A faun with a mist-erious power

I'm about 75% through Island of Fog Book 10, Forest of Souls, and expect to be finished in the next three weeks. Then it'll be ready for beta reading, and then a release on July 20 as planned.

I had also planned to finish Island of Fog Legacies Book 5, Death Storm, and release that on August 20. Yeah... I don't think so. That was always a bit of optimism on my part! Still, I'll be well into the first draft by then, so I don't know, maybe it'll be ready in October.

Anyway, Forest of Souls is going great! I thought it would be much harder to "find" those old characters again, but no, they were always right there waiting for me. Three months have passed since Hal and his friends had their epic battle on the beach at Brodon, and things have been quiet since, so the shapeshifters haven't worked as a team lately. They jump at the chance to get out of school to deal with the very serious matter of a magical faun with an evil agenda.

The situation quickly gets way more serious. The faun is ruthless and will stop at nothing to see her plan through. And what is her plan, exactly? Well, I can't tell you everything, but I will say that she can conjure a weird blue mist from the palms of her hands that causes people to explode into dust. There's a purpose to this, and though everyone thinks she's nuts, she comes across sincere and uncomplicated, true to her simple belief... which is that humans should not exist.

I always had in mind that this book would be a self-contained story, and it is. Death Storm will be a sequel, but one that can be read on its own as well. Two independent stories with a similar threat, twenty years between them. If Forest of Souls is a villain at ground zero testing her powers on a handful of victims, Death Storm is the same villain sitting aloof in her secret lair while her magic runs riot on a much grander scale. I think readers of both series will get a kick out of the continuing theme and references between the books, but readers of one series or another will enjoy either book on its own, in any order.

I'm finding it interesting to work on the Island of Fog series again. Can you believe it's been four years since I wrote Castle of Spells? I'd moved on to the Legacies series (set twenty years later) and expanded on the New Earth setting, introducing new monsters, characters, and settings, and now here I am adding earlier versions of the same into the Island of Fog series -- so it's like circling around between timelines, the future seeping into the past and vice versa.

Despite having a pretty good memory for details, there are some things I've had to go back and look up. I have a feeling it might be a good idea to read the last few books in the series again. Did I mention it's been four years? I have a few creatures that I first mentioned in the creature-heavy Castle of Spells, so I had to check the descriptions there. To my surprise, I found that I'd written about a faun already. That particular faun was described as fairly small but agile and tenacious. Well, I had the agile and tenacious bit right, but not so much with the small, so I'll be going through Forest of Souls adjusting that detail.

Here's a funny thing. While searching for images to use on the cover, I found this faun-ish person quite easily and just needed to make a few adjustments -- removing the weird single horn and adding two traditional goat-like horns instead, and also adding the blue mist, which is a major part of the story. Well, I didn't realize until later that the female model in the photo is the same model used on the cover of Gargoyle Scourge. It's fairly obvious when you compare, but -- well, I just found it strange.

As I was writing last night, dumping our heroes into a perilous situation and urging Hal to come up with a way to get out -- yes, I really do that -- I had a sudden vision of the next Island of Fog episode, Book 11. This is what happens with ideas. A book just presents itself in the form of a single image or short scene. So now I have the germ of an idea for Book 11 ready to be nurtured into a full-blown plot. And it'll be a completely different setting to anything I've done so far, so I'm looking forward to it.

But, for now, Hal really needs to deal with this faun.