A glimpse of the future

© Otnaydur | Dreamstime.com

Snooger, a snoggle, was snoring in his sleep when an alien from another planet stepped on his foot. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Little Bill Gentle got involved when the alien and her vampire friend trespassed on his property. The two of them changed his life rather dramatically.

Viktar, the Lost Prince of Venus, was not really lost. He and his aide, Tudie Tidalbars, were — well, perhaps I’m telling more than I should at this juncture.

“Yes, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said the red-haired young woman who happens to be the alien who accidentally gave Snooger his rude awakening. “And what’s this about me being an alien?”

“Of course we’re aliens to these people,” said Blaine, her vampire friend. “This is their planet, not ours.”

“I know,” said Jeep Thompson. “It just takes some getting used to.”

Once upon a time, a writer who lived near the waters of Green Bay awakened not long after midnight and remembered that he had not written his daily blog post yet.

“Whatever shall I write about?” the writer murmured to himself.

“Hey, we snoggles are still trying to sleep here,” came a voice from somewhere in the distance. “Snooger, shut your friends up, please.”

“Sorry,” said the writer. “I didn’t mean to cause a commotion.”

“It’s not your fault,” whined Snooger. “Everything was fine until she stepped on my fooo-oot.”

“Do all snoggles whine like this?” Jeep asked.

“Only the ones who get their feet stomped,” smiled Little Bill Gentle.

The writer posted his blog post and went back to sleep — or at least that’s what they thought. Only he knows what really happened next.

An announcement long in coming

I am ready to say that Jeep Thompson and The Lost Prince of Venus is my next book. I can see my way to “The End” at last.

I even added the book cover to the website’s sidebar with the caption “My Next Book.”

Jeep has been pacing along the sidelines watching me write 1,828 daily blog posts while I nibbled around the edges of her story. One of the first memes I made said, “Jeep Thompson: Coming in 2021.” I’ve had mockups of the trilogy covers done for years, along with working titles, currently Jeep Thompson and The Lost Prince of Venus, Jeep Thompson and The Martian Alternative, and Jeep Thompson and The World Jumpers.

Maybe conceiving it as a trilogy overwhelmed something in me and made me hesitate and procrastinate for months at a time. Maybe it made me overthink certain scenes to try to plant seeds in the first book that would bear fruit later on. Whatever the case, it has taken me a long time to get Jeep back from Venus, but I know how she gets home now, and I know what she finds there that sends her to Mars next.

And I don’t know precisely how, but I know that Jeep Thompson is destined to save the worlds.

This means I’m abandoning my goofy goal to publish 12 books during 2025 — what the heck, through the end of July I’m five books behind anyway. Perhaps I’ll work my way up to monthly in 2026 or 2027.

I’ll keep you posted as I get a clearer idea about when Jeep Thompson and The Lost Prince of Venus is ready. My expectation is that it will be there in time for you to give copies to all your loved ones for Christmas.

P.S. When I posted this post for Saturday morning publication, I saw the WordPress “Related” algorithm presented previous announcements about how Jeep was almost here. I hate to say, “This time for sure,” but: This time for sure.

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As long as I’m talking about my books, please consider my recent bits of fiction — the Christmas fable Ebenezer (also available in hardcover), the Halloween fantasy Dejah & Summer in The Time of Magic, and The Man Who Crossed Whimsy Avenue — or my most recent blog post collections, A Declaration of Peace and See the World! They also would make wonderful gifts and are available now wherever fine print-on-demand books are sold, e.g., everywhere.

My mad goals

On Saturday I finally fixed the weed whacker and got busy on whacking some of the weeds around here. This time the procrastination actually helped a bit, because some irises and other perennials have bloomed as if to say, “I’m not a weed, please don’t whack me.”

I had so much fun getting my hands dirty at last that I posted this picture of the biggest iris and proclaimed, “I may not bring it all the way back this summer, but I’m going to learn how to tend Grandma’s Garden the way Red did. That, and finishing my novels, are my first two big retirement goals.”

By Sunday morning I was wondering if I really meant it.

I mean yes to the garden. Our place was a flowering Eden when Red was in charge, and I would love to restore it to some semblance of splendor, although first I need to learn a little bit more about how it’s done.

But about those novels …? That’s been a constant whine of mine for a very long time.

Still, there are three sort-of- to mostly-finished novels I really would like to finish someday, and if I buckled down I could probably finish them this year. No brag, just fact. It’s just that I have always had a problem with buckling down.

Their working titles:

Jeep Thompson and the Lost Prince of Venus

No Chance to Dream: A Comfort & Joy Mystery

The Girl, The Alien, and Me

I have left a lot of novels unfinished over the years, but these three haunt me from time to time. I love the characters, and I love where they were going when I inexplicably abandoned them.

Last fall I proved that I can indeed finish a novel, and swiftly, when I wrote Dejah & Summer in the Time of Magic in six weeks, give or take. 

What is stopping me now, especially since a) I am newly retired and not bound by an agreement to pour my efforts into a day job, and b) I just proclaimed that finishing those novels is one of my first big retirement goals? Oh, and c) I set a silly goal to publish 12 books in 2025, and that could be three of them?

The only thing standing in my way, as far as I can tell, is me.

I wonder if I should get out of my own way and get down to business?

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Meanwhile, here is episode 13 of the “See the World! Podcast,” daily readings from my forthcoming book See the World! It’s scheduled for release June 10 and available for pre-order by clicking the book’s title.