I've been stuck before - musing over some scene, trying to capture some narrative nuance or perfect a bit of dialogue while all around me time slows down. It certainly slows down when it come to productivity as I stare at the screen, check Facebook, glance at a sales report, and then come back to the half written paragraph. 

You see I'm a bit spoiled - I've been writing two first person memoirs this year as part of my Scarlet Bastards series, so I've been in a certain mode when it comes to pumping out prose. With my latest, The Scarlet Bastards - The Bone Witch, waiting for its next step in the editing process and the next one still cooling on the back burner, I've moved back to the third of my military scifi books, Titan Rising. Third person narrative much heavier on tech, math, and science than the other series, and here the narrative has ground to a halt. 

I'm fortunate that the weather is good, the gardens needs tending, and the chickens need looking after. It gives me something to do while I figure out what word comes next in that unfinished paragraph. 

It's been a year of writing my first urban fantasy, From the Little the Much is Known, as well as a long and difficult edit of my third book in The Scarlet Bastards series, The Bone Witch. That book has been shunted off to the editor leaving me with choices for the next project. I have the often thought about but hardly started, Land of Bones - a post apocalyptic tale surrounding the strange relationship between a young girl and a bison. I have the follow on urban fantasy that is percolating in my mind; I have yet to decide if I write an anthology of three of my mythical characters or if they are deserving of their own individual books. I also have my first draft of the fourth book in The Scarlet Bastard series, The Rule of Nine, but that needs to sit a while longer before I take an editing swing at it.

So I am left with the third book in my Gliesiun Chronicles, Titan Rising. The first book, Europa Rising, is a military scifi thriller that begins with the disappearance of an elderly European cruiser in the Jovian system and concludes through a twisting tale of intrigue, greed, and revenge with a battle between a NASA frigate and a rogue UN cruiser as they vie for possession of a crashed alien ship on Europa and a mysterious alien jumpgate in the empty wastes beyond Jupiter.

Book two is Jupiter Rising: the story expands as forces from Gliesium, a world ten light years from Earth, arrive to wrench away their stolen technology from the Terrans. As the opposing forces probe each other's strengths and weaknesses and the distant islands of Terran industry are wiped out with each successive attack on the major mining asteroids of the inner solar system, a United Nations task group stages a last, desperate stand at Jupiter, gambling their future in the outer solar system on one final battle.

So that leaves me at story number three, Titan Rising. It was about a quarter finished when I left it about a year back, and now I am free and clear to wrap up this trilogy.

To work!