote Gunslinger to Earth during a major turning point in my own life—just after I started dating the woman who would become my wife, at a time when I was reinventing my writing process so I could tell better stories more consistently. In a lot of ways, this book is about that same kind of turning point on a galactic scale: the moment when old patterns break, a long-promised future finally arrives, and you have to decide who you’re going to be on the other side of it. My hope is that if you care about loyalty, about home, about the possibility that history is going somewhere meaningful, then this story will leave you with the same feeling it gave me while I was writing it: that even in the middle of chaos, there’s a way through—and it leads somewhere worth fighting for.
Explore the series index for the Gunslinger Trilogy.
Return to the book page for Gunslinger to Earth.
Right now, I’m a science fiction writer who occasionally writes fantasy. I want to transition to being a fantasy writer who occasionally writes science fiction. But I also have a pen name (J.M. Wight) for more religious-themed books, since there are a lot of science fiction readers who have a serious ick with that.
As I set things up for this transition, I’ve been looking at the books I’ve already published and trying to decide what to do with them. The Gunslinger Trilogy is one series I’ve been looking at particularly hard. It’s kind of an edge case, because the religious themes become more pronounced as the series progresses. One of the more consistent themes in one-star reviews is that people don’t like the “Mormon” stuff in the later books, such as the part where the main character meets with the missionaries (and ultimately gets baptized), or the alien twist in the last book that’s pulled right out of the Books of Enoch/Jasher/Moses.
If I’d planned out the whole series before I wrote the first book, I probably would have published them under my J.M. Wight pen name for that reason. But the first book was a straight-up space opera, with minimal religious themes. It was only after I’d published the first book (under my main Joe Vasicek name) that I wrote the next two books and decided to throw in the more religious stuff. And while I was careful to write it in such a way that the books never come out and say whether all that religious stuff is actually true, the fact that it’s in there at all has turned off some readers who weren’t expecting it.
The trouble is that the first book has a lot of profanity in it, and religious readers tend to be just as icky about profanity as sci-fi readers are about the religious stuff. Even more so, in fact. So before I make the switch, I will probably have to make an extensive rewrite to tone down the swearing and make it more palatable for that audience.
It’s a fairly common mistake, especially among inexperience writers: you write the first book for a certain audience, but as the series progresses, the later books appeal to a different audience, betraying some of the expectations of the first audience. When taken to extremes, it’s the sort of thing that torpedoes careers and forces writers to reinvent themselves. So given that fact, I’m kind of surprised that these books have done as well as they have.
What do you think? Should I switch them to my J.M. Wight pen name, editing them to remove the profanity and lean into the audience that isn’t turned off by religious themes in their science fiction? Or should I keep them as they are?
So I missed a couple of blog posts last week, and I don’t currently have any more lined up in the queue. I know I said I’d try to blog daily from now on, and I intend to work up to that, but I’ve got to get other things in order first. Here’s what I’ve got going on:
It’s not that the workload is overwhelming, it’s just that there’s a lot of moving parts. Also, the daily routine has fallen apart and I need to build it back up again. This tends to happen periodically, so I’m not too worried, but it is frustrating and it does mean that balls are going to get dropped.
First things first: finish the copy edits for Gunslinger to Earth and get that up for preorder, preferably by the end of the week. Taxes also need to be done ASAP. The wedding stuff is mostly being handled by other people, but I need to be available, so that’s an ongoing thing. But if I can tackle those big ones, then the rest should fall into place hopefully.
Also, sleep. Can’t function without it. Caffeine is not a long-term substitute.
I’m not gonna lie, there’s a part of me that wants to shut out everything else and just do family history all day. Then there’s making family history, AKA spending time with Future Mrs. Vasicek. But she’s got school and work, so there’s a hard limit to that.
Then there’s reading. So much reading to do. Books are piling up everywhere.
Anyways, that’s enough for now. I’ll post as often as I can, but it’s going to be touch and go for a while, at least until everything else is in some semblance of order.
It’s been a busy, busy month. I finished a major WIP, published a new bundle, started a new job at the local bookstore, and made a bunch of changes and adjustments behind the scenes. And that’s just my writing life!
First, I published a new Star Wanderers bundle, containing the complete series. This replaces The Jeremiah Chronicles and Tales of the Far Outworlds, the two previous series bundles that have been up for the last several years.
