So while I’ve made noise that I’m done with the Compact Universe for a while after Storming comes out, I haven’t stopped writing in that universe. A week ago, I dug out an old short story and began outlining it for a novel called Down the Rabbit Hole. The story takes place about 50 years after the last World War, when humanity is trying to figure out what it wants to be that won’t result in its own destruction. A crew working out in the Kuiper Belt chases an old space probe only to fall into the first known stable wormhole.
At the other end is a world with an unstable climate but the perfect location for a cult to Marilyn Monroe. (That’s another story.) It’s the birth of the Compact Universe, and none of the current characters are in sight.
This story will be different than the others. For starters, it’s (going by No Marigolds in the Promised Land) about 430 years earlier than the events of the current series. There are obviously no characters (yet) that I’ve already written about. But it’s also going to be shopped traditionally. It’s amazing how great that idea sounds when you’ve stopped trying. Let it make its rounds, then put it out some other way later if that doesn’t work.