Summer 2025 Writing Update
I had to rethink the title of this post. I’m a university and college professor, so I tend to think of the year in three parts—Fall, Winter, and Summer (each of these roughly corresponding to the academic semesters at school). There’s not really a substantial springtime in my mind. Accordingly, summer for me begins at the beginning of May, but I realize that it does not officially start until June 20, 2025. Today, I thought that I would provide you with an update regarding my summer writing projects, and my imminent writing and editing plans. My hope is to work on three projects this Spring/Summer. I’ll discuss each of them in brief below.
First up, my most immediate concern right now is to complete the penultimate draft of my academic book, titled The Place of the Court Tales in Early Jewish Literature and the Hebrew Bible (Bloomsbury). I am very excited to announce that this will be my first published book. It is an academic book based on my Ph.D. dissertation, which reevaluates the ancient genre of Jewish court tales. These are accounts of the deeds of Hebrew heroes in the courts of foreign kings. The goal was to reanalyze the Jewish court tale genre in light of additional textual evidence from the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I also provide a special focus in this book on the themes of punishment, exile, and apocalypse in these fascinating works. I’m very excited to be nearing the end of the editing process on this work, and I hope to provide you with an update on the publication of this work later in the year.
However, I also have several other projects ‘on my desk’ at the moment. In April 2025, I was getting quite antsy with grading, so I decided to write a new standalone novel, which I am tentatively calling Singularity. The work follows a private detective in Toronto, who has been hired to locate a university student that has been swept up by a local cult. Little does the detective know that his investigation is the tip of the iceberg. A much larger diabolical conspiracy involving artificial intelligence looms in the horizon of his investigation. While the work falls into the genre of detective fiction, it also straddles the increasingly blurry line between philosophy and science fiction, in so far as it deals with modern ideas around transhumanism and singularity (a hypothetical future that involves the uncontrollable growth of technology and the transformation of homo sapiens). The story also incorporates some of my recent research into New Religious Movements. I’ve already completed the entire first draft of this novel, and I’m very excited about what I’ve come up with. The plan is to go through final edits on this work in Fall 2025.
In the late Summer of 2024, I also wrote and edited the first volume of my new science fiction trilogy, Four Kingdoms. The trilogy is heavily influenced by the fall of Alexander the Great’s massive kingdom that he established throughout the Mediterranean basin and beyond, and the subsequent Wars of the Diadochi (Alexander’s generals) that followed (322-281 BCE). This complex and brutal historical context forms the historical inspiration for this trilogy, which envisions a similar conflict between four ‘remnant’ kingdoms in the distant future when humanity has become proliferated throughout the galaxy. Book One introduces the concept of the Firmament (hence the working title, Four Kingdoms: The Firmament), which in ancient Near Eastern thought was a boundary set up between Earth and the waters of the Heavens above. In the context of my trilogy, the Firmament represents the edge of the Known Universe, which is discovered early on in Book One. I had so much fun writing and editing this book last summer that I had initially planned on beginning the final editing process this Summer. However, I have decided to change course slightly before the final round of edits on Book One. Instead, I have decided to write the sequel, tentatively titled Four Kingdoms: Utopia, later in the summer (hopefully between July-September 2025), so that the editing of Book One will be able to better anticipate the second volume in the series.
I also have a few other manuscripts in various stages of completion on the go, but I hope to save those projects for future posts. Anyways, look out for more updates soon.
Stay well!
AK-M