The Return to the Kingfisher

I think that life can be measured with the idea of a volume measure.  Life got really loud for about six months, and while I was working consistently, it was slower and without quite so much interaction with my outside world, here, as I normally have.  It’s not an apology and it’s not an excuse.  Just a mile-marker.

I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to come back to a lot of the series that I’ve moved on from.  There are business reasons that I go do something else, and there are creative reasons that I go do something else, but I rarely leave a series because I’m just through with it and don’t want to play with those characters and in that world anymore.

(I used to go to writing conventions and put that I write science fiction and fantasy on my name badge, and I’d have writers point out that I don’t *actually* write fantasy, just urban fantasy…  It still stuns me how many years into writing I was before I released my first fantasy-fantasy novel, but with Verida I finally put that comment to bed.  I’ve known since I set out that I wanted to write fantasy, as well; it just took a long time to get to where I was situated to do it.  Ha.)

It doesn’t mean that I don’t miss those worlds, and it doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten them, that it takes so long to get back to them, but I do worry that *next time* it won’t be so easy to make the jump back into an existing world (or galaxy) with all of the *things* going on that were going on when I left.

And then it always feels like coming home.

I had had a plan to do one-off books in some of these main series as I was working on Verida, and I found very quickly that trying to make that corner was a bad idea for me, so I put them off to when I could do a much bigger block of work.  I really do love four-book sets for setting up really big arcs and landing them before I move on to something else again, and that’s what I’m in the middle of, now.

As things sit right now, I’ve put out two new Carbon books (The Clash of the Machines and The Division of Ping Ring Belt) and I am working toward finishing out the editing on another that will release in March of 2025, then returning to writing the fourth in this release-block, which will hopefully be ready in April of 2025.

Avery is still one of my favorite characters ever.

I don’t always get to really *let on* how much of a nerd I actually I am, but I’m properly trained as a *serious* nerd, and Avery is just out running rampant with all of my favorite *bits* of what it looks like to be a feral, exceptional *nerd*.  Savannah finally gets some oxygen in this set of updates, as well, and her arc has surprised me, while Monte remains one of my favorite archetypes to write, and Carbon.

Carbon.

She holds herself so carefully, takes so much responsibility for *everything* because of how *capable* she knows she is, and yet she’s still figuring out whether she even believes that she is a human being.  I love her so dearly for how hard she fights.

The Carbon Chronicles series is intended to be a much more relaxed sequence of adventures compared to what I’ve done in Surviving Magic or any of the Verida series, and I’m quite happy with how it has turned out.  It means that I don’t have some big, lurking arc that is someday going to be complete and the world will take a curtain-bow and be done.  These could go on forever, and… I’m here for it.

My plan, sitting next to me on the wall right now, doesn’t include any more Carbon books on it after book 8 through to the end of 2029, and I know that’s disappointing to readers that this is the one series I write that they love, but there are so many other series I want to put time into, including a brand new one in 2026 or 2027, and characters that I have no intention of abandoning.

So don’t give up hope.  And I hope that these are the series continuation you’ve been looking for; I’ve enjoyed writing them more than I had even anticipated.