Roberson's Interminable Ramble

Having finished The Dragon's Nine Sons last week, and writing a short story for Lou Anders's forthcoming Sideways in Crime this week (the story is "Death on the Crosstime Express," for what it's worth), I'm gearing up to do a bit of sharecropping in the next couple of weeks. Or rather, preparing to prepare to sharecrop. Confusing enough?

You see, I'm working up pitches and outlines for two different franchise projects, one a novella in a universe I'm very familiar with, and one a short story in another universe I'm just digging into. I can't discuss any details until the deals are done, except to say that both are space operas of a sort, though the two franchises really couldn't be more dissimilar. It's an interesting kind of work, though, burrowing into someone else's imagined world (and richly imagined worlds, at that) and seeing what kind of stories there might be to tell.

And having spent all year tilling my own fields, as it were, with two Celestial Empire and two Carmody-Bonaventure projects, it makes for a nice change of pace to work in someone else's fields for a change, especially since they've already done all the hard work of worldbuilding before I ever arrived. If I'm unsure about the mechanics of a bit of technology, or how far it is from point A to B, all I have to do is check the reference materials and there's the answer waiting for me.

Of course, the fact that the "research" for these two projects involves me consuming other bits of franchise entertainment that I would have happily devoured just for fun is just that much more attractive.