Suspended Animation

Since writing my last post on leaving teaching, it has been a weird period for me, a time of limbo where I’ve been busy as hell but don’t have much to show for it. The majority of my time has been sapped up job hunting: sending out resumes, waiting… doing interviews, waiting… doing follow-up interviews, and, of course, more waiting. I’ve passed on one untenable offer already, and am waiting on at least one more offer in the next week, hopefully one that I can live with. As a teacher, I’ve always had to scrape up lousy temporary work for the summers, and as much as that sucked, trying to find a new permanent job is even more grueling and discouraging, mostly because of the waiting and the uncertainty the future holds.

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It is also a little exciting, though, particularly with the writing projects I have in the hopper, first and foremost being what’s going on with my Dreamwielder series. Souldrifter, the second book in the series, was originally slated to come out this summer, but my publisher, Diversion Books, has decided to release a new edition of Dreamwielder first, with brand new cover art. As much as I love the original cover, I’m excited to have a cover with Makarria on the front. Stay tuned for a cover reveal soon! The re-release of Dreamwielder will push the release of Souldrifter back until the fall, in order to give us more time to get advanced copies to reviewers and do some giveaways, which is all good. The new book is even better than the first and I think readers are going to love it, but they have to know about it first.

In addition to working with my publisher and agent doing all the behind-the-scenes editing and marketing business on the Dreamwielder novels, I’m outlining the third book in the series and back to working on my unrelated cli-fi novel, Remember the Future. My goal is to have a first draft of Remember the Future done by summer’s end and then get to writing the third Dreamwielder book before Souldrifter is released, but no guarantees! That’s the one thing I’ve been reminded of during this period of suspended animation: nothing works out quite the way I expect it to.

-Garrett Calcaterra