After spending the first half of 2026 editing and rebranding my entire backlist of books, I’m now finally turning my attention to writing again. First up is the third book in the Starstrikers Series: XiniX. I’ve already written nearly a dozen chapters on it over the past few years, but progress was stalled as I did other writerly things. But now I’m back on the novel in full force until it’s finished. It’s been really difficult getting back into this one. Heck, it hasn’t been easy getting this one off the ground at all. It’s complicated and I haven’t been able to think about the plots, subplots, and new characters enough to feel out the rhythm of the book. Going back and printing out what I’ve written and then reading it to make sure it makes sense was the first thing I had to do this month.
Then I had to make corrections to the plot and add stuff that I had missed or otherwise left out until the flow was established and the story made sense. With that behind me, I can now focus on moving forward with the story. For some inexplicable reason, I have not done a detailed outline. I’m working on memory and a few pages of notes that I wrote over the preceding years to suss out the plot. I don’t recommend that with a complex story. What the hell was I even thinking? After writing over twenty novels over the years, you definitely develop a sense of how to plot. Most books I can keep the plot in my head as I write and no longer have to make elaborate outlines. When I first started writing, outlining was just part of the learning process for me. Like students learning to write by hand and practicing each letter of the alphabet on lined paper. I needed to learn to write in the lines so everything was neat and straight and readable. I still don’t know exactly how this novel will get wrapped up. But that’s sometimes part of the fun of writing. It makes me want to find out how the story ends. Sometimes it goes where I anticipate, and sometimes not.
This time I’m adding another layer to this novel by writing the rest of the first draft in pencil. After each day of writing, I dutifully type what I’ve written into the computer so I don’t have to do the whole thing at the end. This gives me my daily word count, which I don’t really care about, but social media thinks is important. All I really care about is when this chapter will be done and how many total words I have completed. Right now I have 25K words on this beast. That’s about one quarter of the way to the standard 100K word manuscript. This is important to know because it tells me where in the plot I’m at and what I need to focus on for the next 25K words. A useful measuring stick and a signpost for where in the story I’m at. As long as I’m moving forward on word count each time I write, it doesn’t really matter how many words I produce. At least for me.
I’d like to take a moment to circle back on the re-releases we’ve been doing this year. My brother, Byron McConnell, does all the cover work on my novels. He puts the starship pictures I take of my models into Photoshop and creates all the cool effects and dramatic art that you see on the covers. He’s super talented and his services are available! Anyway, he’s currently working on the final tranche of books, and I can’t wait to see what he’s come up with. We’re keeping the cover art like what came before and just adding branding and cleaning up some minor things. But they are looking fantastic! I think new readers will better understand the whole Star Saga and how each series fits into it. That’s the idea, anyway. So far, I’ve seen evidence that a reader has purchased the entire Starforgers Series to read it in order. I have never seen that kind of buying behavior before, so I think the new branding is helping.
As a side note, all the book pages on this site are updated with current links to where you can purchase the newly released books.
I’ve been focusing my social media these days more on Threads, so you can find me there for writing updates in real time. I post pictures of my setup and chat about process there, in case you’re interested in that sort of thing. I think it’s important to talk shop occasionally, so people know what you do and can see that you are indeed writing stuff and doing other author tasks. Check that out if you like, and I’ll try to post here a bit more.
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