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NEWS AND VIEWS - JULY 2025
I finished writing Signal Solutions this month -- the eleventh book in the Signalverse series. It's about a guy named Lore who gets roped into working for a hero-for-hire business in Signal City, alongside the granddaughter of a notorious gangster, a martial artist from the Matsumoto Academy, and Melusine, the Devil's Daughter, whom we last met in the "Kidding Around" short story I wrote earlier this year. It seems to have turned out okay. You can get it on my Patreon right now, if you're a member. Not sure when it'll be available on Amazon, but I'd like to get it out by the end of the year. Not really sure what my next project will be. I'd like to write a few more short stories set in the Signalverse, and I have plenty of ideas for more Signalverse novels, but I usually like to follow up a Signalverse book with a non-Signalverse book, like maybe a Sam Fortune novel or a new fantasy. Or I might try something completely different; I've been playing around with an idea for a space opera kind of thing about a trio of orphans living in a gigantic crashed spaceship. But then again, my readers seem to be mostly interested in the superhero stuff, so maybe I should just stick with that for the time being. (Incidentally, I happened to ask the Claude Sonnet 4 AI about the marketability of prose superhero stories the other day. It concluded with this: "The brutal truth is that superhero fiction is in a publishing dead zone right now -- too niche for big traditional publishers, but with enough competition in self-publishing that it's hard to break through there too." Which seems about right to me.) Apart from all that, I don't have too much to report. My insomnia (an ongoing problem which regular readers are probably tired of hearing about) started hitting me really hard around the beginning of July, so I wasn't able to get quite as much writing done as I would have liked, but I think I've gotten through the worst of it now. Games-wise, I've been playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 alongside Tales of Destiny II, which is an old PS1-era Tales title. Expedition 33 is artistically excellent, but not actually all that much fun to play -- if the cute, sweet, adventuresome innocence of the Dragon Quest games lies on one end of the RPG spectrum, then Expedition 33 lies on the other. These characters live in a dark, desperate, harrowing world, full of death and horror. It's not a place I like to visit. I've also been doing a little more reading than usual this month: Lawrence Watt-Evans' The Lure of the Basilisk (which I had never read before, not sure why), the two Arrowsmith trades by Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco, and some more Vampire Hunter D novels, which are not all that great, but whatever. |