Would you believe this post recognizes the fifth anniversary of IGC Publishing? I didn’t even realize until I went to look at last year’s update in preparation for writing this year’s, and realized in the process that this would be the fifth update post. Perhaps, if I’d realized further in advance, I would have contrived to do something special for this occasion, like a bonus story of some sort, but…I didn’t. In truth, this post could hardly be expected to compare with last year’s, which featured announcements of my first professionally published stories, unless I’d managed to sell a novel or something. Even had I managed to finish Impressions on my original timetable, that wouldn’t be realistic.
If anything, this has been an unusually quiet year for IGC Publishing, in part because it’s been a busier year for other parts of my life, like my “real” job, and in part because a significant majority of my writing time has gone into finishing Impressions. While I’ve continued to submit short stories to various forums, albeit less consistently than I should, I’ve not been writing as many of them, hitting only a couple of Elegant Literature prompts recently, and even my reading pace has been a little slower than usual. This is a lesson for me when it comes to novel writing, since Impressions was the first novel I sat down to write since becoming serious about writing (I wrote two novel drafts before, but they were almost…accidental, in a way), and how it affects my other writing, especially getting towards the end.
We’ll talk more about Impressions later, though, and it will have a dedicated writing reflection post coming up in a few weeks. We’ll also talk about what you can expect in the next year of IGC Publishing, current and upcoming projects, and perhaps a few reflections on writing and publishing in general. First, though, I owe an expression of gratitude to all of you who come here and read what I write. Whether you’ve been here for five years, or just stumbled across one of our book reviews (which remain our most popular programming and the main way people find the site), your attention and support are appreciated. Sure, I could just spout all these hundreds of thousands of words into the void, but that’s a lot less satisfying than knowing that there are people who derive some kind of value from what I post. So, thank you.
Year in Review
Technically, the IGC Publishing year started with the publication of A Rejection in Sci Phi Journal, although we already knew and announced that publication in last year’s update post. We also published Until Death do Us Part here on IGC Publishing, which doesn’t really fit a conventional genre description, but is a neat little story with a very strange evolution to its current existence. Those are the only publicly available stories for the year, but that does not mean it’s the only writing I have to show for the year. Beyond the usual litany of book reviews and Tuesday blog posts, I wrote the following complete stories: The Legend of Meladerth’s Valley (12964 words), Origins (2190 words), Hunters (1873 words), Against the Warlock (1932 words), Phoenix Landing (6706 words), Golems and Kings (13532 words) and, of course, Impressions (178946 words).
All told, I have the following works which I am actively submitting for publication: Against the Warlock, The Abyss Stares Back, Hunters, and Codex. Origins is the seed for a science fiction series I intend to write eventually, although this “zeroth” episode stands on its own. The Legend of Meladerth’s Valley, aside from needing significant revisions, is set in the same world as Archmage and the Unicorn Queen. Last year, I mentioned seeking to publish that novella directly here on IGC Publishing, which it is apparent I have not done; I have refrained both because I haven’t done enough revisions on it, and because I am now contemplating the possibility of putting together a collection of stories set in the same world. This would include Archmage and the Unicorn Queen and The Legend of Meladerth’s Valley, along with some unwritten stories I would like to tell, including one about dragons ruling alpine archipelagos, a possible Ovarder origin story, and a partially written story about the partnership that arises frequently in this world between weapon-masters and magi.
That puts the entire collection under my long-term works in progress, along with the Origins series. In other words, these are both projects that I will definitely work on in the future, but are not being actively worked in the near-term. At some point, they will be elevated to the status of primary project, but that’s a subject for the Year Ahead section.
Phoenix Landing was supposed to be for an Elegant Literature prompt, but it ballooned to six thousand words, and I realized I needed to develop some actual calculations for the orbital dynamics of the complex planetary system involved. That project is therefore paused with the first draft complete but significant work required before it can be revised and ready for submission.
