Hello, dreamers.

It’s been a while. Last year was a rough one for me, and I feel my posting on this site was a mix of sporadic posting followed by long silences, then apologies for being away. But I’m getting things back on track, in every respect. It’s a new year, and a new beginning. And while I’ve been silent this past year, I haven’t been idle.

So, as a new year dawns, I have a big announcement to make: I have begun working on a new novel.

Neptune 1

Set within the Dotiverse of my other novels and stories, Neptune 1 follows the crew of the Deep Space Reconnaissance Vehicle Challenger. When a robotic probe detects liquid water on a moon orbiting a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri system, the Earth Space Administration launches a manned mission to explore the moon and search for extraterrestrial life in one of the closest star systems to Earth. As the moon is completely covered in ocean, the story revolves around Karen Hernandez: the first marine biologist in space.

If this announcement comes to a shock to my longtime readers, that’s understandable; it comes as a shock to me as well. Back in October, I began revising and expanding my notes in preparation for the next novel in the Pioneers series. That included fleshing out background, and basically determining the overall state of mankind as of 2155. Since the next novel will take place over thirty years after the events of Pioneers, this also meant fleshing out the story of mankind over that span of time. I threw myself into worldbuilding, devising everything from extrasolar colony planets to enormous spacecraft and megastructures required for terraforming. Yet as I worked through it all, one concept drew my attention: the Deep Space Reconnaissance Vehicle, or DSRV.

The first and only DSRV to appear in my works was the Endurance, which was introduced near the end of Pioneers. But from the start, I’d been enamored with the idea. The DSRV is a ship of exploration: crewed by ESA’s best and brightest, intended to spend years alone in deep space exploring habitable exoplanets. It played into what I’d seen as the original overarching concept of the Dotiverse stories: essentially a more modern, realistic Star Trek, adapted for our world today. Space travel has long been my greatest passion. And while I thoroughly enjoyed writing Pioneers, and look forward to writing the subsequent novels, I’ve long hoped to transition into stories about the crews of spacecraft exploring the cosmos.

After finishing the background for the DSRVs, I originally intended to write a series of short stories about their missions, collectively known as the Neptune Program. But when I began plotting out the first story, Neptune 1, I slowly realized I was actually planning for a novel. I am now about halfway through the novel, and very pleased with how it’s going so far. I’m still thinking through the future of this new parallel storyline. I have a lot of ideas. But for now, I’m happy to be back at it, and focused mainly on finishing this novel, beginning the query process for Pioneers, and beginning work on The Pioneer Era.

That’s about all I have to report right now, dreamers. As tends to be the case, my novel project has been absorbing all my writing time and efforts. However, keep an eye out in the coming days and weeks. On Wednesday, I will be resuming my WIP Wednesday posts, starting with an introduction to Neptune 1. Until then, happy New Year, and dare to dream. – MK