My apologies to Midnight Games readers who are wondering about a sequel, or sequels. As soon as the book came out in 2015 I had to buckle down and complete a PhD in Literary Studies and Theatre Studies in English at the University of Guelph. Among the program’s teaching and writing duties, I also had to write a dissertation, which is in effect a good-sized book. Once I got all that out of the way, I was lucky enough to get a few jobs sessional teaching at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus. All this has taken time and energy, plus some getting used to. It has taken away time and energy from the task of turning The Midnight Games from a standalone novel into some kind of continuing saga.
As of this date, however – March 2019 – I’ve completed a complete rough draft of a sequel to The Midnight Games. I’m halfway through revisions and hoping to get it into good enough shape so that it can come out in 2020.
The Midnight Games, of course, offers a kind of alternative present; the exciting and sometimes scary thing about the present day is that it offers us a range of alternative futures. At the end of the novel a new element enters the story– an airship, SORCERER, erupts out of the continuum threshold at the penultimate ceremony and vanishes into the night sky over Hamilton’s north end.
To continue the story of Sorcerer I’ve been doing some serious research into airships. They are an efficient and viable means of transportation, and there’s a company in Winnipeg that’s trying to launch a commercial freight business, using airships to ferry freight to Arctic communities. This month, there was a conference in Toronto promoting the commercial use of airships. I wanted to write about it, but I couldn’t find any periodicals who were interested. And two days after the conference, I can’t find anything about it in the Toronto papers.
So let’s think more about alternative futures – futures we’re allowed to envision, and futures that some people would rather we not think about!