Much closer to being ready to send out to potential venues is Revising Memories. In fact, I fully intend to have submitted it to at least one place by the end of the calendar year. All it needs to be ready is another round or two of revisions, none of which should be terribly time-consuming. The most significant matter is deciding what I want to do with the accidental computer consciousness side-plot that twines in with the main story, since my writing group found its conclusion dissatisfying, though realistic.
Kind of fitting into this section is a short story for this month’s Elegant Literature prompt inspired by my reading of Philip and Alexander, Shahnameh, and Five and Twenty Tales of the Genie. It’s not quite historical fiction – no real place names or people are involved – but it is heavily historically adjacent. It is, as usual, an example of me experimenting with ideas I would like to eventually incorporate into more significant works.
Not reflected well in my word counts or project titles is the amount of effort and time I’ve devoted to revisions, both my own and for others. Several members of my writing group are also working on novels, and I allocated a significant portion of my writing time, especially in the first half of the year, to reading and providing feedback for their works. They were kind enough to share a few chapters at a time, instead of dumping sixty thousand word chunks the way I did with Impressions, but it was still a consistent effort. I’ll be sharing my next novel project with the group in the same way, rather than in huge parts.
The main work for the year, though, was Impressions, which I am pleased to say is finally finished. It took much longer than I wanted it to, although I ended up only about two months behind schedule from where my typical writing pace should have put me. More significant is how little other writing I was doing while I was working on the last few chapters, skipping monthly short stories and barely dabbling with any other projects while Impressions inched along towards the end. It came in right about the length I anticipated for it, though, and I’m pleased with the result, although I have some concerns with the ending, as I usually do. Now, it’s off to my writing group and a few other beta readers for feedback, and I will be turning my attention to a new project in the meantime.
Year Ahead
Speaking of which, this seems an appropriate time to transition to the Year Ahead section of the update. While Impressions is out for feedback, I will be turning my attention to my next novel project, Rogue Planet. I announced that this would be my next project awhile back, but here it is again – I will be next writing a science fiction novel about, loosely, something called a Romanovskaya world. This will be a little shorter than Impressions, as my outline currently calls for 28 chapters (well, 27 plus an epilogue) and about 140,000 words, which I intend to accomplish within just one year. That would be a little aggressive, except that I already have the first five chapters completed. That leaves twenty-three chapters to go, which is just under my average of two chapters a month.
That will be the main effort for the year ahead, although I hope to return to writing a short story every month or so. Since my main project is science fiction, I imagine I may be inclined to write more fantasy, although I find that less suited to short story form for some reason. I’m confident there will be at least one or two side projects, as well, in the novella range. Ideally, this would be Spring of Nations, which would provide a nice contrast to Rogue Planet in content and writing style – I think I’ve been less enthusiastic about it because it was too similar to what I was doing, history-wise, with Impressions.
We may also be launching a podcast. This is still in the discussion stages (and we’ve been discussing it for years now), but my brother and I are considering a podcast that we would put under the IGC Publishing imprint. Tentatively titled Thought Out, the podcast would explore history, philosophy, science, and language. If you’ve read posts like Definition, Connotation, and the Function of Language, or Abstraction and the Limitations of Language, you’ll have some idea of what sorts of discussions might be featured on this podcast, since both of those posts were inspired by conversations my brother and I had. So, no promises on this one, but there is a possibility you will see a podcast in the next year. If we decide to go forward, there will definitely be an announcement post here on the site.
While these efforts are ongoing, I will continue submitting stories like Revising Memories, Against the Warlock, and The Abyss Stares Back to various forums (and I will attempt to be more consistent about doing so). I cannot control if any of them will be picked up, but hopefully you will see a few more stories next year either published professionally or published here on the site. The weekly book reviews will continue, too, along with the Tuesday posts (although I do have some thought of attempting to get some guest posts going for those Tuesday posts, both to increase the variety of what IGC Publishing offers content-wise, and to reduce the amount of time I spend writing blog posts instead of writing novels). As for other efforts you may be wondering about, those probably belong in the next section.
