I’ve made a start on book 4 of my Inverted Frontier series, but right now I find I’m spending a lot of “writing” time doing calculations, like “How far apart are these starships?” and “How long does it take to get a message from one end of the fleet to the other?” It’s frustrating, but I need to block out events on the stage before I get down to the actual writing. In large part, this is because I have no innate sense of the vast distances I’m dealing with. So I force myself to gauge things comparatively — i.e. radius of Earth’s orbit and Saturn’s orbit — and in multiple units: kilometers, astronomical units, light minutes. That helps me to work with the immense scale of space…and then I try to leave most of those numbers out of the actual story. 🙂

On a tangentially related topic…
I have no regrets about being an independent writer/publisher. Seriously, none. But of course there are drawbacks. For example, very few outlets of scale are willing to consider indie titles for review — a problem compounded when the title is third in an ongoing and little known series. So I am deeply grateful to reviewers who do take the time. The latest is booktuber Michael Everts, who has included my latest, NEEDLE in his top 3 books of the year so far! Thank you, Michael!
Click here to see his review (and subscribe to his channel).