And….

I fired off When the Guns Roar (Siobhan Dunmoore Book 6) to my editor just now, after two weeks of work revising and polishing the story to the standard she expects.  How long it will take her, I couldn’t say but the book will certainly come out in October.  At this point, I’m pondering whether to try putting it on pre-order.  I’ve never done pre-orders so it could be an interesting experiment.  If I do it, I’ll probably set the release date for the end of October, just in case.  But if everything is ready before then, I would certainly move the date up.  However, before I can set up a pre-order, I need to write the book’s description and finalize the cover, which I will do in the next few days.  As they say in advertising, keep your eyes on this space.

What comes after this?  I need to work on the Ashes of Empire: Imperial Night storyline, certainly.  However, I also want to get started on a series covering the other end of my scifi universe’s continuum, something which will take us through the fall of Decker and Dunmoore’s Commonwealth and the rise of the empire whose dissolution I describe in Imperial Sunset and Imperial Twilight.  So far, I haven’t found the ‘hook’ that will get me launched, but these things come unexpectedly.  For example, I unexpectedly figured out When the Guns Roar during a workout session at the gym back in June.

You can pre-order it on Amazon via this link: https://books2read.com/whenthegunsroar.  I didn’t set it up for pre-order with other retailers for technical reasons, but it will be published everywhere ebooks are sold.

Mission Accomplished

I just finished writing When the Guns Roar (Siobhan Dunmoore Book 6).  Now for the revisions and the polishing before my editor sees the manuscript in early October.  Barring any issues, it will be published late next month.

What’s the story, you ask?  It picks up where the fifth book left off, focuses entirely on the Shrehari war and ends rather dramatically.  But I won’t say anything more because I don’t want to spoil the denouement.  I’ve yet to write the brief synopsis you’ll see on the book’s product page, my blog and the official Eric Thomson website.

On the First Monday

And on the first Monday in September, we celebrate work by being idle.  The concept of Labour Day has always amused me, but nowadays, these statutory holidays make little difference in my life.  If I’m driven to write, I’ll write.  Mrs Thomson, who still works in the bowels of the demented bureaucracy on the other hand, quite enjoys them.

Labour Day is the unofficial end of summer in our part of the world, and in the last week or so, it certainly seemed that way.  The nights are getting chillier, the sun sets earlier and rises later, and the sky is taking on that autumnal luminosity which we recognize but cannot quite describe.  Mrs Thomson’s vegetable garden is just about done for the year – a few green tomatoes remain, but nothing else.  Where has the summer gone?  It started so late, after an awful and awfully long winter, followed by a cold and soggy spring.  Will we get an early winter as well?  Speaking of winter, another sign of the season’s passing landed in my email inbox the other day.  Our snow removal company’s contract for the 2019-2020 season.  Let’s hope we won’t need their services until well into December, but the way things have been going in the last few years…

I’ve written three quarters of When The Guns Roar (Siobhan Dunmoore Book 6) and should be typing those two words every writer loves, The End, in the next two weeks.  After that?  Well, the next installment in the Ashes of Empire saga, Imperial Night is on the menu.  And perhaps the start of a new series covering events in Zack Decker’s later career when the Commonwealth slowly becomes that empire we’ve learned to hate in Ashes of Empire.  I was playing with a book cover idea for the first installment yesterday, to flex my graphic design muscles and take a break from writing.  The result is below.  And that, as they used to say, is all the news that’s fit to print in my little universe.