Cool! Have a load of fun!

Not that Jim has said. As he himself has noted before, he seemed to be at his best and most energized when switching between story worlds; each one served as a "rest" from the other when he was alternating between TDF and CA. Since CA has been over for a while, he "auditioned" a few concepts with the betas, and the steampunk story kernel absolutely blew us away. Taking real-life stuff into account, he seems to be enjoying doing CS, so that's a valuable thing for both him and us.

Wish I could, but I'm having surgery on the 5th.

Yeah, a multitasking Jim is a happy Jim, apparently. And that's what's realy important. And besides, are we really going to complain about having more things of Jim's to read? Because I know I'm not going to.

He described it once as each different writing world being a rest from the other. I can't speak to that with any personal experience, but it sure seems to work for Jim!

Any mention of a publication date or is that still in scheduling hands?

Nada. Jim's well into the writing, but given that a contract for the series was just signed, details haven't been released yet.

And superior to us in all ways. Don't believe me? Just ask them.

Indeed, but irritating the heck out of your publishers or potential publishers is not necessarily a net win.  I can think of more than one fairly respected genre author who ended a career that way.

Maintaining a personal online presence is in no way equivalent to "irritating your publisher". Being irritating online by deliberately contravening requests they've made is.

I truly hope nobody ever asks me to make it mine.

These days, it's a given. The writing/reading world has changed fundamentally in the course of our lifetimes. Today's citizen may not actually demand direct contact with the artist, but it's far, far closer to the norm than it used to be, and putting out some sort of contact is rapidly becoming a sine qua non of the profession. Look, for example, at how many current urban fantasy authors are not only on Twitter but active there. Readers are beginning to expect that sort of thing.

If you're thinking in terms of traditional publishing, the advice I've had is; don't do anything until you've sold something, or you look indistinguishable from any other wannabe.  And even then, don't do anything that treads on the toes of your publisher's marketing people; this being what they do for a living, odds are they are better at it than you.

There's a huge gap between what the publisher does and the author's personal presence. Many readers appear to like at least the appearance of a personal touch, the thought that you could actually "speak" to the author. Personal websites/blogs/social-media presence (or, more to the point, POSTING on them) go very far towards that and are not something a publisher's marketing department could do. Nor should they; it's not their job. Being yourself, putting yourself out there, that's yours.

As a reader, I can say with certainty that there are a number of authors I would never have picked up without that personal presence, no matter the publisher's marketing work. In fact, publisher-initiated marketing is usually on a non-reader-oriented scale, anyway; getting your book to distribution points and suchlike is the way they contribute most.