2022

The 2021-22 school year was horrible for me.  I got switched without my consent to a new classroom, a new grade, and a new subject.  I had very little time for writing.  By summer 2022, I had only some outlines and a few bits.  What I did have though, was a lot of pent-up creative energy.  I did most of the writing in this year during those two months.

His Robot Wife: Extreme Patience

I felt a great deal of pressure to complete Extreme Patience.  I was getting a letter almost every day from fans of the series.  I had my outline written back in 2017, but I had changed a lot of things in the previous book that had originally been planned to exend into this one.  Consequently, there was less plot left for this book.  I pushed through and finished a smaller book than originally intended.  Sometime in the future, I plan to combine the three books together and do a second edition.

The Destroyer Returns

I had been approached a number of times to write serialized fiction for distribution groups in Asia.  I had always been wary about it because of their payment system and terms.  Then Amazon created Kindle Vella, that worked very much the same way.  I came up with two stories, one of which was The Destroyer Returns and started writing and posting them in mini-chapters (about 1000 words).  Because of the way payments were structured, I earned about $50, even though nobody had read my stories.  Nobody.  For a writer, or at least for this one, a reader is more important than a sale, so I decided to put the story into book form instead.

The setting for The Destroyer Returns is very loosely based on the game of Minecraft.  My daughter introduced the game to me and it has since replaced all the other games that I played.  I toyed with the idea of writing a Minecraft book, but in the end, I decided to try to recreate the feel but with my own creations.  In addition, I took some inspiration from Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, particularly as he was portrayed in the old Marvel black and white magazine.

Astrid Maxxim and the Great Water Project

The Astrid Maxxim series was becoming more popular and it was time to write the next one.  I had actually finished this one before both The Destroyer Returns and Extreme Patience, but I set it aside.  It was way too dark for an Astrid Maxxim story.  After I had finished the other two, I returned to it and rewrote quite a bit, especially the middle.  I’m happy with it overall, but plan to return to more of the formula of the first two books in the future.