Axon, Inc. Update Feb 2020

Among the agents who gave me feedback on their rejection, the most common complaint was that the beginning was not compelling enough. This was somewhat discouraging.

There then arose many non-writing-related matters to attend to; so I set the book aside for a while. When I went back and looked at the book again, in the spring of 2019, I saw that there were a lot of things I wanted to fix in it, and that was also discouraging.

So of course I worked on other writing projects. But I think later this year I’ll be ready to look at Axon again. I think it is a good idea, with good characters, and I think it has great potential, and I’m not going to give up on it. I’ll take another crack at it and see if I can’t make it the book it deserves to be.

In the meantime I’ve been continuing to work on other things, most of which are a long way from finishing and need a lot more slow-cooking. On this blog I’ll present some of projects I’ve working on, as and when they become presentable. To kick us off, here’s a short list of things I have on various burners:

• Harry Potter and the Hourwick of Oz. This one is actually finished, and fresh out of the oven: a Harry Potter / Wizard of Oz mashup concerning Time Turners, house elves, and what would happen if wizards began to inexplicably lose their powers. Since it’s just fanfic I’ve posted it at Inkitt and, with my daughter’s help, a couple of fanfic sites. Twenty chapters or so of Pottery Oz goodness! Enjoy!
• Return to Sagaia. A fantasy novel inspired by Narnia. Sagaia is dying, and Sarah, the only remaining human left alive who has visited there, must return and save it. (It’s called “Sagaia” because part of the background is that Sagaia is the real name of the country, and “Narnia” was a pseudonym created by C. S. Lewis.) The goal of the book (as yet unfinished) was to redeem Narnia, to make it as it should have been: a Narnia without racism or sexism, a Narnia we could proudly read to our children; a Narnia that fully explored the amazing potential of a world where women could be both queens and witches, where animals could talk and be treated as citizens equal to humans, where the intersection of Christian redemption and the wild beauty of naturalistic deities was explored properly. Read more about that here.
• Gnial. This is a very new project and just in the beginning stages. In the late 21st century, a few hundred biologists, geologists, and climatologists embark on an expedition back in time to 66 million years ago, a few thousand years before the extinction of the dinosaurs, in order to study the time period. They are stranded… and for the next two thousand years, as the dinosaur-killing meteor slowly approaches, their descendants populate the northern polar regions of the Earth, building a semi-feudal, semi-industrial society in the face of certain apocalypse. This is a big world building project, with half a dozen languages and cultures to develop. To that end I’m creating a special dictionary and encyclopedia; you can check that out here.
• Mere America. This project has been cooking for over 15 years and it’s going to be quite a few more… An alternate history in which the geography of North America is reversed, with the California coast facing Europe and the Atlantic seaboard facing China. With the Rocky Mountains slowing the advance of the Europeans, the first nations peoples of the plains and Appalachian woodlands are able to unite and hold them off. There are some initial draft materials here, and an ebook of the first section here. I’m still pretty pleased with some of this, but I haven’t tackled it in years and there’s going to be a lot of re-visioning.