We have Liftoff!!!

Work has officially begun on the third novel in the "Man of War" series, to be entitled (unless something radical happens to change our minds) Brothers in Valor.  The action picks up about eighteen hours after the Cumberland delivers the response to the Krag ultimatum and is returning to Union space to rejoin Task Force Tango Delta.  But something very strange is going on . . . .

Some of the correspondence we get from folks indicates that some people have an extremely inaccurate idea about how we write these things.  Unlike lots of writers, we do not write from a detailed plot outline.  Most of the time, we don't know very far in advance what's going to happen, so we are as much in suspense about how things are going to turn out as you are.  When we started the last book, we knew what the first chapter was going to be about and how it would end, but almost nothing of what happened in the middle.  With the first book, we watched the plot coming into focus usually about a chapter or two ahead of where we were actually writing.

Right now, we have an idea about what we are going to do in the first two chapters and we think we know what the situation will be at the end (plus a really cool idea about the last image to leave in the mind of the reader) but that's about it.  One of the reasons we were so impatient to start writing again was that we were eager to see how things come out.  The suspense was killing us!

Oh, and for those who care about such things, the picture is the launch of Apollo 8 on December 21, 1968.  Apollo 8 was the first time human beings ventured beyond Earth orbit into deep space.  This was the memorable mission in which the astronauts, orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve, read aloud from the Book of Genesis and closed with "good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you - all of you on the good Earth."  In 1968, we sure needed all the blessings and luck we could get.