The State of Play

What I'm working on and how it's going

I’ve seen other writers do this, where they post a kind of broad-spectrum update on where all their various projects are at, and I always find it voyeuristically fascinating. And also a bit envy-making, when I see all the stuff that other people have goin’ on.

But I’m at an unusually chaotic, transitional point in my own creative life, and I realized it would actually be useful for me to do something along those lines, just as a way of organizing my own thoughts about the jumble of different projects I have in front of me. And also of spreading feelings of fascination and envy throughout the world.

Last year, after an unmentionably long period of struggle, I finally published The Bright Sword—I may have mentioned it—and now that it’s off my desk I find myself with a slate of projects that fall roughly into two groups: (1) former side-projects that I started because I was stuck on Bright Sword, and which have now moved to center stage, and (2) new projects that sprang up more recently, to opportunistically fill the power vacuum that Bright Sword left behind.

I’ll take them in turn.

The Former Side-Projects

The Heavens. This one replaces The Bright Sword as the single longest-tenured item on my to-do list. It began life on a vacation in Cornwall in 2017 (where, unrelatedly, we turned out to be staying in the bungalow next door to the bungalow where the legendary M. John Harrison was staying). The Heavens is space opera in the Star Wars vein, with thundering space ships, ancient ruins etc., but with less of a light vs. dark vibe and more of a morally grey lots-of-vying-factions vibe. It started out as a TV pitch, which was taken up by the Russo Brothers’ studio AGBO, and then bought by Amazon, and then eventually killed by Amazon. But I couldn’t let go of the idea, so I asked Lilah Sturges (who wrote the brilliant Magicians comics) if she’d collaborate with me on turning it into a comic book, and she said yes.

We sold that book to Inklore, Lilah and I have just turned in the script for Book 1. Inklore is currently looking at artists to draw it. Status: in the trenches.

Unannounced Picture Book. One night in 2021 I dreamed that I wrote a picture book. It was a bit like Where’s the Green Sheep?, and a bit like Edward Lear, and it had gods in it. Strangely this still seemed like a good idea when I woke up. I spent literally three years laboring over the 450-word script, and now it has now been gorgeously illustrated by an artist who lives in Vietnam and will come out next year. Though none of this has been officially announced yet, so don’t tell anybody. Status: basically done.

And now The New Projects.

(BTW if this seems like a lot of stuff, that’s by design, because there is a high mortality rate among my creative projects. I am confident that nature will cull the population down to a manageable number.)

Novel #1. A couple of years ago I took a road trip with my son. We drove ten hours and listened to audiobooks of Percy Jackson the entire time, and by the end of it I knew wanted to write something with gods and monsters in it. Coming off Bright Sword I had so much energy, I thought I would bat this thing out in three months. Instead I spent an entire year just writing and rewriting the first chapter twenty times. (This is not hyperbole. It was probably more than twenty times.) I’m now finally on to chapter 2. Status: normal, please ignore that burning smell

Novel #2. I don’t want to be working on two novels at the same time. Nobody wants that. But while I was endlessly spinning my wheels on Novel #1, I happened to watch the trailer for the second season of Squid Game, and I was also binge-reading my son’s One-Punch Man books at the time, and the combination of those two caused me to have an idea for a novel that seemed really urgent. (Saitama is literally the only character I could ever even semi-credibly cosplay. Though I would rather go as Speed-o'-Sound Sonic.) The writing is going quick, but the idea is so weird that I can’t tell yet whether or not it’s a real thing. I can handle weirdness in other people’s books—sometimes—but I do not personally do literary experimentation in my own work. That is not my jam. So I’m still getting my bearings here. Status: risk it for the biscuit

Speed o’Sound Sonic from One-Punch Man. I don’t look like this

Unannounced, unsold movie treatment. Last summer, in an unguarded moment, a producer friend of mine remarked in my presence that it would be cool to do a four-quadrant-y movie sort of along the lines of Night at the Museum (but also not like that). When she said this, I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean ‘it would be cool to do something like that with you,’ but that’s what I chose to hear. So I wrote and am now revising a treatment for a movie that is definitely not Night at the Museum but has some of that feel. Like most movie treatments, it is very much a moon shot. Status: somewhere over the rainbow

Unannounced TV show. This one’s a lot further along than the movie treatment, far enough a long that there are other people involved so I shouldn’t talk about any of its particulars. But I will soon. Over and out. Status: veiled

Unannounced, unwritten, unsold middle-grade graphic novel series. This was really my wife’s idea, but I loved it so much that she gave me her blessing to try to actually write it, and then I did start writing it, and it was a lot of fun. Inspirations include Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales and George O’Connor’s Olympians. I’m going to send it to my agent, and if she likes it we’ll start trying to find an artist for it. If not we will never speak of it again. Status: the honeymoon period

In conclusion I want to say to anybody who is partnering with me on any of these projects, or waiting for me to deliver something: I am working 100% of the time on your project only, and not on any of those other ones.