The Next Movement

Like I said, after two years of shopping I realized I had a decision to make; make the changes BBB wanted me to make, or do something different.

This is the different route.

Beyond the Red Line is a massive book.  And it's the first book in a series of four equally massive books.  When I was trying to end up in a Big Box Bookstore (BBB) I made a lot of cuts to keep the book at a readable size.  These cuts fell into two categories.  1) Good Idea Cuts and 2) Nature of the Beast Cuts.

Good Idea Cuts were ones meant to keep the story moving along.  Yknow, the kind of editing that separates good writing from terrible writing.  No problem with these at all.

Then there are the Nature Cuts.  The cuts where things went away not because they were badly written, but because they went off on tangents that made the novel unreadable in BBB's eyes.  My focus group readers didn't have a problem with these tangents as a matter of fact most members of this group loved the tangents. But BBB was convinced that the book would never sell with these tangents in, so I got rid of them.

At some point, it hit me.  If I release the book as a quarterly eBook, I could keep more of the tangents in.  And then, I could take the tangents that didn't get written, or that really don't fit and release them periodically as bonus chapters for free, or nearly free.  So that's what I'm going to do.

Beyond the Red Line started out five years ago as a therapy session designed to help me get through  a really rough patch.  What took it from two legal pads to the 93,000 novel it is today is the world that I stumbled upon.  I fell in love with the alternate universe I created and I want to tell as many stories about this world as possible.  Now, I have the option of doing that. 

The plan is to release quarterly issues on the following schedule for the next four years. 

March 22- Summer Quarterly
June 23- Autumn Quarterly
September 14- Winter Quarterly
December 12- Spring Quarterly/The Annual Print Omnibus

In between, I'll throw out singles that help develop things we already know about Diego and his friends at Willis College.  Look for those to start happening after the next quarterly drops in June. 

There are other projects in the pipeline, other worlds to explore and we'll get there in time.  Right now, let's see how this one works.