Eventually, I plan to release Star Wanderers: The Complete Series as an audiobook. That’s one of my big projects for the year. I want to narrate it myself, but I also want to do a damn good job of it, which means I have to learn how to properly record and produce a quality audiobook. That’s going to take time.
I will probably release Star Wanderers: The Complete Series in print too, once I’ve gotten set up for that. As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve pulled all my books from KDP Paperback and plan to go with a different print-on-demand publisher in the not too distant future. But again, that’s going to take time to do properly.
Second, I finished Gunslinger to Earth! At this point, I’m just waiting to send it out to my editor. Another few weeks, and it will finally be up for preorder!
There’s a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes, too. I’ve sent out more than 60 short story submissions this month, sold one to The New Accelerator, and hope to sell a lot more in the next few months.
I’ve also been rethinking my email newsletter. Until now, I’ve been using it mostly just to share free and 99¢ stories, and tons of links to giveaways. But now, I think that might not be the best way to provide value.
From what I can tell, there are basically two approaches to newsletters: as a vehicle to convert casual readers into fans, or as something much more personal to keep the existing fanbase active and motivated. Obviously, there is some overlap.
With the way I’ve structured things, I lean a lot more to the first approach. However, I do think there’s a lot more that I can share to add value, even to casual readers. Here are some things I’m thinking about sharing:
Those are a few of my current ideas. Do you have any of your own? If so, I would very much like to hear about it!
The other big change to my newsletter is that I’m branching out to other sites, like Story Origin, Book Cave, and Bookfunnel, to build my email list. I’ll probably also add preview editions of my books to Prolific Works and put more emphasis on those. It’s something to experiment with.
Still trying to figure out how this blog fits in to everything else. At this point, I’m just doing my best to keep it updated. I have lots of ideas for blog posts, but not a whole lot of time to write them.
There’s a ton of books that I’m reading or want to read, and at some point I really need to revamp my Goodreads profile and get all of my book reviews up there. Probably after I set up the new book site, which will mostly just be a repository of affiliate links for all of the books that I review. I can’t put them up on this site without commingling them with my own books, and I don’t want to do that.
That’s most of the big stuff, at least for now. The main focus for the next couple of months will be growing my email list and figuring out my newsletter. My girlfriend is a programmer, so this weekend we’ll fix up the newsletter template I’ve been using and hopefully make it cleaner. If you have any other ideas for that, please share!
My name is Rex Carter, and I am—or rather, was—from Earth.
I don’t blame you for not believing me. If I hadn’t experienced firsthand the events of my own life, I would be skeptical as well. But I assure you, my story is true. The legends of humanity’s lost homeworld are, for the most part, based in fact. Sol was indeed the cradle of the human race, not Sirius or Aldebaran or any of the nearby stars. The xenologists’ main criticism of Sol, that it lacks a habitable-zone planet, are moot because the world they are looking for—Earth—no longer exists in our plane of reality.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. My name is Rex Carter, and I was born on Earth only a few years after humanity made contact with the galactics. As a young man, I played a key role in…
[SPOILERS REDACTED]
…so I enrolled at Earthfleet Academy a year earlier than most of my peers. If I had to attend school, I was determined to get it over with as quickly as possible so as to get back to the business of having adventures.
Little did I know, adventure would soon find me.
Earth had a single large moon, which we called Luna. It was gray and rocky, with one-sixth the gravity of Earth, and no atmosphere. It was also the location of Earthfleet Academy. After a week-long break to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with my parents down on Earth, I grudgingly returned to my studies at the Academy.
“Hey, Rex,” my roommate Frank greeted me as I entered our dorm room.
I dropped my duffel bag at the foot of my bed and flung myself onto the mattress. Earthfleet Academy had its own artificial gravity to compensate for Luna’s, so it felt very much as if I’d never left Earth. The fact that I’d taken a teleporter back contributed greatly to the illusion.
None of which improved my mood.
The dorm room was clean and Spartanly decorated, as you would expect from a military academy. Frank lay back against his pillow with his laptop on his chest, playing some game or chatting online with some friends back on Earth. Quite possibly both.
“Did you miss me?” he asked, giving me a lopsided grin.
I rolled my eyes. “More than I missed this place, that’s for sure.”
“Oh come on. The academy’s not so bad. Besides,” he said, giving me a knowing look, “you-know-who is back from Antarctica.”
