Ancestors

Toot

Written by Charlie Stross on 2025-01-31 at 10:35

[#]WritersCoffeeClub 31Jan—How’s your writing progress so far this year? What are you working on?

So far: finished the final draft of "The Regicide Report" (Laundry Files book … 14?) and it's with the editors at Tor/Orbit.

Ploughing through the third and final draft of "Ghost Engine", a space opera. (About 50K words remaining to write, 112K words in the can.)

In the planning stages for "Starter Pack", a swords and planets romance, shared setting with "Ghost Engine". Aim to finish it this year.

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Descendants

Written by Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦 on 2025-01-31 at 10:38

@cstross

Can't wait! I finished A Conventional Boy and had to go back to The Fuller Memorandum to refresh my memory about one of the cultists

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Written by Scimon Proctor on 2025-01-31 at 10:52

@cstross

I'm still coping with the fact that Conventional Boy reveals that the Laundry had Derek's game notes, which accurately predicted events in the future, for a while before everything went tits up.

I'm REALLY looking forward to seeing how (I would say if but I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have laid that point out if you didn't plan on following it somehow) this effects stuff.

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Written by Charlie Stross on 2025-01-31 at 11:05

@scimon Nope, blame bureaucracy: they classified Derek's game notes as so secret he couldn't read them; nobody with enough of a TTRPG background to make sense of them also had a high enough clearance, so they were glanced at by non-gamers who understood nothing, then dumped in the archives.

(Security agencies do this sort of thing all the time.)

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Written by Scimon Proctor on 2025-01-31 at 11:11

@cstross

I one hundred percent accept that possibility.

I also would not be surprised if it turned out someone had read and understood them (I mean Bob had a lot of long flights right?) and there's a long game going on.

I also fully expect that if this is your plan you wouldn't tell me ;)

(Anyway, looking forward to the next book very much)

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Written by HighlandLawyer on 2025-01-31 at 13:37

@scimon @cstross

Well obviously Forecasting Ops would have read it, in those timelines where it had existence (qv Overtime)

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Written by Alan Bellingham on 2025-01-31 at 10:58

@cstross Looks like the post-Covid productivity is back up, hoorah!

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Written by Charlie Stross on 2025-01-31 at 11:06

@bellinghman It's more like I'm having a post-Laundry rebound. Working on a 14-book series exclusively for years is soul-crushing.

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Written by Alan Bellingham on 2025-01-31 at 11:22

@cstross That too? Anyway, good to see

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Written by Charlie Stross on 2025-01-31 at 11:28

@bellinghman The Laundry is roughly 1.75 million words at this point, and I'm a bit burned out on it at this point—surprising no-one, I'm sure. There may be more in the future, but I need a multi-year break doing something else while the well re-fills.

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Written by Charlie Stross on 2025-01-31 at 11:30

@bellinghman I burn out regularly during multi-book projects (or even individual novels). The Merchant Princes was particularly bad, but I had an epic flameout wrt. the Laundry after writing "The Labyrinth Index" (forcing it out right after my father died). Couldn't write anything for nearly a year. I recovered, but it took a while.

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Written by oheso on 2025-02-02 at 10:14

@cstross > book … 14?

Only his editor knows for sure

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Written by Charlie Stross on 2025-02-02 at 10:17

@oheso Thinking … books 1-9, then 3 New Management, then A Conventional Boy, so The Regicide Report is book 14? But there's almost enough short fic for a story collection as well. And the Laundry Files is on its third publisher (in the USA), leaving aside the SFBC omnibus.

I've nearly lost count of my novels at this point.

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Written by oheso on 2025-02-02 at 10:26

@cstross I’m glad I went with editor and not publisher.

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Written by Charlie Stross on 2025-02-02 at 10:28

@oheso Oddly, despite the multiple publishers I've managed to hang onto my original editor since the beginning! Marty missed out "Season of Skulls" IIRC, but has done the copy edits at least on all the other novels. (Need to ask if he's available for the last one. It's been over 20 years and we're all getting older …)

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Written by oheso on 2025-02-02 at 10:32

@cstross A lot of that about. Glad to hear of what is presumably a good working relationship.

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