That title is a misnomer. With the fundamental change in my work flow this year to focus on one major fiction product at a time, it would be more accurate to call it something like, “Projected Project Rotation”, but abbreviated as PPR that won’t tell most people anything while WIP is easy to interpret. So I’ll stick with that title but with the caveat that it’s a projection of both current and the next few major projects.
While this page is for book-length work, it’s still worth noting that I have a lot of things drafted at other lengths that need at least one editing pass before I consider them “complete”, and that total seems mostly to go up with time. Right now, not counting Flash pieces (or maybe I should), “a lot” means 33 short stories, 10 novelettes, 8 novellas (although a couple of those may belong in the trunk), and 2 novels.
And I still have a lot of outlines and plans.
I’d like to say the overall count of stories to be edited is a lot lower than it was a year ago, but that’s not true, even without the inclusion of flash fiction. It might be the same as it was in early 2025, and it’s definitely lower than at the beginning of 2024, but it’s still a big number. It’s likely to get bigger before it gets smaller due to other things going on in my life at the moment.
Fiction – Major Projects
I’ll put these in the order I intend to hitting them, beginning with the current major WIP draft, and I’ll just rotate through. The basic idea is that I will eventually have five things in the process at a time, each getting its next draft. So draft one thing, revisions draft on the next thing, polishing the next thing, and so on. But that’s still getting established. It’s several years before I need to outline another novel, but I’m slowly outlining one anyway just with no pressure to actually get it into the rotation.
- Drafting: Heroic Genesis (SH, 123k/150k complete) – this has expanded several times and is now going to be a pair of novels, but I’m still counting it as a single drafting project in the meantime.
- Make It Pretty: none planned in this rotation
- Final: Welkiri Corps (SF, 3rd draft = 67k words)
- Outline: none planned in this rotation
- Next rotation stars with Drafting Extragalactic Contact, a SF novel I’m initially projecting at 60k words.
I have the basic rotations plotted out to the end of a three-year plan and projections beyond that which, yes, means, I know the next 9-10 novels I want to write will be. There’s always room for project changes, though, and the number of ideas never goes down even when you write things on the list.
Non-Fiction
Same idea here, although the drafts after the first don’t always have the same purpose:
- Commentary: The Memory Project Volume 5B, Journals and Blogs (nearly done, but some of the journal entries were dictated in days of crummier technology and need a lot of cleaning so it’s slow going)
- Revisions: The Old Man and His Karate
- Editing: The Memory Project Volume 3, Higher Education
- Finalize: The Memory Project Volume 2, The Teenager
- Drafting: The Memory Project Volume 5, Fatherhood
Other Projects
Because of life events and my Master’s thesis, a lot of things have been slow to progress for the last couple of months, but the first draft scripts for the second season of a three-season audio drama I’m hoping to commit at some point is getting near the top of the list and will probably happen when the first draft of Heroic Genesis is complete. The third season will slip into the rotation after Extragalactic Contact gets its first draft.