Future Reflections
Five years on, and I still don’t rightly know what IGC Publishing will be, long-term. At the moment, it remains mostly a personal writing website, but it retains a framework which could support an eventual transition to an independent publishing apparatus, both for my works and for others’. Whether that is a route I want to go in the future is uncertain. I don’t, at the moment, have the inclination to go through all of the effort involved in running this as an independent publishing apparatus – the idea of popping a novel off to an agent to shop around every year or two, and not having to worry personally about designing the cover, formatting the text, marketing the book, getting it on shelves, and all the other intricacies of the publication process is somewhat appealing is rather attractive – but I may, eventually, want to do just that, or perhaps do a combination of those methods, where some books are published here, and some books are published by an outside publishing house.
At the level of individual stories, there are a few projects I can say with certainty will be coming in the future, although I can’t say when. Some have already been mentioned in this post. Origins, a science fiction series of short stories arranged into episodes (like we did with Blood Magic, but a lot better), features an ensemble and focuses on the idea of a civilization exploring its more advanced predecessors. The collection of stories including Archmage and the Unicorn Queen and The Legend of Meladerth’s Valley will also happen at some point, although the rest of the stories need to be written, everything needs to be revised, and I need to establish a clearer vision for what this looks like all together.
Those of you who have been around since the beginning probably remember Fo’Fonas. I increasingly have a clearer vision for what this series will look like when I return to it. The name will change, as will some of the characters, and the timeline…a lot is going to change from the original draft. However, I am beginning to feel more ready to tackle this project and do it justice. Perhaps it will be what I turn to after I finish Rogue Planet, although please don’t interpret that as a promise. The biggest change is that I would no longer consider Fo’Fonas to be epic fantasy. Oh, it will have elements of that genre, but it lacks the defining good and evil kind of clash that is really necessary to make an epic fantasy.
No, I expect my first foray into truly epic fantasy will be the world of Hiarathala (featured in this post). Even after all my writing practice, I still don’t quite feel ready to do justice to the story I want to tell in this world, although I am getting closer. If Fo’Fonas comes after Rogue Planet, then I’ll probably insert another science fiction project after Fo’Fonas, and then maybe it will be time to turn to Hiarathala. That’s hugely speculatory, though. After all, if Rogue Planet takes a year, Fo’Fonas is at least a four-year project, and then anywhere from a year to three years, perhaps, for an undetermined science fiction project…plus time for revisions and other writing-adjacent tasks…we’d be looking at probably a decade from now to start Hiarathala. That’s a pretty long time…but then IGC Publishing has already been around for five years.
Conclusion
Life is full of trade-offs. Every day, when we choose what we’re going to do with our time, we’re making decisions based on opportunity costs, because, no matter how hard I try, I can’t do everything. Writing this year’s update post emphasized that for me, between it being the unexpected fifth anniversary of IGC Publishing, and the slow progress I perceive myself to have been making on my writing efforts this year. I always have more stories to tell, but I tell them alongside my “real” job, my personal life, volunteering as a STEM mentor, constantly teaching myself new things, submitting to engineering contests for things like navigating on the moon or developing clean water solutions, and a dozen other things. Yet, I wouldn’t want to give up doing any of those things, and I genuinely believe my writing would suffer, not improve, if I did nothing but write full-time.
Writing itself is full of trade-offs, too, because there’s only so much you can keep in your head as you write. For every dozen techniques of storytelling I’ve learned, I manage to apply maybe two at any given time. No idea I’ve ever had for a story is ever captured on the page in quite the way I envision it in my head, and part of writing has been learning to accept that discrepancy. For every fascinating new word that I learn and internalize well enough to incorporate into my speech and my writing, there are ten others which I forget, or only remember with effort, and therefore don’t make an appearance. That’s a lost richness, as are the dozens of little ideas or notions I have as I’m reading about different places, different peoples, different times, different technologies or ways of thinking, which don’t quite make their way into a story. It is both reassurance and frustration to know that I will never run out of ideas around which to build another story.
Five years of IGC Publishing is just the beginning. There are more stories to tell. I may not be the most prolific author, but I’m going to keep telling them, and I hope you’ll continue to join me on the journey.
-Lloyd Earickson
IGC Publishing 
2 thoughts on “Intergalactic Update 2024”