It’s been an exciting few weeks on the Pandemonium front with us getting the book cover approved and along with blurbs and other advertising material. I’m still pretty excited to see the story that got me writing come to life.

However, life goes on, and I go on to write other things. Next up in the dock is Live in the Dream, a science fiction novel of about 78,000 words that I’m currently putting through a second round of beta reading. It’s a story about Lucas, an artificial human grown in a jar living in the year 2192 and working as an accountant. The world is run by natural born people: morons obsessed with money and social status. Seems depressing? Yes, but Lucas copes because every day when he comes home he plugs his brain into a personal alcove where he gets to spend time with his virtual family in a utopian dream world. Furthermore, Lucas is a week away from retirement, where he gets to transfer his mind into the Dream 97 program permanently, leaving his physical body to rot and the “meat world” as he calls our physical world, to rot along with it.

That’s what he plans to do, only to log into the Dream on retirement day to find his family has been taken by someone with the means to hack the system. Now, to get them back, he has to travel across the world to retrieve each member of his virtual family from a different alcove, while in the background, a plot to destroy the Dream and the modern world along with it starts in motion.

I’ve already put it through one round of beta reading. After that, and after the finishing touches on my promotional material, I’ll start querying literary agents. I haven’t done that in a while since getting Pandemonium accepted by a publisher, but I know the basic process. Tell me what you think of the concept so far.