For those of you wondering what happened to the sequel to BRAGG FOR HIRE, I will tell it currently exists in three written chapters and an outline. It has existed in that form for four years now. Why have I not finished it in that time? Well, several reasons.
The biggest reason, I suppose, is crassly economic. While BRAGG FOR HIRE was fun to write (and gratifyingly well-reviewed by readers), it didn’t exactly pay the light bill. I had hoped it might. In fact, I had thought at the time it was written a cut or two above the average MilSciFi books you see on the Amazon bestseller lists, and I thought it stood a good chance of picking up a following and making some money. I was wrong. Apparently, I did sell many more copies than your average self-published book, but it required advertising to do that, and this expense ate up everything I made and more. Without active advertising, any book will sink rapidly beneath the waves in the vast sea of books published on Amazon every year. So as long I pushed the book with money, it sold okay; but when I left it to sink or swim, it sank. My motivation to write a sequel sank with it.
The second reason is I got stuck on what to do with Atticus as a character. I came to believe that part of why BRAGG FOR HIRE didn’t catch on is there is little to no character development in it. It’s just a straight-up action banger with characters who are who they are, as fun as they might be. That made for a fun story, but there’s not much emotional punch to it; and the Prime Directive of we authors is to make the reader feel something. I didn’t do that. So for the second book I wanted to do something internally with Atticus that brought him closer to the reader. What might that be? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Not easy to answer. He’s a self-sufficient guy, somewhat later in life, who’s pretty much made his peace with who he is and what happened to him. So I first came to him after the drama. My bad.
Finally, I think I’m a better writer now. BRAGG FOR HIRE wasn’t my first book, but it was my first (self-)published book. I have a much longer Weird West manuscript that I wrote when I had no idea how to write fiction, and I learned write as I wrote that manuscript. So yeah, it sucks, but it also has the supreme virtue of existing, so I will probably end up doing something with it. But back to my point, I think I’m now a much better writer than I was when I wrote BRAGG FOR HIRE (which I’ve called a proof of the concept I can indeed write a whole novel people will read and like), so the idea of revisiting Atticus and that world holds far less appeal now. I want to do other things. I have other, bigger ideas. One of them was THE FIRE WITHIN. Another is a Civil War historical fiction novel.
So that’s why BRAGG 2 is shelved for the foreseeable future. Now, your next question is why did I write an epic fantasy novel instead of more sci-fi? The short answer is because I wanted to. I have no singular love of sci-fi: I enjoy reading good sci-fi, but I also enjoy reading good other things, too, including fantasy. Tolkien most notably (and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series-es, except the last one and don’t get me started on that). I like fantasy, so I wrote a fantasy book; and in what I like to think of as a style that Tolkien would have used had he been more interested in character. Will I ever write another sci-fi book? I don’t know. If I get a good idea that excites me, sure. In the meantime, I’ll write what does excite me. I hope you like it too.
What happened to the sequel to BRAGG FOR HIRE?
