Sensory Overload - Part I

I love science-fiction novels and I read at least 500 during my teens and early twenties. After reading a pretty lousy book early in 1996, it finally motivated me to try and write one of my own. It seems like perverse logic, but all my favorite sci-fi novels written by talented authors only intimidated me from trying to write one myself. The crappy books though, at the very least I could write one this bad, I thought.

Also lingering in my head all this time was a seed planted by my twelfth grade English teacher, Richard Cunningham, that I had the ability to write a book someday. I had scoffed at the idea at the time, but it never left me.

I started writing my book on May 13th, 1996.  I had no clear direction at first for my story but I was in the last year of my Army Reserve service so I latched onto a idea about a soldier being medically discharged from the military after being injured on a dangerous mission. Since the Cold War during my youth was over, I decided to place the story in the aftermath of a war against a alien race.

As a test for myself, I started out with a prologue of that final disastrous raid and I told myself that if I liked it well enough, I would continue writing.

After some positive feedback about the Prologue, I ended up slowly writing 7 chapters that dealt with the aftermath of the mission and the main character's discharge from the military. In those chapters, I developed the synopsis below.

Mini-Synopsis:

The Great War between the Terran Race and the alien Durmir is finally over and the newly formed DùrMan Confederation has created peace for the first time in a generation.  For an elite soldier like Jâk Silvestri who spent his whole life fighting in the war, his special forces unit is now tasked with hunting down former war profiteers and crime syndicate leaders.  After a freak brain injury on a mission that also killed his best friend, Jâk is medically discharged from the rapidly downsizing military and sent out into the civilian world he has never experienced.  While avoiding the crime syndicates who recruit former soldiers like him, Jâk vows to go after Tan Sipter, the man he failed to capture on his last mission.

I am currently stuck around 150 pages and I don't know where to take the story next. Hopefully, I will figure it out soon.