Update: Making progress, making decisions, and much excitement about birds

OKAY, so a lot. When did HEDESA go live at Patreon? One week ago, basically — July 1st. Already that seems like a long time ago! How remarkable one’s sense of time is!

Anyway: I will shortly correct a relatively tiny number of typos — yes, of course there were a few, just imagine me rolling my eyes here — and the new! pristine! epub file will go live tomorrow, Tuesday, the 8th. Then I’ll load the correct versions at KDP, do the final formatting for the paperback and hardcover, nudge the cover artist if necessary because those editions are also scheduled to release, so I need those covers, and move on.

And by moving on, I mean: finish secondary revision of World of Tiers and send that to proofreaders et al. I wound up doing just a bit more with it than I expected, and by “a bit more” I mean adding two scenes and rearranging the early chapters, and do you know why? BECAUSE OF THE TITLE SHENANIGANS. This is barely an exaggeration.

The title — I’m unlikely to change my mind yet again, though I won’t say it’s beyond the realm of possibility, but it’s unlikely — will be:

Nine Doors from Dawn to Midnight

And, should I wind up ever writing another book set in this world, the SERIES name can be The Thirteenfold World, which would work great for that purpose.

This may be clear, but quite likely not, since I only handed you the list of tiers one time, but there are nine MORTAL tiers, which run from the dawn tier to the midnight tier, so that’s where “nine” comes from. There are also four IMMORTAL tiers, hence thirteen tiers total.

Putting “Doors” in the book title allows alliteration, which is nice, and avoids “doorways” as in “Every Soul a Doorway.” Thirteen doors might evoke “Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All.” This novel is not remotely similar to either, so I don’t want echoes.

AND, for a completely unrelated reason, it turned out to work to add an early scene where we glimpse the tier of dawn. We already wind up at midnight tier (I don’t believe this constitutes a spoiler, as you have no clue how that’s going to work, obviously). Thus, adding that early scene lets me deal with a separate problem and also provide a from-dawn-to-midnight throughline, even though the story takes place over more than one day. Not a lot more, I will say. This is a very fast-paced story.

MEANWHILE

At this point, it seems weird not to set up chapters of something to go live at my Patreon, and I HAVE this book right here, so next week, you can expect to see chapters of this new book begin to drop there. Not this week, because I am still tweaking this and that, including right up at the top of the story. But next week, sure.

I don’t see any reason the full novel shouldn’t be ready to go live at my Patreon in a month or so; I’m thinking very seriously of aiming for September 2 as the release date on Amazon, which means no later than mid-August at my Patreon.

WHAT ELSE?

I’m also re-reading NO FOREIGN SKY, and of course you realize this means that I intend to (finally!) start writing the sequel. However, I think I’m going to work on this AND other things, because at this point SEKARAN is pretty close to finished — maybe four or six more chapters? Close enough that it seems VERY SENSIBLE to finish the thing before truly focusing on something else. If I have a draft finished by the end of July — seems perfectly doable, even if I’m also doing other things — then I see no reason I can’t set SEKARAN to release as Tuyo: Book 11 on October 2. If that’s overly optimistic (I admit I sometimes get a trifle overoptimistic), then November 2.

So I don’t thnk I’ll be seeing new releases come out on Amazon August 2, September 2, October 2, November 2, AND December 2, but I DO think I’ll be hitting four out of those five dates — you remember THIS HOUR is already set for December. So, releases in four of the five latest months of the year. That’s what I expect.

And then with luck something — such as the NFS sequel — ready to go in early 2026, plus Tuyo: Book 12: The Thing That Happened in the West, and then sometime later in 2026, probably Hedesa II and we can all finally move forward with Tano’s story and meet the Saa’arii for real.

That’s the plan. It only extends roughly a year into the future, so who knows, I might stick to it.

Not sure what I’ll be putting in my newsletter.

Chapters of SEKARAN, which is what I intended when I thought it would be half the length? Maybe. Separate short stories? Maybe. Scenes from earlier books written from different points of view? Maybe? I’m kind of doing that a tiny, tiny bit in SEKARAN, which is why I thought of it. Chapters from a book I want to write, but haven’t got time to write? Maybe, because doing that for THIS HOUR caused me to write that story, which I hadn’t intended to, so maybe I could try to do that again? The newsletter ought to go out mid-month, so I guess I’ll be deciding. Oh, I may delay that a trifle because I will be running a sale as HEDESA drops at Amazon, and news about the sale ought to go in the newsletter. That gives me an extra week or two to think about this. If anybody has a preference, this would be a good time to mention it!

MEANWHILE