As usual, my imagination wants to take me in various directions. Story ideas boil up in my head at the least provocation, it seems. I have to rein them in to keep from going down rabbit holes and losing focus on “the main idea.” Still, like my reading habits, I tend to have multiple irons in the fire. I jot down notes on story ideas in hopes that I will someday get to them. If I live long enough. Talking with my friend, Dan about this subject the other day he laughed and asked, “How long do you plan on living?” I just can’t help myself, I guess. At any rate, here’s what I have in the works at the moment.
Though not truly a sequel to The Gift of Mars, I am working on another historical novel on the Roman Republic. My original plan was to write 4-5 books chronicling the rise and fall of the Republic that lasted nearly 500 years. I have decided, however, not to worry about writing them in chronological order. Maybe Dan’s joke touched on a truth that’s been rolling around in my brain for a while, and so I have gone straight to what I planned as the final book. The working title is A Requiem to Concordia, and it involves the same Tempanius family 350 years later. Whereas The Gift of Mars begins in 495 BC, this one takes place from 146 to 133 BC. Technically, the Republic carried on for seventy years or so after this date until the arrival of Julius Caesar, but it was a Republic in name only by then.
I hope to fill in the middle 350 years in the future. We may have to move to Italy again to do it. “Please bre’r bear and bre’r fox, don’t throw me in that briar patch.”
The second book I’m working on, though less often, is also set in Italy. This one, however, is much more modern. It takes place in the 1350s. Ha, ha, gotcha! For obvious reasons I don’t want to go into too much depth or detail, but suffice to say it’s about a medieval bounty hunter up north around Milan (another reason we may have to live in Italy for a while). His name is Aldo, and in the first episode he is hired to track down a thief who has stolen poems from Petrarch. The working title for it is The Sonnet Thief. This would also be a series, and I have three or four plots for future Aldo books already in mind.
So, if you like my books so far, pray I live long enough to write the others. Quite a few people who have read No Balm in Gilead have asked me if I plan a sequel to it, but at this juncture I have not. I always wanted to write a Western, and at present that’s it.
Check back and see if I’ve made any progress!