As soon as people finish Falling Into Midnight, they hit me with the inevitable question: When’s the next book? Well, unfortunately the answer is: Not as soon as you would like.
The bad news is that working on Book 2 made me quickly realize just how tightly tied-together the overall series was. These aren’t stand alone Star Trek episodes where nothing that happened in the past really matters in the future. Things from FIM don’t just matter in Book 2, some things set up events that don’t happen until Book 5 or 6. Same for all the following books. Unfortunately, the only way to keep things like that straight is to outline the entire series in as much detail as possible now, while there’s still the freedom to tweak things. Once the book is out, the story’s cannon and I can’t go contradicting it when I come up with a better idea later.
So, the bad news is that Book 2 is going to take at least another two years, possibly three. For reference, FIM took me three years, but I was learning as I went and it was delayed by several life events along the way. The good news is that, once the detailed series outline is finished, Books 3+ should go much, much faster. Not having to play Outline Jenga before every single book should cut out a substantial chunk of development time.
So that’s it. Things will be pretty quiet here for a while, but know that I haven’t given up. Your patience will pay off eventually.