Wow, bet you all thought I was dead, didn’t you? As my longtime readers will testify, social media has never really been my thing. I need to get Brandon Sanderson to give me some lessons…

So here’s where we are. Ember Blade 2 is about 1/3rd done, some way north of 100K words (ie I’ve already written a novel’s worth, now I need to write two more novels to make one book). I’m loving what I’ve got but progress has slowed considerably since the start of the year. Firstly, I was getting pretty burned out, and them chapters weren’t coming as easy as they did. Same thing happened during The Iron Jackal when I was writing the Ketty Jay books, and during the last of the Braided Path books: after a certain length of wordage (circa 400K, it seems) I start grinding to a halt and need a break.

That break came along when I got the chance to write for a super awesome AAA videogame, and since the end of March that’s what I’ve been doing. Details will be forthcoming when I’m allowed to but for now that’s all I can give you. What that means is that I’ve got a lot less time to write the Ember Blade sequel, but in reality I was going so slowly anyway that it’s not made much difference to the overall progress. The difference is that before I was spending all day ploughing onward and generating a small amount of words and a lot of frustration; now I write joyous and swift whenever I get the chance.

No doubt there will be some disappointed readers out there unhappy at the news, but with books this size – for me, at least – this was always going to be a marathon, not a sprint. On a more positive note, I’m not a big rewriter these days so I’m not likely to be going back and reworking huge chunks of it once it is done. Part of the reason it takes so long is that I spend a lot of time planning and worldbuilding. Plus it’s looking like 300K or so, same size as the last, so when you get the book it’s like getting two books in one