A Prequel

I've been pondering for a while what to write next, and I've had several ideas.  One was set in the future, and involved underground mines.  Another was a fantasy story involving a smuggler.  I even thought about doing some revisionist historical fantasy, setting a fantasy story in the middle of the Civil War.  While I have vaulted these ideas and will consider them later, they are not what I think will be my next project.

In The Second Shadow, the first book I wrote, there are a group of people known as abscondytas.  They're basically human, but invisible to human eyes.  They have a few chapters in that book, where part of their backstory is explained, but I've (probably) decided to write a book that goes into more detail about them.  Thus, this book would take place about 150 years before the events of The Second Shadow.  It's a prequel of sorts, I suppose.

This would be meant as a stand alone book, so you would not need to have read The Second Shadow to know what's going on.  This is especially true, since once I have written it (and edited in one million times), I will be trying to get it published, while (I assume) The Second Shadow will not yet be published.

I've just started the process.  I've been working on the outline, and am forcing myself to spend a bit more time on the outline than I have in the past.  The initial writing on a manuscript is my favorite part of the writing process, so I'm excited to get there.  However, I want to get my outline to be rather detailed first, and I'm also going to detail the characters and their personalities more before I start the actual writing.  In theory, from The Second Shadow to Queen of Men, my writing as improved, which includes a more detailed planning process.  Progress on this should speed up immensely once my extra election-cycle work is over.