People like it!

Nine reviews as of this morning with an average of 4.444 stars out of a possible 5.  I'm humbled by and thankful to all the kind reviewers (even those that called me BeGuer - it's a "Q" people :P).

I'm hard at work on book 2, almost 220 pages into the first draft, and if anyone is wondering, it looks like about the end of 2012 when I'll be completely done with all the drafts and subsequent edits at my present pace.

There are also two more series percolating in my head.  One is futuristic space opera stuff, inspired by Niven, Asimov and Roddenberry (oh, and Clint Eastwood...).  I don't have this one in my head fully, save the leading character, and the over-arching plot thread.  It's intended to be something more serialized, shorter than Villain, but with the same Beguer style.

The other comes courtesy of my latest reading of George R. R. Martin, and a wealth of other inspirations from Weiss/Hickman's Dragonlance saga to Cornwell's Arthurian tales, to Robert E. Howard.  This idea is sort of an overreaction to watching HBO's excellent Game of Thrones series and subsequently starting to read the first book.  Part of what's motivating me here is a prevalence of late-middle ages technology and socio-economy in describing the time periods of much of the fantasy I'm seeing published or on TV/Movies. I miss the old sword and sandal epics of the fifties and sixties as well as some of the older heroes that led to everything we're doing now, like Conan and John Carter.  I know gleaming metal plate armor is cool looking, as are massed charges of destriers laden with heavy armored lance bearing knights.  But it seems that most of what I'm seeing these days revolves around a European pseudo-feudal political system with clean castles, and heavy-handed laws to protect everyone.  I recall the joy of reading Howard's The Scarlet Citadel and Lieber's Ill Met in Lankhmar and having a feeling that the ground was muddy, and there was little to protect our protagonist but his guile and the edge of his sword.  Now, I know a lot of Roman stuff is out there, including great books by Valerio Massimo Manfredi and Simon Scarrow, but these are governed by the rules of history, and can't venture in the the shadowy realm of fantasy.  I mean, you're not going to see a coiled serpent rise out of the Rubicon as Julius Ceasar and Legio XIII crossed it.  Besides, I mean to go back farther, perhaps inspired by a period far back as the Uruk period of Mesopotamia, but with an original world and lore that I'm already putting together.

But, Blackjack Wayward (as it's tentatively called so far) is next, and I'm already making plans for the third and fourth books.