It’s winter finally! We got snow yesterday in the Blue Ridge Mountains and it actually stuck around for today! Yay!

For those of you who didn’t know, I love the snow. It was probably the only thing I liked about living in Colorado. Well, that and I had some really good friends there.

Yes, I find it weird as well that I would move to a state where it doesn’t really snow often.

One day I might live in Idaho, Montana, or Utah. They get a LOT of snow up there. Minnesota might be a bit too far north for my tastes.

GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY is currently the #3 Hot New Action & Adventure release over on Amazon right now. It peaked at #2 but Jamie and I are competing against a NYT bestselling series and an Amazon-promoted series, so I’m okay with #3. Still haven’t gotten an Orange #1 tag, though. They didn’t have them when Eric and I had the Kaiju Apocalypse series come out in 2014 otherwise I would have. But still… at least I can say an anthology I’ve been in was on the NYT bestseller’s list (BLACK TIDE RISING). It’s almost impossible for an anthology to crack the list, so for BTR to do that well is amazing. Still, I would have liked for GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY to hit that #1 mark.

The other reason I really like the cold though (see how I circled back to it? Clever monkey, I am.) is my productivity goes up. I hate sweating (always have, even when I played sports) and I own a 100 year old house with no central A/C and crappy insulation, so it gets really cold in here in the winter and REALLY FREAKING HOT in the summer. Throw in this thing called “humidity” and I usually feel like I’m sitting in a sauna.

I’m currently working on three major projects right now. Two of them are set in the Four Horsemen Universe, which is where GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY lives. The first one is a direct sequel to SONS OF THE LION and stars possibly my second favorite character of all time, Sunshine. This is titled DAUGHTERS OF THE PRIDE and yes, that is the final title. I refuse to change it because I love it. Let’s hope the publisher does as well.

The second 4HU project is still untitled. I’ve got it labeled in my file as “WIP 22”, which translates to “work in progress 22”. Yes, I have 21 other WIPs. Relax. Most of these are simply in the outline phase (except for WINTERBORN, but I’ll get to that later). This one is set around the same time as GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY and features the aliens (the Draaki) who Meerawn and his companion meet up with in the Merc Pit early on in the book. I’ve been plotting this one for awhile and now that GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY is out in the wild, I can write the concurrent novel. Yay!

The third is my fantasy book I’ve been working on for the past few months. Epic fantasy isn’t usually my genre but then, neither is a children’s book, yet a lot of you might have found me because of A CHRISTMAS SURPRISE. If you did, hi! Welcome to the party!

So you may have noticed I left off WINTERBORN (see? I did come back to it) and are wondering if I gave up on the series. The answer is no. It’s just taken a bit of a backseat for the moment. It’s part of the aforementioned 21 other WIPs. I actually have about 10,000 words written in it already. The problem is that I don’t really know how to link the sequel to it with the final three of the series (which are already plotted out and the ending is complete). Book 6 is going to be CRAZY when a lot of things are revealed, including why certain events in Book 2 occurred as well as a resolution to the war (well, two of the wars… because a bigger one breaks out… and we’re not counting the civil war, either). The Kin Wars Saga is getting very deep the further along I go in the series, and this threatens to make the books too long or stretch the series out, so I’m trying to see where I can cut stuff to make room for the main story line. At the same time, I really don’t want to ignore Christine, Joel, or even Esau’s story, so… I’ll probably make room without cutting too much. This might make the novels longer, but it will keep the series at the projected 9 books.

Other than that, not a lot going on this week. My coauthor Chris Smith had a book released from Baen Books yesterday. He coauthored it with NYT bestselling author John Ringo and Kacey Ezell, both of whom I would call my friends, if not family. It’s a terrific book and the start of a new post apocalyptic series set in the US and has warrior monks, giant ants, and dragons. Really, GUNPOWDER & EMBERS is a really cool book and you might want to check it out.