Moving on to New Stories
A telling thing started happening in my writing over the past week or so. The latest book in my Martiniere series, Justine Fixes Everything: Reflections on Mortality, is at the editor’s. She gave me some feedback which made me go through another revision pass before I got her response.
But when I finished those revisions and returned to the current work-in-progress, Repairing the Legacy, another Martiniere book, I realized that this was definitely the last of the Martiniere books. At least for a while.
Legacy is as much for me and any other completists who want to read more about “what happens next?” for both Ruby and Gabe after the close of the Martiniere trilogy (Inheritance, Ascendant, Realization). I want to tell these stories and have them available, but I’m not sure how much interest there will be in them.
Legacy does not have the intense action of the other Martiniere books. While there are problems and Big Bads, most of it is about Ruby and Gabe wrapping up what they can do to fix the mess bequeathed to them by Gabe’s father Philip. Their focus on raising Philip’s clone Mike to be a sane and mindful human being, and not the narcissistic, sociopathic megalomaniac that Philip was.
Legacy is a book of quiet stories. Gabe’s first reforms of the Martiniere Group. His coming to grips with the reality that Justine is his sister, not his cousin, and that there are parts of her past which are very, very dark (as chronicled in Justine Fixes Everything). Ruby adjusting to sudden wealth and power while holding tight to the ranch life she knows and loves, and forging ahead with her biobot research. Gabe and Ruby rebuilding a relationship shattered by outside influences over twenty-one years earlier. Adapting to their own mortality and aging while raising an old man’s clone.
Nothing at all like Justine Fixes Everything. While that book can be seen in part as the love story of Justine and Donald, it’s also the saga of Justine’s rise to power, viewed in retrospect as she tells the history to Philip’s clone Mike, as he recovers from surgery. It’s about what she sacrificed to become powerful—and, at the same time, how that past comes to haunt the challenges she faces toward the end of her life.
Oh, there’s probably Martiniere stories beyond the conclusion of Justine. I’m certain of it. But for the first time in nearly two years, I’m able to look at other stories, other notes, and think about where I go from here. I started work on revisions of the first series I released, the Netwalk Sequence (lots and lots of continuity and copy edits amongst other things happening!). I’m thinking about the second fantasy series.
But at the moment, I’m also thinking about serial fiction. While I put three completed stories up on Kindle Vella, I’m considering writing a couple new serials that will run on Vella, and start posting episodes weekly once I get enough installments drafted so that I’m running ahead. The Vella projects are what I think of as smaller stories. Short novels, short projects that probably won’t become series. Tales I want to tell but are not priorities.
At the same time, I’m looking at Legacy and considering that it might well make a Patreon project. Something I could serialize on Substack or Medium, until I’m ready to issue it as a completed work. It can’t go up on Vella because I published the first chapter on Curious Fictions, and I won’t publish the serial version without that first chapter.
But do I really want to fiddle with Patreon? Another bit of soul-seeking.
I just don’t know. Do I even have enough to offer? It is a concern.
I’m just grateful that I have space in my brain now for these other projects.
And if you want to explore the world of the Martinieres, the trilogy (Inheritance, Ascendant, Realization) is available on Amazon, with the other works (The Heritage of Michael Martiniere, Broken Angel: The Lost Years of Gabriel Martiniere as well as short stories listed as Related Content.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08LDQJG2F?ref_=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_tkin&binding=kindle_edition
Or you can buy the books from Apple, Barnes and Noble, or Kobo as individual works.
Check the Martiniere Legacy page for more details.