Fury, Unleashed

By the time you read this, one thousand, three hundred and eight-four entire days will have past since the release of my first novel, Famine. That’s three years, nine months, and fourteen days, or 45 months and 14 days, if you’d rather. It’s a lot of days, no matter how you look at it.

Even worse, it seems like a lot more when you consider that its sequel and the next book in the Charon Chronicles series still hasn’t be published.

Well, at least it hasn’t been yet.

I started work on the planned sequel, Fury, even before Famine was published, in the spring of 2020. And work on it went well for a month or two. But as anyone who’s presently older than the age of six knows, 2020 wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. Sure, Taylor Swift spent lockdown churning out roughly 1762 new albums. Unfortunately, as the pandemic progressed, I didn’t fare quite so well in the creativity department.

In my defense, Taylor wasn’t responsible for a houseful of mopey teenagers suddenly trying to find the motivation to get out of bed in the morning or take classes seriously through a computer monitor.

Now, I suppose one could argue that I reaped what I sowed for publishing a novel about a post-pandemic apocalypse days before we were all shut in. Considering that I started writing Famine in 2010, though, that has to be one of the more startling coincidences of my life.

Regardless, at some point, after writing about a third of what I had planned for Fury, I realized it wasn’t working. Even worse, for the first time since I’d started writing seriously, I went to the Well of Ideas to pull up a frothy bucket, but the damned thing was bone dry.

I knew what I had didn’t work, but I didn’t know how to fix it.

So I took a week off.

And then another.

Weeks became months that turned into actual years of nail-biting, knuckle-chewing, eye-rolling, how-do-I-make-this-story-work, hair-pulling frustration. By this past summer, it had become, to me, at least, embarrassing. I’d begun two separate series in 2020, and neither was moving. Readers would occasionally ping me on the socials and ask if I’d abandoned them. I’ll let you decide if that intentionally dangling pronoun refers to the readers or the series themselves.

In the middle of this year, then, I decided I had to get back on the horse and lead it, well, somewhere. Preferably to the bar, where all good stories begin.

So I decided to try a different tack. I dusted off a manuscript I had in the trunk, a middle grade novel I’d written back in the day when my kids were still young enough to wonder why I didn’t write books for their age. Publishing the The Secret of Commander’s Mansion reminded me that there was still joy in putting stories out for the world to share.

The problems with Fury were still there, though. It didn’t really work the way the existing plot was outlined.

But. Parts of it did work.

What it required was a little surgery, and, although I didn’t know it yet, a leap of faith. So I opened up the draft, spent about a week copying, pasting, and (especially) cutting chunks of text until I had a beginning I was happy with and a whole lot of question marks. That’s when the Big Idea hit me. What if I didn’t plan Fury as one thing? Why not write it as a few separate shorts, each focusing on different characters? Give them agency to tell their story and trust I could bring them home in the end.

After all, that is how Famine was written.

And I’ll be damned if it didn’t work.

It is, then, with immeasurable delight (and relief), that I am proud to announce that Fury is finally complete and scheduled for release.

Part I, Tempers Rising, will be available on January 16th, 2024. Part II, Savage Storm, drops on February 20th, and Part III, Reckoning, the climactic finale, hits on March 12th. The three-part novellas will only be available in digital form, and they’re all available for pre-order today!

“But, wait, JR,” you say, “what if I don’t like to read eBooks?” Or! “What if I refuse to watch Netflix series that have adopted the maddeningly irritating practice of dropping only one new episode every week after they basically spent years training us, Pavlov-style, to want to binge a series from start to finish while ignoring basic hygiene and housekeeping obligations?” Fear not, faithful reader! I understand you completely.

No, seriously. A lot of times these days I actually put off watching a new show until I’ve waited out the entire season so I can hit it at my leisure. I’m more than happy to provide you the same opportunity. Which is to say, after all three parts of Fury have been released, the full complied novel will be available in eBook, paperback, and hard-cover one week later, on March 19th, 2024*.

Again, I can’t begin to describe how excited I am to finally be bringing the next chapter in Tom, Ana, and Lindsey’s story to the world. Not unlike Tom’s, the road was long, windy, and full of perils—although maybe not bloodthirsty plaguers—but despite thinking this story might kill me before I ever finished it, here we are.

I do hope you enjoy it!

*As of this writing, only the eBook is available for pre-order, but paperback should be up next week