A Sunny Day on Ganymede is ready for preorder on Amazon. I’m doing some fine-tuning with the manuscript (adding front matter, figuring out back matter, revising according to my beta reader’s requests), but it’ll drop live in both paper and hard copy on August 22. It’s a collection of five longish short stories that tackled me out of the actual novel projects I was working on, demanding to be written immediately before letting go in time for the next one to hit me.

This one, like The Passing of the Age, centers around young protagonists. Unlike The Passing of the Age, the young protagonists aren’t totally responsible for their own safety and well-being: they still have parents, and, while they’re instrumental in solving the problems their parents are facing (mostly), they aren’t always fully aware of everything going on, and frequently aren’t aware of more than peripheral issues that hit them, personally. But the problems the adults are facing are pretty easy for adult readers to piece together, even as they’re likely to bypass a younger reader’s attention. It’s a collection that can be read and enjoyed by any age, children or adults.

Frankly, most of the stories were really fun to write. The third one, however…that one was frustrating. I could not get the character to tell me what was happening. As it turned out…he didn’t know. He’s eight. He didn’t understand more than the immediate need for action, and that…that was mostly because his mom was trying to shield him from larger issues.

It didn’t make it any less frustrating to write, figuring that out. Nor did it come out any quicker. I had to back up and try again several times before I got that story written, because it would utterly stall. I had to figure out what was going on after the words hit the page, and was able to revise for better pacing and clarity once I finally got it fully written.