Earlier this week we launched our latest book. It’s called Tenpenny Zen — perhaps you’ve heard of it? Now that all of the champagne corks have been swept up and the fancy alcoholic milkshakes have been drunk, it’s time to look ahead.

As we’ve mentioned in other posts, it’s important for us to keep several projects in motion. When a draft of a novel is resting before editing (or between editing passes) we need to have different works to turn our minds to. Publishing the Divided Man Series means we have less fodder for that. We’re currently sitting on 4 novels that are at least at the first draft stage, so we’re not in danger of running out. Yet.

But as Jen finishes up the major edits of the final Divided Man book and we look ahead to pushing it out into the world this fall, we start to become a little bit nervous. If we don’t plan ahead, we will run out of finished novels to rotate between.

For quite a few months (in between editing and polishing the Divided Man books, and designing their covers, as well as writing Son of Science Novel) we’ve been batting around ideas for our next story world. The Divided Man books are done, at least for now. The Science Novel series is plotted to the end, and that’s what we’re working on. The Music Novel series is 2/3 done. What comes next?

I hope it’s not too spoilery if we say Ghosts. Ghosts are next. We’re both drawn to the general concept of a ghost story, but it took a lot of brainstorming to figure out how to put the Rune Skelley twist on it. We don’t want to tell a standard ghost story. There are a lot of writers out there who do that very well. So how to take some of those tropes and make them our own?

As is often the case with us, inspiration came from an unusual source. In this case, an article on Cracked. We’re obviously not going to say here what the article was about, but when Jen read it, a whole Vegas Strip’s worth of lightbulbs went off. There were a few fascinating nuggets in the article that acted as a catalyst to bring together almost all of the nebulous ideas we had floating around. It all crystalized into the most beautifully twisted story world. Jen typed it up and sent it off to Kent at work, and it sparked his fevered imagination, too.

We spent a good chunk of time that should probably have been spent writing Son of Science Novel bouncing ideas off each other and getting very excited. It felt great!

The circle of life continues.