In my last blog article, I updated all y’all on all the many writing projects I’m working on currently. What I didn’t talk about was all the projects I’m not working on. Well, I guess technically that list would be infinite, but I mean specifically the ideas that are stirring around rather urgently in my head, that I haven’t been able to let go of, but for which I haven’t written more than the occasional note.
First, there’s The Last Light Flickers, the fourth and final book in the series that begins with The Widening Gyre. I think this will be the shortest of the four (which isn’t saying much, since they are all over 300,000 words) but I also think it will be the hardest to write. I’ve been living with these characters for a long time, and they are dear to me. Don’t worry; I know the ending very well, and I know the path to get there.
I have ideas for at least two more Winter Tales, although one is shaping up to be more of an Autumn Tale, since it’s kind of spooky. That one will be called Six of Sorrows, and most of it will be set at the Renaissance Festival introduced in Blackthorne Faire. There’s more “backstage at the theatre” stuff, more tarot cards, and a pair of ghosts very loosely based on the poet W. B. Yeats and Maud Gonne. The second story is called Tomorrow Smells Like Rain and Roses. It’s about a man with precognitive powers—but he doesn’t see the future, he smells it. He uses his power to plan crimes, and ultimately to seek redemption. I kind of love the shape of this story, but I’m not entirely sure there’s enough there for a whole novel. It might just be a short story, but time will tell. I hope. I’d really love to work on both of these. At this point, I think Tomorrow Smells Like Rain and Roses will probably come first, because I still need to think about the ending of Six of Sorrows.
My novel A Planet Called Eden is completed and is about to go to a last beta reader before I deliver it to my publisher. It is, however, meant to be the first in a series of five or six (depending on whether or not I can squeeze the final story into one volume, which frankly seems unlikely). The titles of the next books are The Gates of Eden, The Moon Over Eden, The Gardners of Eden, The Rebel Angels of Eden, and (probably) The War for Eden. I also have a spin-off series in mind, with a very tentative working title of The Worlds Beyond Eden, but God only knows when or if I’ll ever get to that. I also have a company to run, after all. The first novel in the series features an ensemble cast. The sequels will focus on one or two characters, until they all come back together again for the finale. Or finales. I haven’t written even one single word of these sequels.
A while back, I had a TV pilot called Challengers stuck in development purgatory. Challengers is my take on the old pulp heroes of yesteryear, albeit with a very modern twist. Now that I head a film and television studio (as well as a book publisher), I’m planning to bring that one back to the top of the stack.
I wrote a novel based on the first three episodes, but it needs a significant update. I know exactly how I want to fix it, but … well, time has been an issue. These are some of my favorites of my characters, and this story is (at least some of) the glue that unites all my other projects—they all take place in the same story universe.
Challengers is my take on the old pulp heroes of yesteryear, albeit with a very modern twist. I’ve always had a love for the old pulp stories, but they really only work if you set them in period. I mean, you can kind of believe that Tarzan was raised by apes back in Victorian times, but attempts to modernize the story always seem to come across as ridiculous. You can almost believe that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger (who inspired the title of this project) could find dinosaurs in South America back in the day. In the age of Google Earth, well, not so much. All the same, I wanted to create a contemporary story. So my take is that these characters are the great grandchildren of pulp era heroes—a shaman, an explorer, a jungle boy, a magician, a daredevil pilot, and a masked femme fatale detective. The reason their great grandparents could have all these amazing adventures back in the day is because the world really was different back then, and something essential has changed. The nature of that change is the secret history of the world.
Last is a portal fantasy series set in a sort of Da Vinci-punk alternate world—it’s set mostly in a heightened Renaissance city where the technology is like that Da Vinci sketched in his notebooks.
This is a project I really hope to finish before I die. The first book (and the series) is called The Silver Realm. If you’re wondering about the title, that dates back to when I was around twelve or thirteen years old. I’d been told that there was a new J. R. R. Tolkien book coming out, but I’d misheard the title: The Silmarillion. The bookstores had no idea what I was talking about when I kept asking about a book called The Silver Realm. That title has stuck with me through the years, though, and I plan to put it to good use.
I’d originally envisioned nine books, or a trilogy of trilogies. When the time actually comes to write this, I may try to reduce the story to three volumes, but I’m not confident that will work. The first trilogy is a sort of fairy tale, but our main character isn’t the lost heir/chosen one. She was brought along by mistake. Her “wish come true” was meant for someone else. She grew up an orphan, moved from home to home. Her one possession is a children’s book, one of a series. She loves the book dearly, but no one else has ever heard of it, and she can’t find any of the other books in the series, It seems she has the only copy . . . until she meets three other orphans, who also have volumes from the series. It turns out, of course, that the books actually come from The Silver Realm itself. They were sent with the orphans when they were hidden in “our” world as infants. Except that one of them, our hero, is a decoy.
The middle set of stories is the aftermath … even if they’re the lost heir/chosen one (the real one, not our main character), what kind of ruler is a child going to be, one without experience or allies? The feeling of this trilogy is rather like the American or French revolution, and many of the heroes from the first stories are now on opposite sides. The heartbreak is that there’s not really a wrong or a right side, and no one is, well, evil.
The last trilogy (or novel) … concludes the tale. It’s the aftermath of the aftermath, as it were. I have a very specific ending in mind, but it’s one that’s going to be hard to earn, I think.
This series has some of my favorite characters and concepts, including a masked highwayman, lots of swordplay, dark pubs, lost treasure, zombified dragons, secret libraries, and the mysterious philosopher pirates, the latter of which my pal Jonathan Brown called “the most John Adcox thing I’ve ever heard of.” I’m not entirely sure he meant it as a compliment, but I took it as one anyway.
Anyway, that’s it. I’ve declared a moratorium on new ideas, since I’m pretty sure I already have more right now than I have years left to live. In the words of the late, great Issac Asimov, “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”
I’m typing as fast as I can.
How ’bout all y’all?
John Adcox: Thoughts on My Author’s Journey 