Heck of a month, huh? It feels like everything’s a giant mess out there, and people are enduring a lifetime’s worth of stress. I don’t have much power to change things, but I can do my little part: how about some free entertainment? From today until Saturday, three of my e-books — Winter’s Reach, The Long Way Down, and Sworn to the Night — are free to download. That’s one epic fantasy, one urban fantasy, and one dimension-hopping smorgasbord. Enjoy!
On my end of things, the virus situation has slowed everything down. The next Harmony Black novel is still in editing, and I’m still aiming to have it out in April, though I don’t have a hard date yet. There are so many moving parts in publishing, and it just takes one piece going out of action to slow the whole beast down. For instance, Susannah Jones is ready to record the next Harmony book, but the staff at Audible is working from home and quarantined, so even once the book and audio is ready it may (hopefully not, fingers crossed!) suffer added delays waiting for approval.
Likewise, The Insider is still slated for a July release from Thomas & Mercer Publishing. I don’t think anything can hold that up, and the advance copies have already been printed, but we’ll see. (And I’m still hoping to be at ThrillerFest in July but again…we’ll see.)
Presently I’m pounding away at the followup to Ghosts of Gotham. What about the next Faust novel? As I mentioned in the afterword to The Locust Job, I started working on that the second I typed “the end.” That said, sometimes plans shift in the air. Essentially a big chunk of it is done but I ran into a few second-act problems (the action isn’t exciting enough and a major plot point just doesn’t feel credible to me), so I put it on the back-burner while I sort it out. You know me — I don’t put my name on anything until I think it’s tight. Suffice to say that both books are getting worked on and I think you’ll be pleased with the end results, and you won’t be waiting very long for either one.
Stay safe, all. We’ll get through this together.