Some deliveries really aren’t worth the trouble.

Meet Juno Vega: independent courier pilot, occasional smuggler of things she’d rather not ask too many questions about, and captain of a small spacecraft with an artificial intelligence that may be just a little too pleased with itself.

A routine cargo run should be simple. Pick up the package. Deliver the package. Get paid.

Naturally, things don’t go quite according to plan.

Bad Decisions and Burning Thrusters is a fast-moving science fiction adventure about questionable choices, dangerous cargo, unexpected allies, and the kinds of problems that arise when perfectly reasonable people find themselves in thoroughly unreasonable situations. There are spaceships. There is danger. There is humor. There may even be coffee.

At its heart, though, it’s a story about people: the choices they make, the consequences that follow, and what happens when doing the right thing becomes considerably more complicated than simply knowing what the right thing is.

Where Things Stand Today

Unlike The Silence of Ancient Light, which I’ve shared here scene by scene as I’ve written it, Bad Decisions and Burning Thrusters has been taking shape mostly behind closed doors.

The first draft is complete, at roughly 40,000 words, and I’m now deep into the revision and editing process: tightening the story, strengthening characters and motivations, chasing down inconsistencies, questioning some of my earlier decisions, and occasionally discovering that fixing one problem has created two entirely new ones.

In other words, writing.

This also means I won’t be publishing the complete draft here as an alpha read. I do expect to share more about the story, its characters, and the process of bringing it toward publication as the work continues, and perhaps I’ll include the occasional excerpt or preview when the time feels right.

Where We Go From Here

For now, Bad Decisions and Burning Thrusters remains very much a work in progress, but it’s considerably farther along than some of the deliberately mysterious glimpses I’ve shared on the blog might have suggested.

I’ll be writing more about that soon.

In the meantime, watch this space. The engines are burning.