For anyone that does manage to stumble across my blog, you may notice all of the password protected pages titled, “The Center for Galactic Anomalies.” Yeah, well, that’s a whole thing now.
This baby was years of work. YEARS. The official count on my drafts/full on rewrites is 4.5 and that number might honestly be low. I had people tell me that they loved the second draft, but I had to make a lot of changes since this IS going to be a series. Seriously, you don’t want it to end where it does.
When I wrote A Regrettable Likeness, I made it with series potential, but tied the ending up in a bow so that it wouldn’t have to be a series. Glad I was intuitive enough to sense that I might not want to make it a series, because at this point, I probably won’t. Steampunk would have to be cool again. If it was and A Regrettable Likeness took off out of absolutely nowhere, maybe I’d think about a sequel. To be honest, I had rough ideas, but none of them were great. That is in absolute opposition to how I’ve planned out CGA (abbreviating because it really is too much to spell).
CGA can fit into several subcategories of speculative fiction. I market as science fiction, but perhaps it should be considered weird fiction primarily, I just hesitate to do that when the criteria for the genre feels all over the place. It features a lot of the general motifs of weird fiction’s cousin, cosmic horror, but it’s thematically quite different. And since we’re bringing up horror, I do consider it to be a horror sci-fi blend, but I don’t tend to think it’s that scary. It’s a different (I hope) kind of dystopian, so that’s kinda horrifying, right? One reader said that it read like a thriller. (Because for some reason, whatever I write ends up being a mystery. I don’t know why I possess this curse, but the plot is always a flippin’ mystery.) There are definite fantastical elements to it, so sci-fi fantasy is fitting as well. But there’s one thing that I definitely intentional set out for it to be: a space opera. And space operas are hefty.
But wait, don’t leave! This first book isn’t that long. It’s just over 100K words, so much shorter than Dune or Lord of the Rings. More like the length of Divergent or Twilight. I plan on going about this kind of like the Harry Potter series where each book gets longer than the last (not that my book is like Harry Potter). I don’t know what the word count will be of the sequel (Into the Void), but it’s already in drafting and I know how it’ll end. And I debate between whether I want it to be three books or four. That being said, I still know how everything is going to end, which is weird for me. I consider myself an exploratory writer, but I’ve always known how anything I’m doing with the CGA will end (at least the important bits). So get ready to go into the void, y’all. Read The Center for Galactic Anomalies now to mentally prepare for the ride that will be the sequel.