As the final book of the Northumbrian Western shapes up, now at 70,000 words in second draft, I can start thinking ahead. The trilogy has been fun to write and the series should hang together quite nicely but it all came from ideas that bubbled up in 2008 so, like the iPod, it's starting to feel like it's had its time. Blasphemous Isle should be out in 2018 and something else needs to take things forward for the next few years.There are ideas floating around, currently just rough drafts but enough to get some words down. It looks like they are pulling in two main directions. The first is the next step from the current novels and I'm calling it the Future Dark Age Series. Set in the future (of course) but much further on than the post-peak-oil, mid twenty-first century setting of the Northumbrian Westerns, they are also different in tone with a gothic-horror theme and some Arthurian touches. These are only short stories at the moment, in very early development, but there seems to be something interesting in the concepts.
The second is contemporary with touches of magical-realism. The clearest story so far is Forever Festival, a love-horror-upbeat-downbeat mystery, which is falling into place quite nicely. The main threads are there and a number of key scenes have appeared. It looks like a novel and there should be enough to knock together something lengthy. There are also fragments coalescing for a second book. This could be sci-fi, magical realism but it's rather vague at present.
So, these may come to nothing (like the dozen unfinished novels and film scripts on my hard drive) but there feels to be something worthwhile within these early and rough drafts. Time will tell.