Whoa...a Joel Suzuki series update? Are you kidding me?
Let's back up for a minute. If you've been following along, then you know that while the main story arc of the series ended with Volume Seven, I've had this idea to write four additional volumes ever since I changed the name of the series from the Spectraland Saga to the Joel Suzuki series back in 2017 (details are in this previous blog post). Why four? Because while each of the volumes in the main series corresponds to a particular color on the visible light spectrum (red, orange, yellow, etc.), there are four additional colors outside the visible spectrum, which are infrared, ultraviolet, black (the absence of light), and white (the sum of all colors). Plus, seven plus four equals eleven, and you can't have a book series that is based on rock music and not "go to eleven."
I've always sort of intended Volumes Eight (the "infrared book") and Nine (the "ultraviolet" book) to be short story anthologies about events that take place before or around the time of Volume One (the red book, hence, "infrared") and during or after the time of Volume Seven (the violet book, hence, "ultraviolet"). You can read prior blog posts about them here and here. But up until now, I've been undecided about what Volumes Ten and Eleven would be about. One idea I had was a duology about Joel and Felicity taking on an ultrapowerful adversary in a super-high-stakes adventure, but then I thought, well, (spoiler alert!) I've already kind of done that. Then I thought about doing a "Cursed Child" sort of thing, where the kids of the main characters in the original series get their own story. But that just didn't feel right.
So, I stopped thinking about it for while, especially since the entirety of 2024 and the beginning of this year was spent focusing on a little short film project you may have heard about. Then recently, my thoughts have been slowly drifting back to Joel and company, and I had this epiphany: what if, instead of a high-stakes adventure, I went the complete opposite way, and made the final (for real, this time) two volumes character-driven, almost literary fiction-like stories about Joel's ordinary, day-to-day life? Genre-wise, it could be like a memoir (which I've been reading a lot of lately), or "cozy fiction," or even a style of Japanese novels in which nothing really happens. I mean, I've read and seen a lot of posts and memes where people say they would watch a movie about the Skywalker family set in an alternate universe where Anakin never turned to the dark side and they just go about their happy, normal lives (as normal as life can get in a galaxy far, far away). Heck, I would watch that!
Anyway, we shall see if that idea holds. Even if it does, I probably won't start writing anytime soon, even though I do already have tentative subtitles for each volume (which I won't disclose just yet). But who knows. Stay tuned!
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