While he typically releases a book every year, John Scalzi dropped some interesting news on his blog earlier this week: he won’t have a new novel coming out in 2016. Instead, his next will come in 2017:
Why the wait? Among other things, because Tor just dropped a ton of money on me so we want to make sure we debut this next novel, the first in the new contract, just right. I’m on board with this plan — note the “we” in that last sentence — since (again, among other things) I actually want to try to earn out the silly large chunks of money Tor has dropped on me. I also don’t mind the extra time it gives me to write/tweak the novels I’m currently working on.
This makes a certain amount of sense: Scalzi signed a huge deal last year
What’s also interesting about the note is what he’s writing: a YA novel (which he’s written before, with Zoe’s Tale) and a new space opera which will kick off a new series. It looks like the YA novel will be the one released in 2017.
From another blog post, it looks like both are pretty well plotted out:
Seriously, though, I think it will be fine. One, these novels are pretty well baked, pre-writing, which is to say in both cases I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do and where the big story beats are. Which means at this point getting the books written will be the quotidian task of punching out a sufficient number of words on a daily basis. Which means, to use less fancy words than “quotidian,” putting my ass in a chair and typing.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/its-survival-o...
This is more exciting, because Scalzi’s best books have routinely been those in his Old Man’s War series. It’ll be nice to see him play to his strengths far out in space. What that actually means for the Old Man’s War series is unclear: he’s noted that he will likely return to the universe someday, after another break.
In any case, the list of books to look forward to in 2017 just grew by one.
Disclosure: John Scalzi and our editor in chief, Charlie Jane Anders share a publisher, Tor Books.