Blood rushed to my cheeks. He was talking about Charlotte Bujold, the girl I’d been crushing on since my first semester. I regretted having ever confided that to him.
“She is?” I asked in spite of myself.
“Yeah,” said Frank. “Came back just yesterdayshift. I was going to tell her that you were coming back early too, but—”
“Dammit, Frank. Please tell me you didn’t say that.”
He laughed. “Don’t worry, my friend. I’m just teasing.”
I groaned and rolled over, burying my face in my pillow. I’d navigated my brother-in-law’s starship through space battles and war zones, and traveled far beyond the Gliese colonies of Earthspace, but girls like Charlotte still made my knees go weak and my tongue stammer. What can I say? I was still young.
“To be honest,” Frank continued, “I think Antarctica may have actually thawed the cockles of her cold little heart. She gave me a smile as we passed in the hall this morning. Didn’t say anything, but she smiled. I don’t think she has anything planned before classes start on Monday. If you’re going to ask her out—”
“Shut up.”
“No, I’m serious. Now’s as good a time as any. What are you afraid of?”
“Nothing,” I said sullenly, burying my face even deeper. Of course, that was a lie.
“Dude,” said Frank. He set his laptop aside and turned to face me. “If you like this girl, man up and ask her out. Nothing’s going to happen unless you take the first step.”
I said nothing. This dissuaded him not at all.
“Seriously. You’re not going to get a better chance than now. Once classes start up again, we’ll all be swamped from now until Christmas. She’s sure to leave Sol for the holidays, and—”
“I get the picture,” I said, cutting him off. “What do you suggest?”
Frank sat up, his grin as lopsided as ever, and rubbed his hands together as if he were starting a project. My heart both sank and skipped a beat at the same time.
About half an hour later, not quite sure how I got there, I found myself on a tram to the Earthfleet Academy library. Charlotte’s roommates had told me she was probably there when I’d checked at her dorm. They’d asked if I wanted to leave a message, but I’d blushed, mumbled something incomprehensible, and gotten out of there as fast as if one of them had thrown a live grenade.
The main campus of Earthfleet Academy sprawled out leisurely across the mare, or lunar plain. Since it was cheaper to maintain a lot of small but interconnected artificial gravity fields than to put everything under one giant dome, all of the various buildings were connected by trams. The library was on the other side of campus from the dorms, not far from the spaceport and Earthfleet headquarters itself.
It was currently night on the moon, and the Earth hung like a brilliant blue-green marble in an otherwise dark sky. Swirls and streaks of bright white clouds covered its surface. The tram was mostly empty, so I had the view almost entirely to myself.
“Phoenix Tanner from Earthfleet News,” the announcer on the radio stated, briefly interrupting my nervous thoughts. “Tensions remain high at New Australia as the Earthfleet task force headed by Field Admiral Cox refused to lift the military quarantine of the system. The two civilian ships detained by the task force remain under Earthfleet control, and repeated requests by the colonial authorities to release the crew have been denied. For the last several months, the president of New Australia has defied the Grand Council of Earth’s ban on the immortality serum to treat children suffering from chronic illnesses, while medical authorities on Earth insist that there are safe, legal ways to address the colony’s medical needs. In other news…”
My mind drifted as the news droned on. The only reason I’d picked up that first story was because Charlotte was from New Australia. A little less than half of the students at the academy were from the colonies. Sam Kletchka, my brother-in-law, had attended for a year before dropping out. If he hadn’t insisted that I finish my studies first, I would have already dropped out and joined his crew.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I probably would have stayed on a couple more months, just to see how things worked out with Charlotte. But the moment she rejected me, as I inwardly dreaded she would, I would have been out of there.
The tram came to a stop, and the doors slid open. I walked out on watery legs. The library was a big place, even for Luna’s standards, but I had a pretty good idea where to find her. Sure enough, she was studying at a cubby on the library’s top floor. I’d seen her in the same general vicinity several times in the previous semester—not that I was stalking her, of course. Her attention was focused on her tablet, with headphones in her ears in a way that said “do not disturb.”
Allow me to take a moment to describe just how gorgeous Charlotte is. Thin and petite, with hourglass proportions and a narrow waist, her eyes are a piercing blue and her hair is as black as midnight. It was cut just above her shoulders, so it bobbed and swung with every move of her head. Her face was long, her lips red and moist, her nose small and slightly upturned. It was the fire in her eyes, though, that really got to me. She may have been small, but she was full of energy and passion, and a hell of a lot stronger than she looked.
