November Update

With Risen’s release now less than a month away, here are some bits and pieces of news for November!

The first reviews of Risen are coming in, and they’ve all been very positive so far.  Here’s the one from Publisher’s Weekly – one final starred review to round out the series!

A reminder of Risen’s release schedule:

• December 2nd:  UK/worldwide release of Risen (paper, ebook, and audio)
• December 7th:  US/Canada release of Risen (paper, ebook, and audio)
• December 14th:  Reddit AMA on r/fantasy to follow the release of Risen

We’re also coming to the end of my Author Commentary series.  The second-to-last one will be next week, covering Forged.  I’d originally planned for this series of posts to lead up to the release of Risen, and that’s exactly what I’ve done – we’ll reach part #11 just a couple of weeks before Book #12’s release.

For my part, though, I put the last touches on the manuscript of Risen nearly half a year ago, and I’ve been spending all my time working away on my new series.  The book’s about 80% of the way through its first draft if I’m measuring by word-count, but I’ve been doing some thinking and I’ve decided to change a few things.  It turns out that I wrote most of the book without a very clear idea of what the series theme would be.  That’s no longer true:  I now know exactly what that theme is.  However, this means that I’ll have to adjust the earlier chapters – two characters in particular need to be significantly rewritten.

This kind of rewriting is a lot of work, and will take a lot of time – I’m now expecting the first draft of the book not to be complete until January or so.  To me, though, it feels as though it’s worth doing.  I’m planning for this new series to be my major project for at least the next five years or so, so I think it’s worth taking a bit of extra time at the start to make sure the foundations are good.  Getting the first book right is important!