June’s been another low-output month for Descent: Diaspora, with me reaching (or not reaching) the dizzying heights of 3,000 words on paper. So it now sits at around 33 sections completed out of 200, with 42,500 words of 250,000 for draft one being ensconced in paper and ink (if not quite stone).

I’m not overly upset however. One of the (to me) unforeseen impacts of changing from a trilogy to an hexalogy is – surprise, surprise – there are twice as many books, and that means six rather than three manuscripts to be edited, polished, then sent out to the great reading public’s care. Much of June was spent on thrashing out changes to Descent: Diathesis in order to have at least the text sorted out for an early August deadline. For a book due to be released in December this may seem a bit early but, and I have it on good authority, it’s actually cutting things a little fine.

As everyone else in the publishing universe knows (and I, apparently, did not), besides an obvious lead-in for printing physical copies and the associated layout design etc., there’s also the small matter of advance copy reviews, publicity, getting promotional material ready, a book launch venue and date, and – with me at one end of the planet and my publisher at the other – coordinating any signings (or “author book-defacings” as one wit on twitter has described it) ready for advance copy sales.

Cover art is in train as well, so there’s that to feed into the mix as well. So four months lead-in goes from looking very generous to ludicrously tight in the blink of an eye.

But I am, as I will admit, my own worst enemy at times and this time is no different even if I do have an excuse. My recent medical issues seem to have either generated or exacerbated a laziness in my writing, resurrecting old bad habits I thought I had lost at least a decade ago. Upshot? Plodding through Descent: Diathesis took longer than I, or my publisher, had bargained for. On top of this the second novel in the hexalogy, Descent: Death, seems to have suffered from the same ailments and, not wanting to inflict a cardiac episode on my publisher, I’ve got to revisit the text and sharpen it up immediately. Perhaps a little too far in advance for some (as I believe the publication date for Descent: Death is somewhere near Christmas 2025), but I want to get it polished up and out the door asap so I can lean into Descent: Diaspora properly. After all, I’ve got the tiny Earth survivor group to torture and we want to do that properly, don’t we?

With fair winds and fine weather I’m hoping to have Descent: Death tied up by mid-July, so my time should be split more between writing and getting Descent: Diathesis out the door. But you know me, there’s bound to be something else come along to change it all.

Take care, and keep hammering out those words.