First official Verida post

I talked a lot about it in my November 2021 post, late last year. If you want the full story of how Verida came into being, please check it out. (I knew for *sure* this wasn’t the first time I’d posted about Verida here. I just didn’t get it in the title.)

Tonight, The Queen’s Chair went live.

Gonna be honest with you: I’m anxious, but in an entirely new way.

Most of my series, I’ve got a 4-book arc planned, and I set it up so I drop the entire series over 3 or 4 months and then… I see what I’ve got.

And what I’m discovering is that it takes a *long* time to work through the back-end administration to start connecting a 4-book series with readers. (Hello!) It might take six months to really get a series going like it’s going to. It might take more. I’ve still got some series that I’d like to believe *aren’t* going like they’re going to, once I make another good connection or two on how to find the readers who are most going to enjoy them.

But the series is mostly done. I’ll add on one book at a time over the next few years, because I don’t know how to *finish* a series, but the arc that really needs to happen to introduce the characters and the world is done.

And The Queen’s Chair isn’t a four-book origin story. It’s a doorway to an entire world. I’m not looking at a 4-month commitment with a bunch of work afterwards to figure out who most wants to read these books. I’m planning at least two full years of big releases *in this world*, and probably *another* two full years after that.

The release that happened at midnight tonight is the first step in sixteen-or-twenty-six-or-forty books in a world that just… grabs me. And I’m not going to know whether this *thing* has worked tonight or four months for now or maybe even a year from now. For the first time, I am running alongside this release schedule, writing books as far out into the future as I dare plan, rather than writing a series, publishing it, and then looking at what I want to write to publish next.

I write in the range of 8-12 novels a year, regardless of what I publish (stay tuned on that; this could be a *very* interesting year for backlist releases), so it’s not that I’m pushing to write a lot more than I normally do. (Okay, I actually am, but it’s because this schedule has pushed a lot more writing earlier in the year, and I figure, once I’ve already met that rate through July, why not finish the rest of the year the same way? Who doesn’t like bonus books?) It’s that I’m making publishing plans – tonight – for book four in a series that I haven’t even started writing yet. Don’t even have titles.

Verida is going to force me to grow up as an independent publisher, and it’s going to force me to actually stick to a plan for more than six months at a time. There will be no ‘oh, that sounds like a great idea’ series, this year, nor next year. I’m putting together a publishing calendar that actually looks like it has strategy behind it.

(Gasp.)

During the first four months of the year and the last four months of the year, I will be putting up front-list, new series (all in Verida, for the time being). During the summer, I will be putting out backlist continuations on existing series.

If I get sick or have something going on in my life that I’m going to have to sacrifice something that’s on the plan, it will be those backlist titles. The front list new series are set in stone, as completely as I have the ability to make it so.

And I feel like my feet are on the first bricks of a path that I can’t see the end to.

Verida.

With no further ado, let me introduce the series:

The Queen’s Chair: a series about the political and economic heart of Verida. Isabella Gabriella Angelina Aurora Renata Anastasia Fielding-Horne is the spare daughter of a very, very wealthy merchant, and upon her arrival in Verida, she promptly gets herself tangled up with the King’s Guard and affairs of state. Verida is a dangerous city at the best of times, but when you’re working for the Queen, the stakes are big.

Murderers, Thieves, & Velvet: this is a series about Skite, the King of the Rats, and his crew. The Rats are one of Verida’s many underworld gangs, and Skite runs them because someone has to, but his crew are completely separate from the Rats, and this is where he shines as a leader and a tactician and a man who really knows how to nurse a grudge. The crew are the best of the best, and these books are heist books, at their hearts, though nothing is ever so simple as to *just* be a heist, when Skite is involved.

Ever in a Pirate’s Eye: these are books where the focus is split pretty evenly between Katrina Swift, the captain of the Flying Phoenix, and her First Mate, Casset. Katrina is cold and calculating with a fiery temper that would make her a very unpopular captain if not for Casset, who is best described as a cross between Jack Sparrow and Legolas, and who does the heavy lifting of managing the ship’s crew. They run around the Pirate Islands doing piratey things, except that Katrina really doesn’t like it when someone else’s plans get in the way of her own, and Casset’s about to discover that maybe being the First Mate on the Phoenix isn’t *everything* there is to life.

The Hill Chargers: I grew up reading every horse-and-a-girl-who-loved-it book I could get my hands on, until my mother decided that I needed to grow up and I started devouring shelf after shelf of my father’s thrillers and detective series. I have long believed that if I write about horses, it will cause me to regress into that teenage girl angst, and I have kept the door closed on all such possibilities. Until now. Because, guess what, I’m a grownup, and I want to write about giant, magic horses. Go with me on this. The Hill Folk are nomadic family groups outside of Verida who breed livestock and wander the grasslands with their huge herds. They are best known, outside of themselves, for being the breeders responsible for the Hill Chargers, gigantic horses of unusual intellect who have a number of unusual characteristics from having been bred in the shadow of the Wolfram Mountains. These stories will actually be about the Hill Folk, but they will focus on some of the most important Hill Chargers alive and how they impact and shape the world around them.

Will it all stop there?

No.

I don’t know if I’ll have additional full-bore series that will come out of Verida (though I wouldn’t bet *against* it), but I do know that there are already two novellas and a prequel… done. There’s lots more, and every time I hang out in Verida, I discover something else that’s worth writing about. The plan on my office wall right now includes no less than twenty-six novels.

I’m on a path. I don’t know where it ends. But I’ve got a pretty good idea it’s going to have been an amazing journey, from everything I’ve gotten to so far.

Go with me on this.