So by now you've probably seen the cover for my new release, Saint Cochrane's World. You're probably wondering, since this is a book with "Cochrane" in the title, it must be related to The Lightship Chronicles, right? Well, the answer is yes and no.
SCW was the first novel I wrote. It was always where I intended to start the series of books. My idea was 3 novels in the time of the Second Empire, (roughly 2,800 AD to 3,900 AD) then go back and write a starship-based series either at the end of the First Empire or the beginning of the Second, and a series that showed how the First Empire came to be.
What I ended up with was SCW, then The Lightship Chronicles as the Second Empire rose to prominence, and then Speedwing, which ended up being a Young Adult novel of a time before the First Empire rose.
So the full layout was intended to be Speedwing-Lancewing-Battlewing in the YA series; Impulse-Starbound-Defiant in the LSC, and Saint Cochrane's World, Saint Cohrane's War, and Saint Cochrane's [Something] in the third series. But now I think things have changed.
I am rewriting and expanding Speedwing into a new edition that will be a full-length novel, adding about 40,000 words to the original, and I think that will tell the main story of the Colonial Era. There will be at least one more LSC book, Endeavor, plus a short prequel story in the Infinite Stars anthology coming in October '17 from Titan Books. Likely there will be no follow up novels for SCW, or if there are, it will be quite a while before they are written. So the future timeline looks like this:
The Colonial Era
Speedwing (Original Edition, Whiskey Creek Press, 2012)
Speedwing (New Edition, 2018)
The Lightship Chronicles
Last Day of Training (Infinite Stars, Titan Books, October 2017) IMPULSE (DAW Books, 2015) STARBOUND (DAW Books, 2016) DEFIANT (DAW Books, 2017)
PLAGUE SHIP (2018 Novella) Prelude to ENDEAVOR (Possible 2018, Novella) ENDEAVOR (2019, Projected) (LSC Volume IV) GUARDIAN (Projected, 2020) (LSC Volume V) The Historian's War (Prequel to LSC, Timeline unknown)
The Second Empire
Saint Cochrane's World (Sept. 2017)
Non-LSC Books and Projects
VOID SHIP (January 2018)
ICEBREAKER (Short Story in Baen Books "Star Destroyers" Anthology, March 2018)
TRINITY (New novel-in-progress, likely 2018-2019 to press)
So my schedule should be very busy the next few years. Currently I'm writing fairly slowly, so we'll see what happens with this schedule, but it's nice to have the future mapped out.
db
