I'm probably going to write the next Athena Fox adventure first. Make it as quick as I can, more of a plot, less history, shorter...
But the series just isn't selling. What really feeds the need many people seem to have is SF and fantasy. Those are the Romances of this era (not that romances are doing poorly, either). And I think I could push The Tiki Stars out of the single-joke, single book and into an open-ended, multi-threaded series.
I'm just caught on some basic conceptual issues. As much as I want to write boiler-plate science fiction, I can't let go of enough science. I can't unlearn the Kzinti Lesson.
Basic problem; getting out of a gravity well is a known amount of energy. A lot of energy. If you can do that trivially, you can do a lot of other things trivially. It is the same problem as the giant fighting robot; if you could put that kind of armor on a walking robot, you could put even better armor on something that looks more like a tank.
(Okay, there is some wriggle room on the giant robot. Agility sort of counts with tanks because at the current state of the art, frontal armor isn't as good as being behind fifty meters of rock and dirt. So being able to fire then duck into a better protected spot before artillery or air support finds you is a good thing. This would almost make sense with giant robots -- if you had a hand-wave to explain why guided missiles et al aren't seeking out the tallest most obvious thing on the battlefield.)
(The Gundam universe has Minovsky Particles. And then it throws it all away by having the heavy legged robots fighting in space.)
Okay, so the Kzinti Lesson. You can play with it a little by hand-waving an "impulse drive" that allows your ships to reach orbit with relative ease but for "reasons" only works for space flight and doesn't give you the kind of battery packs that make hand blasters and powered armor possible but internal combustion silly and wasteful. Some sort of inertia-squasher or something.
Hard to figure out how that can't turn into the hand-held battleship gun, though. Even if there is a black box "get to orbit, don't ask how, do not pass go and do not collect velocity" you still can't get away from gravitational potential energy. There still exist scenarios where all you have to do is turn the magic space-drive back off and you've got a dinosaur-killer on your hands.
Odd to think that Star Trek TOS (Those Old Scientists) got it right; in "Conscience of the King" a single hand phaser set on overload is considered capable of blowing the side of the ship off. The Mass Effect series also nods to this; an Engineer can cause enemy weapons or armor to short out, causing an explosion powerful enough to kill enemies in a wide radius around the unlucky one.
The odd thing is, though...
There is a similarly physics-defying problem with FTL. It is a violation of causality; once you introduce FTL, you've opened a not-so-very-back-door towards breaking the chain of cause and effect. But this is such a Necessary Weasel SF usually manages to ignore it entirely.
So why can't we ignore normal space as well? If we were to just drop a decimal place (pretty much everywhere!) then it becomes possible to get from surface-to-orbit on a reasonably sized fuel tank, but reversing the journey doesn't turn your ship into a terrifying kinetic-kill missile. And proper low-delta-vee journeys -- Hohlmann Transfer orbits et al -- take days instead of weeks, or (for the outer planets) weeks instead of months.
It is just hard figuring out where that magical decimal place goes and how to hide it. And also hard to avoid the temptation of other magic decimals that allow you to have things like...giant robots.
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