Hello, dreamers. Over my past several posts, I’ve hinted at a new project I’m working on. I dropped a few tidbits, but now I’m ready to make the formal announcement. I’ve begun work on what will become my very first series of short stories.

This concept arose organically from several stories I’ve worked on recently. Over time, I realized all of them were set in the same place, just at different points in time. So, without further ado, here’s a reader’s first look at my next big project:

The Drum

This new series will take place entirely aboard the Drum: an enormous cylindrical spacecraft thousands of kilometers long, spinning to simulate gravity. As its name suggests, the Drum is hollow; its inner surface is covered in a vast landscape, with a surface area approximately the size of Russia. This surface is covered in what amounts to an inverted world: oceans and continents, rivers and forests, and cities where the Drum’s inhabitants live.

The story I’m working on, “Seeds of A New Eden”, is the first story within the series continuity (though it may not be the first to be shopped around or released). The crew of the Drum is revived after a disaster, with no memory of their mission and scant memories of their former lives. Initially having no idea of where they are, the revived crewmen explore the Drum. Ultimately, they learn that the same phenomenon that damaged their memory centers also wiped most of the main computer’s core memory. All data on their original mission has been lost, save the Drum’s trajectory through space, which they cannot access as none of them can remember the access key.

With no hope of accomplishing their original mission, whatever it may have been, the crew adopts a new mission: to build lives for themselves, a new human civilization within the Drum. Though they hold out hope of one day learning the Drum’s original mission and completing it, over time their focus turns to maintaining the massive spacecraft that has become their home, and blazing their own path into the future.

From there, subsequent installments will jump through time, often by hundreds of years. As they populate and settle the interior of the Drum, the crew’s descendants develop a new society that changes over time. Generation after generation learn new things about the spacecraft, ultimately coming to understand that the massive cylinder uses the gravity of stars to alter its course, leaping between gravity wells and refueling its massive fusion reactor.

As it’s currently planned, this series will effectively become the short fiction companion to the Dotiverse continuity of my novels. It will be the work of years, following the efforts of a small group of unwitting settlers and their descendants. At the moment I have the story planned out through at least seven major installments, likely interspersed with shorter stories, eventually ending with the Drum fulfilling its original mission as it executes one final gravity-assist maneuver around a black hole, and leaves our galaxy behind.

One of the things I love most about this story concept is its built-in versatility. It will allow me to write stories of varying length, depending on what I’m feeling at any given time. I’ll have the potential to eventually combine some or all of the stories into either collections or an entire novel. The possibilities are endless. I may even post some of the installments either here or on Substack, to invite readers into the Drum and tease eventual releases.

So I end what has been a banner year for my writing with a bold new project. A new vision, a new idea, wholly unlike anything I’ve ever done before. I can’t wait to see what lies ahead, and I’m happy to have you along with me. Until next time, dare to dream. – MK