Progress report

It’s been an eventful week! On Friday, I finally sent a proposal for the contracted sequel to Kamera to my publisher. The proposal, which ended up being about seven double-spaced pages long, is a fairly detailed outline of the novel I have in mind, although much of it will probably change over the next year or so. Hopefully my editor will sign off on the outline with minimal changes, but you never know. More updates soon.

Also, in a nice surprise, I received an acceptance letter yesterday from Analog, which is picking up my novelette “The Boneless One,” making this my second sale to them in less than three months. (The check for “Kawataro,” which Analog is publishing in June, arrived at the same time as the acceptance letter for “The Boneless One,” as well as a delivery and acceptance check for Kamera, making it officially the best mail day ever. It’s all downhill from here…)

I’m especially pleased by this sale, because “The Boneless One” is easily my favorite of all the short fiction I’ve written. It’s sort of a science fiction murder mystery set aboard a research yacht in the North Atlantic, part The Life Aquatic, part X-Files, and I’m really glad that it will be coming out in Analog. Based on what I know of their publishing schedule, my best guess is that it will appear sometime before the end of the year, just in time for Kamera’s debut in bookstores, which is very nice timing indeed.

At the moment, though, I need to get back to work on this next novel, which I’m hoping to start writing sometime in March. I’ve been plowing through background reading all this week, mostly focusing on books on Russia—including James Billington’s incredible The Icon and the Axe—and I’ve just scheduled a quick trip to the UK for some location research. I’ll be in London (possibly with a day trip to Brussels) from February 6 to 13, which means that I’ll have just under a week to get enough material for a year’s worth of writing. Off we go…