I'm writing a new story. With Russian-speaking empires in space. Andc razy mafia members armed with butchers' knives. And vast spaceships made out of biological material tied together with steel and computer circuitry and armed with a considerable array of weaponry. And the kidnapped family of a governor, a mild ship's purser who is pursued by the family and friends of his old girlfriend, a vindictive and mentally-troubled pirate, a strategist working for the government who can't abide those he must work most closely with, and a merchant captain who is hired out by the intelligence cheifs of his country to complete and dangerous and far-away mission on the most highly-contested no-man's-land planet in the galaxy.

In other words, it's a space novel inspired by Patrick O'Brien, Nordhoff and Hall, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and it has lots of subplots that involve gunfights.

I swear, it's not cliche.

By way of an update, it's coming along quite well. I still have no title. I can't decide whether to call it after the one I've been using, Loose Change (the name of the vessel upon which the 'good guys' travel), or to call it after the main character, which is the file name I've been using for the story. This, however, would mean including the word Shoehorn in the title, and if that isn't a turnoff I don't know what is. I'm stillleaning towards Loose Change, but that's not very evocative of a deep-space-mafia-Russain-spy-pirate-merchant-privateer-desert-island-esque story, is it? I don't think so.