With all that said, you can understand why I was intimidated. The moment I saw her, I ducked behind a nearby bookshelf and spent the next few minutes working up the nerve to talk to her. Heart pounding and legs weak, I eventually decided to hell with it and walked over.
“H-hi Charlotte.”
She glanced up at me with a look of contempt normally reserved for strangers. Seeing that I wanted to talk, she reluctantly pulled the headphones out of her ears.
“What do you want, Rex?”
“I, uh, I heard you just came back from b-break,” I stammered. “Your roommates said I might find you here.”
She stared at me evenly, betraying no reaction. I inwardly flagellated myself.
“So, uh, we have a few days before classes start, and I was wondering, uh, if maybe, uh, you wanted to get lunch or something?”
She blinked. “Lunch?”
“Yeah,” I said quickly. “Food court, student center, tomorrow at noon. What do you say?”
From the expression on her face, it looked like my attempt at asking her out had just crashed and burned. My heart sank. If falling through the floor was an option, I probably would have taken it.
“I’ll let you know,” she said, slipping her headphones back over her ears as she turned back to her tablet.
“Uh, thanks,” I stammered.
She glanced up one last time, as if to ask why I was still there. I beat a hasty retreat, tail tucked firmly between my legs, and silently cursed myself with every bad word in my vocabulary.
I felt six inches shorter. I felt like I’d forgotten to put on pants this morning.
I felt like a fool.
Our encounter had lasted mere seconds, and yet as I walked in a daze back to the tram, I couldn’t help but dissect and analyze every moment of it. Charlotte’s icy gaze. My own nervous stammering. Her utterly unreadable face. The longer I thought about it, the more convinced I became that I’d made an utter fool of myself. Frank was wrong: asking her out in person had been a collossal mistake. Any hope I had of dating her was over.
As the empty tram took off again, I stared up at Earth, wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. I didn’t care about Earthfleet. I didn’t care about my studies. I did care about Charlotte, but that was all in the toilet now, thanks to the fool I’d made of myself.
That was when my phone buzzed.
I frowned and pulled it out of my pocket. It was a text—from Charlotte. My heart skipped a beat, and for a very brief moment I hesitated, fearing to read it. But curiosity soon got the better of me.
Food court tomorrow at noon. I’ll be there.
A boyish grin spread across my face as I pocketed my phone, and with no one else on the tram I pumped my fist and shouted “yes!”
Maybe it hadn’t gone as badly as I’d thought back in the library. Maybe she didn’t think I was a fool. Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance things could work out with Charlotte and me.
As I was soon about to learn, I had no idea what I was in for.
It’s been a while since I posted a general update here on the blog, and while I’ve been sharing regular updates to my mailing list, enough has been happening that I suppose I should let all the rest of you know what’s going on.
First, I decided to pull out a bunch of investment money and put it into my writing, in order to go full-time for the next few months (and hopefully for the forseeable future). I shared more about this on my newsletter. Basically, I rewrote my business plan and decided that my best way forward is to go all-in for the next few months, writing more books and growing my business. I have a plan, and if it works, I’ll be able to go full-time indefinitely.
Second—and this may seem to contradict the first—I got a job at the local used bookstore, Pioneer Book! I’ve been going to this bookstore for years, befriending the manager and several employees, and several months ago (before I decided to reinvest in my writing business) I dropped off a resume in the hopes of getting a job there. When I got the call, I wasn’t going to turn it down.
It’s a part-time, 20 hours per week job that fits in perfectly with my writing. It’s also a job where I get to work with books, and be around bookish people, so I’m sure there will be lots of opportunities to learn interesting things that will help as I build my own writing and publishing career. Basically, it’s the perfect day job for a writer, and I’ve really been enjoying it so far.
Writing-wise, I just finished Gunslinger to Earth, the third book in the Gunslingers trilogy, and I’m finishing up the revisions to send it to my editor hopefully in the next few weeks. My next WIP is Edenfall, and I’m hard at work on it now. The goal is to finish it by March, and publish it over the summer.
