REAPER (free planet #3) - manuscript is one year old today - and still growing

so, today I wandered off for my usual 5-6 mile jog, ended up doing a quite decent 7.5 miles... just kept running and running, felt great. Anyway, on the way round, I experienced another bout of Jog Dreaming. As explained before, Jog Dreaming is where a weird 'haven't died yet' vibe seems to be rewarded with intense dream-like auto-resolutions or channelings (a term and concept I really don't like as it implies that 'my work is not my own') of novel content from the point where I'm currently at in any given project.

I've just banished myself to bed with my trusty old laptop while the girls watch The Voice and (firing up the February 2015 version from the relevant folder) I've just noticed that the 33,000 words Reaper (free planet #3) document is one year old this month. Happy birthday to it, happy birthday to it, Happy birthday dear document, happy birthday to it. LOL.

"One year old and only 33,000 words?" as true as that might be, remember I did write Kumiko (war world #3) to first-draft i.e. about 66,000 words while I should have been (had promised to be) working on Reaper through 2014. Anyway, a bit more research on the real age of the Reaper document takes me back to an unused novel treatment from March 2013 called Extinction Level Event that I was gonna use as the core or basis of what this third free planet novel was going to be. Most of that got abandoned in the writing of Reaper but a blind-archaeologist character from ELE might just insinuate himself back into the final free planet novel. He'll probably succeed way things are going with the story.

But ELE goes back even further than that, I was working in the games industry in 2009 when I first came up with the eye-porn idea. I know this because I remember sharing the guts of the narrative with one of my colleagues at the time. So that locks the origins of the Reaper novel way back in 2009 before the Free Planet novel-cum-series even started. ELE went into limbo, got time-capsuled, or mothballed. Strange how these things take so long to brew - luckily it'll be a nice dark vintage by the time it's done. Dark and dangerous, for you the reader and your enslaved souls. The Ninety Billion.