The End

And it’s done.  

I finished editing the manuscript for Alex Verus #12, a.k.a. Risen, last weekend, and sent it off to my publishers at the beginning of the week.  It’s now with my US and UK editors and will stay with them until they get back to me with their first-round edits – if you’re curious, we’re now on Step 4 (Waiting for Edits) of the process that I wrote about here.  My Alex Verus novels have required fewer and fewer rewrites/revisions over the years, and for book #10 and #11, the edits stage was very quick and painless.  So at the risk of jinxing myself, I’m not expecting any delays – that the book should be published in December 2021 on schedule.  (I know, I know, you’d rather have it sooner, but my publishers like to schedule books ages in advance – they probably would have pushed it all the way to 2022 if I hadn’t specifically asked them to release it no later than one year after Forged.)

Right now, though, the biggest thing on my mind is that I’m finally done with Alex Verus.  It’s a very weird feeling – my entire professional identity for the past nine years has been ‘the guy who writes the Alex Verus series’.  Now Alex Verus is finished, but I’m not.  I’m going to move on to something new.  

It does feel kind of appropriate that I finished the last Alex Verus book right at the end of 2020.  Alex Verus is very much a 2010s series – it was written in between 2008 and 2020, and the in-universe timeline begins with Fated in 2011 and ends with Risen in 2017.  I guess my next series will be my one for the 2020s!  

Which brings me to the question of what my next project will be, but I’m not going to get into that just yet.  It’s something I’m thinking about (and have been thinking about off and on for more than a year) but right now, I’ve been working on Risen pretty much flat out since the spring/summer of 2020, and I’m kind of exhausted.  I’m going to a take a break.  I’ve got various bits of news concerning new books and future Alex Verus stuff, but that can wait!