I am not going to write the next book in the Vaulan Cycle. Instead, I’m going to write a near-future Internet thriller.

Over the last 6 days, I have had a bit of an identity crisis, and a total change of direction. I may complete Make Worlds With Me, Book III in the Vaulan Cycle, some time in the future. But for now, I’m giving it a rest. The weight of the mythology spoke to me a lot more in my early-mid 20s, but it has stopped speaking to me. I still enjoy escaping into imaginary worlds (been reading The Worm Ouroboros–you should too), but the imaginary world in which I invested 6 years and probably 500,000 words has stopped nourishing me. Instead, it has become a slavedriver trapping me in a particular kind of cosmology in which everything must have a metaphysical analog in reality, or at the least a metaphysical implication. It’s a kind of narrative neurosis, as it repeats and repeats all of my past experiences with my favorite stories rather than embracing and processing the present. This new novel will do that. It will extrapolate our present relationship with the Internet into a near future, 1-2 generations distant.

I am really concerned about how we interact with and absorb ourselves in The Cloud. This new novel is tentatively titled I Am The Cloud.

Don’t know why I’m saying this now, as you won’t be able to read it for several years, until it is published by a traditional publisher (NOT self-published).

Later.