Well met, travellers!

As some of you may know, I work in education in my real life. With September came the return of a new school year. It has been more demanding than ever, on account of COVID restrictions, and my own increased responsibilities as an instructor and training facilitator. I was forced to prioritize my personal projects, and the Trials was put on the back burner, at least temporarily. This gave me the time to finish drafting The Path of Embers, my first full-length novel set in the Inheritors milieu, and to begin drafting an entirely new novel, set a thousand years further into the timeline.

The first draft of Path of Embers is complete, and I am in the process of revising it, both editorially, and expanding the contento to make more robust book. It is an Ulrem tale, but it's a long one, weighing in at more than a hundred thousand words at this point. The final tally will likely be closer to 120,000. The scope of revision is not huge, but there are threads to be connected and expanded on, and there's always the typographical goblins lurking at the periphery that must be dealt with. Cruelly. After I complete my second revision of the novel I plan to pass it off to beta readers for feedback. I will decide what to do with it after that point, whether to post it here, self-publish it, or make a running jump at the Big Houses. If you are interested in volunteering as a beta reader, please drop a comment below.

The next novel is much bigger, in scope and scale. In some ways, The Path of Embers was a green run to get my feet wet with long-form fiction again. I gave it as much time and attention as I would give any other story I write, certainly, and much more given the length. But I was warming up for the second story, which is bigger in every sense. It's currently sitting at 25,000 words, and I'm just getting it started. This is likely to run 200,000 and more, and I built it from the ground up to be a multivolume epic fantasy, but couched in Roman aesthetics and the same gravity of antiquity that I try to imbue in my other stories. The specific thing I can reveal about it, at this point, is the working title: A New Fire. Hopefully that kindles some interest.

I respect the time and energy my readers have put into the Trials and I greatly appreciate it. Please know that I have not ghosted you. I am writing steadily, every single day, at a pace of 1,000-2,500 words on the new project, and I turn 3-5 pages of edit work in the revisions on the old. Hopefully, in the next month or two, I will have more news.

In the meantime, stay fiece. It's always darkest before the dawn.

L.R.