Publishing-wise, I’ve revamped the backmatter in my books again, with a new map for how everything connects to everything else. The biggest change is in my short stories, which aren’t mapped out here, but basically I’m going to focus on putting them into bundles, and have the singles point there. Eventually, I want to have only one or two singles for every bundle, with five to six stories per bundle. I have enough stories written to fill out four bundles, but a bunch of them are still out on submission, so it could take a while.
I’ve also been doing a lot more to build my email list, not just through Prolific Works but also through Bookfunnel, Story Origin, and MyBookCave. There is a method to the madness, and all of this fits into the wider plan. I’ve also updated the pricing on some of my books, and experimenting with AMS ads, though there’s not much to report on that front at the moment.
In short, I’ve been pretty busy. Most of my time and effort is going toward writing. I’ve got a very aggressive writing schedule for the next year, and hope to finish all of my trilogies before 2020, including the Genesis Earth trilogy and the Twelfth Sword trilogy. The way I have it planned out, if I can average 1600 words a day, I’ll be able to do that no problem.
As far as my personal life is concerned, I’ve been dating a really fantastic girl for the last few months and things are going very, very well. I’m not sure how much of that I should share, but you’ll probably hear more about it in the future, if not here on the blog, then definitely in my author’s notes and newsletter.
As of right now, 2019 is looking to be a fantastic year! I’m really looking forward to seeing what the rest of the year will bring, and I expect I’ll have lots of good things to share with you in the future. Take care, and thanks for reading!
I’m finishing up right now with the third and final book in the Gunslingers Trilogy, Gunslinger to Earth. Just one more chapter to wrap everything up, then all the final revisions for the last few chapters. So far, so good.
At 40k words, this is turning out to be one of my shorter novels. I’m really happy with how it’s turned out so far, though. It wraps up a bunch of stuff from the previous books, with a surprisingly hopeful and optimistic look toward the future of the universe.
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll post a few excerpts, being careful to avoid any spoilers for the previous books. If all goes well, it should be up for preorder sometime in February, with an April release date.
In case you’re curious, I wrote almost the whole thing while listening to the 2009 A State of Trance year mix. Such a great year for trance.
Next up, Edenfall!
It’s been a while since I posted a writing update on this blog, but seeing as I intend to blog a lot more actively in the coming year, I suppose I should start with an update.
First off, my current WIP. I’m making good progress on Gunslinger to Earth, and should finish it in early January. I’m also revising it as I go along, which means that it should be ready to send off to my editor by then as well. Right now, I’m planning for an April book release. So if you’re enjoying Gunslinger to the Galaxy, which I published just a couple of weeks ago, you’ll soon be able to read the thrilling conclusion to that trilogy as well.
That’s not the biggest thing I’ve been working on, though. The biggest thing would have to be rewriting my business plan in preparation for 2019. I’ve put a lot of work into it, and I think I’ve got it to the point where it needs to be, though I anticipate that I’ll be making a lot of other changes to it as the year progresses.
I can honestly say that I’ve built a business that can sustain itself. The problem for the last few years is that it’s not yet at the point where it can sustain me. But with the perspective I’ve gained from rewriting my business plan, I think that I can change that. The trouble is that it’s going to require a massive investment of time and energy, more than just money.
To make a long story short, I’ve sold off some investments and put it into the business so that I can go full-time for the next six months. If I can grow my writing income six-fold within that time, then I can keep writing full-time indefinitely. This is a huge leap for me, and I have no idea if it will work, but it’s better to have a bad plan than no plan at all. If I fail, I’m sure I’ll learn a lot of valuable lessons from the experience. And if I succeed, then I’ll basically be living the dream, at least until that next tier of success. Onward and upward!
What this means for you is that you can expect to see a lot more writing from me in the future. I’m also working on my short fiction game, which I plan to blog about soon. Currently I’ve got 40 active submissions, and since I plan to write a new short story every month, that number will grow accordingly. Expect to see some more short story publications in the coming months and years, hopefully a couple of high-profile ones.
Ideally, I want to get to the point where I always have a novel up for preorder. That means one new novel each quarter, or four novels per year. Besides that, I’ve got a large backlog of short stories and a few bundles that I intend to publish soon. Also, the blog.
Lots of stuff coming out. You can expect to see a lot more from me in the coming year. The best way to keep up with it all is to subscribe to my email list, so if you haven’t done that already, be sure to do so. Thanks for reading, and see you all next year!