Greetings, Friends,
I haven’t posted much in these past few weeks because I’ve been focusing my writing energies on Intrepid Force III. I got up to around 80,000 words and 300 pages earlier in the summer. Since then, I’ve had to take things out and put more things in, and I’m still around 80,000 words and 300 pages, but what I have is more solid. I’ve created some new characters within the past week, in fact. Earlier in the summer, I wrote a scene in which my 1980s-era characters visited the World’s Fair in New Orleans. Some of you might be old enough to remember that. I didn’t actually go, but dug up some pretty good YouTube videos of it that made me wish I had been able to. The 1984 World Exposition was the last to be located in the United States and the only one that has ever had to file for bankruptcy protection, but it had its charms. The 1884 World Exposition was also in New Orleans, and I’ve considered using it in a future project.
Meanwhile, I’ve read some other interesting articles in the past few weeks that I thought would interest Intrepid Force readers. One was about an idea some NASA guys had come up with for building a human outpost on Venus. It was completely different from the approach my characters took, and I kind of wish I’d thought of it. My approach involved using explosions to blast a lot of the planet’s atmosphere into space and make the planet rotate faster to give it more earth-like days and nights. NASA’s HAVOC project involved setting up balloon colonies. The pictures of the space-blimps had a nice steampunk look. There was also an article about bulletproof vests made of orange goo.
Once I knock out my current projects, I have a number of future projects on the list including an Intrepid Force comic, a sequel to Haunted Summer, a science fiction novel inspired by some of my studies about the biblical book of Genesis, a nonfiction book on personality, and a steampunk alternate version of Intrepid Force set in 1884. I refer to that project as Intrepid Force: Steam. Meanwhile, I need to do the final touch-ups on the revised edition of Season Out of Time and finish Intrepid Force III.
Thanks for checking in. I’ll have some finished projects for you soon, but I want to make sure they’re ready before I ship them out. Enjoy the rest of your summer.