Free at last!

As of today, I have no pending deadlines, no articles due, and no short-story commitments, plus I've wrapped up all revisions on my next novel, Rollback, which is coming out in April 2007.

It's my intention to not take on other side projects for the foreseeable future; I just want to concentrate on my next novel without distractions.

Of course, I do have things coming up: I'm teaching for a week at Odyssey in July; teaching for another week at Banff in September; and have agreed to be Writer-in-Residence at the Kitchener, Ontario, Public Library in October and November (I'll post more about this soon).

And I have a full schedule of conventions to attend this year, plus the Writers of the Future awards banquet, plus whatever speaking engagements come up. And I'm sure there will be some things to do surrounding the release of Boarding the Enterprise, the 40th-anniversary Star Trek essay collection David Gerrold and I have co-edited; it comes out August 1, 2006. And there's always something to be done for Robert J. Sawyer Books, the line of SF books that I edit.

But my principal creative energies will be focused on my next novel, and I'm very happy about that. And as a sign of my seriousness about this, I just turned down a major project for a Canadian broadcaster -- I'm a novelist, and I want to be writing a novel right now.