Tag: trilogy

What’s Coming Next

KenMcConnellLeave a comment

With the release of the third Corvette starship novella coming in just a few short weeks, I thought I’d take a moment to let you know what’s coming up next. The Corvette Trilogy is just the first of three planned trilogies with the same main character – Armon Vance. His story started with Corvette, then advanced with Corvette: Seer of the Black Star and finishes with Corvette: Pirate’s Lair.

          

The next book I will write for this series will be called – Destroyer: Declo Demons. Look for it in the Spring of 2019. Following along on the heels of that will be book 2, Destroyer: The Mutineers, which should ship for Christmas in 2019. The trilogy will finish in the Spring of 2020 with Destroyer: Letting Go. The Destroyer Trilogy will be darker and all the books will take place in a single system with seven habitable worlds, none of which are in the Federation.

I have one final starship trilogy planned. It will be called the Explorer Trilogy. The names of those books are still subject to change, but chronologically speaking, will end with the events that take place in Starforgers, Book One of the Star Saga. That will complete the Captain Vance starship series and take you right into the Star Saga.

Speaking of the Star Saga, I need to get back into that middle trilogy starting with Book 5 – XiniX. The Starstrikers trilogy will continue in parallel with the Starship Series. After XiniX comes out, there will be a novella – Dark Wind, followed by the final book in that trilogy: Nex Gen. Now the Star Saga books take longer to write because they are closer to 300 pages long and usually have more involved plots. So it’s going to take me longer to write them. But when the Starstriker Trilogy is over, it will have three novels and two novellas, just like the Starforgers Trilogy.

Needless to say, my lunchtime writing sprints are spoken for well into the near future. I should continue to have two books come out every year for the next decade or so.

 

All The Stories

KenMcConnell

You know the internet meme: All The Things?

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Well I’m gonna talk about All The Stories! It’s been a topic of many interesting posts around the web lately. One of the best ways to build readership if you’re an author is to write a bunch of stories set in the same universe. If by some way you can make them interconnect, all the better. Well, I hate to say this but: Been There Done That. I’ve been writing short stories, novellas and novels for about a decade now all set in the same universe. I call it my Star Saga universe.

It all started with my first novel, Starstrikers. It’s set during a vast, intergalactic war between the human led Alliance and the Votainion Empire. I quickly realized that rather than just write a sequel, I was going to attempt a trilogy of trilogies. My inspiration for this was of course the Star Wars movies. But the time between the trilogies would be 500 years in my saga, not 30 years. So all of the characters in each trilogy would have to be completely different. The single thread that binds them to together would be this huge, galactic war.

I set out to write the first book of each trilogy and spent a few years writing what would be Book One and Book Seven. These are out now and together form a loose trilogy of Starforgers, Starstrikers and Starveyors. You can read each book and get a great story with a completely different cast of characters and know how the Great War started, what it was like to fight it during the middle of the conflict and how it all ends. But of course that was not going to be enough. I knew that readers would want more. I, wanted more.

So I set out to write Books 2 and 3 of the first trilogy. Before doing so, I went back in time and wrote some short stories about the main character of the trilogy, Devon Ardel. She led a pretty exciting life as a Stellar Ranger before joining the military in Starforgers. I had lots of ideas for short stories set in her Ranger days. So I wrote them. Two of the shorts were published, one on the web and one in an anthology. The rest were compiled into an anthology by me called, Tales From Ocherva, Volume One. If you join my mailing list, this is the book I will send you for free.

After writing lots of shorts I went back to the novels and wrote The Rising, Book 2 and then I wrote Counterattack, Book 3. But in telling those novels I realized there were essentially two other stories I’d like to tell in this time period. One was about Devon’s days as a starfighter pilot and the other was about the leader of the Votainion Empire, Empress Nykostra. So I added two short novellas about those characters to the inventory – Devon’s Blade and The Blood Empress. What I was left with was a trilogy that had two “tweeners” or novella’s set between them. My first trilogy had five books and an anthology. Now I see that Disney is doing this same “Tweener” story thing with it’s Anthology films coming out between Episode 7 and 8 and 8 and 9 of the Star Wars movies. I think they are going out of chronological order though.

  1. Tales From Ocherva, Volume One
  2. Starforgers, Book 1
  3. Devon’s Blade
  4. The Rising, Book 2
  5. The Blood Empress
  6. Counterattack, Book 3

In the next couple of months I will be releasing The Rising and Counterattack and all the stories for the first trilogy will be out. But of course I’m not even close to being done. I’m already writing a novella set after Starstrikers called K’nat Trap. Then I’m off and running with writing XiniX, Book 5. Here’s what the next trilogy of stories will be called, all of them set in the middle of the war or during the Starstrikers time frame.

  1. Trader Tales Anthology
  2. Starstrikers, Book 4
  3. K’nat Trap
  4. XiniX, Book 5
  5. Dark Winds
  6. NexGen, Boo 6

How long will it take me to write all of that? Probably about three years, based on my ability to write a novel and a novella in one calendar year. After all of that is written and published, I’ll dive right into the final trilogy of six books. Hopefully I’ll finish it all up before I die. I suppose if it all takes off and I develop a large following I could always quite my job and write full time. ROFL!