In the space-year 2025

It feels like everyone is saying this, but this year is going to be busy for me. Which feels good because there seems to be this collective energy of everyone getting down to business and being creative and productive.

Personally, this feels extra good because one thing about writing as much tie-in fiction as I do is that so much of my work is never actually seen. I had one thing out last year - my first World of Warcraft story, Heartlands - but I probably wrote more in a single twelve-month period than I ever have before, in the form of outlines and revised outlines for new things I'm working on, and pitches and outlines for stuff that ultimately never got picked up. This is just a fact of life when you work in tie-ins, but for a writer, nothing is ever wasted anyway - a lot of stuff will never see the light of day as it is, but I can take bits and pieces, ideas and fragments and plots, and use them for other stuff.

But 2025 feels pretty good. My last novel, Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith, will (incredibly) turn three years old this June. My last "original" novel was I Only Killed Him Once, which came out in - brace yourselves - 2018. I have had stuff out every year: Heartlands, as mentioned, was 2024's release, and 2023 saw the publication of my short story The Steadfast Soldier in Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi. But it's definitely time for something new and something big, and this year has got a lot coming, including no less than four separate releases. More on those later, but for the moment:

What I'm working on right now

I'm glad you asked! Nothing is announced yet and while I was tempted to give everything a silly codename, I actually don't use them myself - actually, the last one I did use was Yellow Barn for Shadow of the Sith, but usually my files and folders are organised by the real name of the thing, or if it doesn't have a title, by something that's just enough for me to remember what the hell it is.

Which is all fine but it makes talking about what I'm working on kinda annoying. So let's go with some vague names and ideas and see if I can remember them in the next update.

While I don't use codenames for individual projects, I do group them together into exciting secret operations, which brings me to:

Operation Summer Break! Which is... well, "January". But this month I've planned things very carefully and have dedicated it to a couple of big things, so it needed a name. It might be winter and snowing where I am in the UK, but a) I'm from New Zealand, where this is the height of summer, and b) I'm currently obsessed with the anime series The Aquatope of White Sand, so I've shamelessly stolen the name of Kukuru's plan for saving her aquarium.

Operation Summer Break! (exclamation mark compulsory) has two projects. The first is a Big Thing which I started late last year and need to finish. This will be out in late 2025. Stay tuned for more on this soon. The other is a Smaller Thing, which is being written from scratch after the outline was approved last year. This will also be out in 2025.

There is another thing, also Small, which is technically done but will no doubt come back to me at some point and will need a quick turnaround on the revision. This will be out in 2025 as well.

So that's three things out this year. The fourth is something that was done and dusted ages ago, except for some interviews I did for it just a couple of weeks ago, which will be included with the release. At the risk of sounding smugly mysterious, I'm excited to find out how this thing has turned out.

Operation Summer Break! also includes me getting some new author photos done at some point, as my current pair are ten years old this year. Which is frankly terrifying, but hey-ho.

What's next?

I've got another mostly finished thing which will need some work this year. It's an original novel and it'll be out in 2026, but I'm expecting the (hopefully) final edit back sometime later this year. This is a book I've been working on for quite a while, so it'll be great to finally be able to talk about it. And with this out in 2026, that'll be eight years since my last original, so prepare yourselves for me to talk about this one forever, once it is announced. With a little luck, the gap between originals won't be so long, going forward. In fact, between everything else this year, my plan is to get two new books done to at least the finished first draft.

And finally...

Feel free to send me any questions and comments - I'm particularly interested in hearing what you want me to talk about. Hit me up here or on Bluesky.