In the never a dull moment category, here’s announcing a new project called The Sea Lord Chronicles. I’ve just finished up “First Voyage,” which is Book One of what I hope will be a series.

This is also one of the fastest books I’ve written, I think because the story was already all in my head and it was just a matter of putting down the words. The stories where one has to puzzle out “what’s next” on the page are fun to write because of that process of discovery—I didn’t know that was going to happen next!– but they go more slowly.

This is a project that combines a lot of things I love—history, the age of sail, fantasy and YA. The result is a fiction series I hope will appeal to younger teen readers as well as adults who are young at heart. There are a lot of us who read YA because it’s just so creative, inspiring and entertaining.

I’ve always loved stories that play a bit with history, whether  it’s changing the outcome of a battle, introducing magic or adding an alternative reality such as steampunk to real-life history.

For me, The Sea Lord Chronicles has been a chance to do just that—taking what’s already fun about history and spicing it up with what’s fun about the fantasy genre.

Part of the problem as a writer is that you get so close to what you’ve written that sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees—or is that scenes for the sentences?

On that note, I’ll be asking some friends and fellow writers to take a look at the manuscript over the weeks to come in order to offer some feedback. If you are interested, be sure to let me know and I can share an advanced reading copy for your ereader of choice. 

As my sea-faring characters would say: Huzzah!