I’m Late! (An update on schedule and some Veridan reflecting)

On average, a novel takes me somewhere around 45 days to complete.

The Merchant’s Daughter took over 80.

I had a lot of other things going on that slowed me down from what I might have otherwise been able to accomplish, but the biggest factor at play here is that The Merchant’s Daughter is the longest book I’ve ever written.  By a good bit.  It’s an enormous book, and JJ is threatening to take the price up on the final paperback because he’s not sure that we would have a positive profit on it at the same price as the other books.  (Fun fact: Amazon can and will charge authors if their books do not cover the cost of production when they’re sold.)  We’ll see how it goes.

At any rate, the plan to have The Merchant’s Daughter out in July was pushed when I was still getting The Queen’s Gamble ready in June, but I’d hoped to have The Merchant’s Daughter ready by August so that I could release new Carbon content September-October-November-December.

No.

I’m magic, but I’m not that magic, and with The Merchant’s Daughter now planned for September (final date coming soon with preorder), Carbon is almost certainly going to spill into 2025, which may push some of my 2025 releases back into 2026.

When a book takes longer than I plan, for whatever reason, there are two choices for the remaining publication schedule: I can pull books off of it or I can push everything out.  Right now, my plan is to push everything out as I need to, to ensure that everything I’ve promised does indeed make it to publication, and on something resembling my original plan.  It’s not my favorite, having things come out later than I’d hoped, but I’d rather have everything come out a bit late than to have some of it on time and some of it get scrapped, because sometimes ‘scrapped for now’ turns into ‘scrapped indefinitely’ as I struggle to get it to fit back into a publishing schedule that is now looking five years ahead.

So.  For those of you looking forward to the next books of Tell, the Detective, they’re coming.  Probably not in January (I genuinely thought I could do it, but it was always a perfect-sailing plan, and this year has not been a perfect-sailing year), but I think by March or April is looking very likely.  And there will be four.  Unless there are five or three or very unexpected reasons, but mostly I’m pretty confident on four.

Beyond that, there’s Surviving Magic, the next (final?) four books, which are still planned for the back half of the year and if I’m very dedicated and next year goes just a bit better than this year, I might be able to accomplish without pushing them.  I think that September of next year is still a close guess.  I’m planning eight releases next year, plus the Carbon titles that leak out of 2024.

After that, things get a bit crazy and we’re far enough out that I try to leave myself space and permission to shift things around as the artistic decisions reveal their wisdom, but the next five years are truly nuts right now.  And I don’t really see a road where they *aren’t* nuts, because that’s just where I live.  The minute there’s a bit more space in my schedule, I add more content.  It’s a good thing.

I had a few weeks, as the end of The Merchant’s Daughter started to get closer, where I was feeling a lot of very real grief, because I’ve been writing in Verida for about three years solid, now, and the idea of not getting to live here in the future is… stark.  It is in very many ways the end of an era.  There are a lot of things that have come together, professionally, for me since I first published The Queen’s Chair, and I’m not the same writer or the same publisher that I was when I hit the end of that book.  My outlook for the future is vastly different, as are my plans and ambitions.  Not all of that is directly tied to Verida – there are other series that have ‘come of age’ at the same time, and which are contributing a lot to my future plans even now – but this is a place where I lived through a lot of that growth and change, and it feels like a writing home.  I’m heading off into the unknown from here – including a brand new series coming in 2026 – and I’m very excited about it, but there’s a sense of loss to it.

I’m gutted at leaving these characters behind, even just for the time being.

Then I wrote my schedule, and found that there was space in it to finally get the Cazian and Remming novellas put out, and that I’m likely going to return to Verida sometime in 2028 or maybe even late 2027, which is not that far away.

This is designed to be a good stop-over place for the series and the world, but there’s more to come, even just from the things that I know about, and as always I am eager to keep on in this world.  This is not the end and this is not goodbye.  This is just the moment for coming back to other worlds and other characters, because I’ve missed them, too.

Plus, a whole new beginning, one that I can’t wait for.

I’m excited.  There’s so much fun stuff coming.  I just… I’m late.  My apologies, but I hope in the end it’s worth it!