Posted by Joey Peters on Jul 24, 2025
Currently I have two projects I’m working on. I’ve spent a lot of time writing in the last month to decompress from all the hi-jinks I got up to during June.
I am extraordinarily close to the end of the first draft of Refugees from Utopia. It’s the sequel to Dissidents of Utopia and mostly about the political situation following at the end of the book. Gagarin is press ganged into hunting down the Starship Venture, meanwhile a threat long believed dead has resurfaced and may come to threaten the galaxy once more. Before the first draft is done I have one final segment of a chapter to finish, then the epilogue.
I’ll talk a little bit about my process.
First, I’ll take a break. After a couple weeks I’ll go through a first edit that is designed to make everything flow better. When I write I use loose outlines, so often times the end of the book contains plot elements that are not really foreshadowed in the first sections. So the first edit is to make the book a single, satisfying, coherent thing. After that I’ll upload an in-progress manuscript that should at least represent the final shape of the book it will be, unpolished.
After that I’ll let it sit for another month or two, then come back to it for a line edit to clean up the text. I expect Refugees from Utopia to be ready by the end of the year. At that point I’ll make DOU free where I can as advertising (and that will eventually trickle back to Amazon, which is actually the ebook store I regard with the least importance).
In addition to this I’m writing a guide for protest marshals. I have about 40% of what I expect to be the manuscript. It covers theory for what marshals should be at a protest and best practices for dealing with common problems and de-escalation in general. I expect that’s going to be
Later this week I’m going to cook up a digital file of one of my old comics and upload it to the secret member drive.
And I’ll spend the rest of today trying to finish the first draft of RFU.