Status Report (27 March 2021)

Status Report (27 March 2021)

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I swear, sometimes my muse has the attention span of a squirrel.

My plan for March was to release a new minor update to the Architect of Worlds partial draft, and then write several more chapters of The Sunlit Lands so I could send out a good-sized chunk of that as a charged release for my patrons.

Architect of Worlds did get bumped up to Version 0.4 as of last week – a bunch of tweaks, some of them substantive, many of them driven by the flood of good feedback I’ve received from Brett Evill since the beginning of the year. With that out of the way, I was all set to buckle down and concentrate on The Sunlit Lands. I expected to be finished through Chapter Six or Seven and about 20,000 words by the end of March.

Meanwhile, I posted a couple of weeks ago about an old Traveller project, the Game of Empire rules that I originally developed about twenty years ago. At some time in the near future, I intend to revisit that project and produce a new version of those rules, possibly working toward publishing them as a paid product on DriveThruRPG. I hadn’t intended to work on that just yet, though – Krava’s story was calling me!

Yet early this week, I got the first hint of an idea for a Traveller setting that could act as a test-bed for Game of Empire. It’s a “Milieu Zero” concept of sorts, a single world striving to establish a new interstellar empire after a Long Night. Every day, while I worked on projects for my day job and made progress with Krava’s story, the Traveller idea kept growing in the back of my head, grabbing hold and not letting go.

Today I sat down to try to jot down some notes and get it out of my system, so I could get back to work on Krava . . . and new material just poured out onto the page. Over 3,000 words of it since I got up this morning. Not to mention that I’ve already come up with at least two or three ideas for short fiction, attached to this setting.

Well. I know not to argue when my muse is at work. Even if I wish she were more consistent.

Apparently, by the end of March, I’m going to have something new and worth sharing, it just isn’t going to be enough of The Sunlit Lands to meet my objective. Nor will this block of new Traveller material be useful as a charged release, since I’d like to share it widely and attract some attention to the potential project.

So here’s the (revised) plan for the last few days of March:

  • There will be no charged release for my patrons this month. (Again.)
  • I should have about 5-6000 words of new Traveller material that will be posted here, shared with my patrons, and possibly shared via social media as well. This will be a free release.
  • I still need to finish and publish a book review for the month of March. I’ve already selected and read the book, I just need to bang out the review.

We’ll see if April goes any differently. At least I seem to have gotten out of the creative slough I was mired in for most of February and the first week or so of March. There’s a good chance I’ll be able to produce a worthwhile amount of material next month.

Looking Backward: Game of Empire

Looking Backward: Game of Empire

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One of the more interesting phases of my creative career was my involvement with the Traveller tabletop roleplaying game. Between 1999 and 2005, I wrote, co-authored, or edited at least seven books for the GURPS Traveller product line. In fact, for much of that time, I was effectively the backup Line Editor, assisting Loren K. Wiseman in that capacity, and even taking over entirely for a few months at one point. It was a neat experience; I kind of miss it even today.

In 2000, I was writing the Solomani Rim sector book for GURPS Traveller. I was also helping Loren to produce an online edition of Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society (JTAS), the venerable Traveller fan magazine. One thing I did in that period was to help Loren wrangle Traveller News Service (TNS) entries, little scraps of “current events” from the Third Imperium setting that were meant to maintain the game’s meta-plot and suggest interesting adventures.

There was a side project I undertook, relevant to all of that activity: a set of rules with the working title of Game of Empire. This was a set of Traveller meta-rules, designed to allow “movers and shakers” roleplaying across a region of space. Instead of playing ordinary Imperial citizens, players could take on the role of very senior nobles, megacorporate executives, planetary political leaders, rebel-faction commanders, and so on. The actions and decisions they carried out would affect whole worlds. There was some resemblance to other Traveller products such as Pocket Empires or Dynasties, although the scale and emphasis were a bit different.

As part of the project, I wrote up a scenario, titled The Alderamin Scramble. The premise was that an Imperial duke’s title had fallen vacant in the Solomani Rim sector, and a number of notables were in a position to compete for an appointment to that seat. There were a lot of other events in the scenario – at least two local wars, a visit from Empress Iolanthe to the Rim, and so on.

I recruited 20 players from the JTAS message boards, and we spent several months “playtesting” the ruleset and the Alderamin Scramble scenario. It was a lot of fun – and along the way, we generated dozens of potential TNS items. I think most of the TNS entries from the in-game years 1119 through 1122 came out of that one game.

I often thought about building Game of Empire into something that could be published. I did write a second edition of the ruleset, based on our experience with the playtest, and thought about running more games with that. Unfortunately, with one thing and another, further development never happened before GURPS Traveller started dying on the vine a few years later.

In fact, I somehow misplaced my copy of the game’s files at some point. Fortunately, in 2017, I happened to be talking with Keith Alan Johnson when he mentioned he had a complete copy of both versions of the rules, the Alderamin Scramble scenario, and a bunch of his notes from the playtest. He was generous enough to bundle the whole package up and send it to me.

At the time, I still didn’t have any place to publish the game, but that may be changing. There’s an “open source” version of Traveller in existence now (a game called Cepheus Engine) and several independent publishers have released material through that venue. I’m already exploring ways to release other game material, as for example through DriveThruRPG. So a few days ago I got the notion of reviving this old project.

Yesterday I made a post on the Traveller Facebook group, describing the project and its history, and asking whether the audience would be interested. The response was a pretty resounding yes – so this certainly looks like something that would be worth moving to the front burner. I already have a lot on my plate for the rest of this month, but I may be spending odd moments looking at the old material and letting my subconscious mull over ways to improve and add to it.

Status Report (13 March 2021)

Status Report (13 March 2021)

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A quick note today, to lay out my plan for the rest of this month. I seem to have pulled out of the creative slump I’ve been wrestling with for most of the last six weeks, so I want to strike while the iron is hot.

I’m currently working on a new minor update of the Architect of Worlds design sequence, which should start to reflect some of the feedback I’ve gotten from my patrons since the January release, and otherwise make some incremental improvements. I’m working on including a change log in this version, so people who are working with the most current draft know where the most recent tweaks are. The plan is to have this new version ready by Thursday at the latest, at which point I’ll send that to my patrons as a free update.

I’m also focusing on getting some more of the rough draft of The Sunlit Lands written, and if I can get to at least 15-18 kilowords of coherent material, that will be this month’s charged release for my patrons.

I’m also working through my backlog of book review requests, so I hope to have one or two more reviews out before the end of this month.

Those are my “must accomplish” items for March. Stay tuned.

The Next Novel

The Next Novel

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and planning for the next novel I want to write and publish.

That may not be The Sunlit Lands. Work on that one is proceeding, albeit slowly, so it’s possible that will be the next book-length project I finish. It’s not the only possibility, though.

More likely is an extension of my short story, “A Fire in Winter,” published here a few months ago.

Portrait of Prince Hall in Masonic regalia, artist unknown.

I’ve conceived the notion of a novel-length collection of connected stories, laying out the history of an alternate-historical American Revolution, with the African-American Freemason figure Prince Hall as the protagonist. The collection would hint at an alternative United States that might be a little better-founded from the beginning.

“A Fire in Winter” would be the first story in the collection. I’ve already blocked out the plot and action of the second story – the working title is “Anabasis,” and it involves Mr. Hall accompanying an expedition into the New York and Pennsylvania back-country, led by a brilliant but troubled American general named Benedict Arnold. I’m thinking there might be six or seven stories in the collection by the time I’m finished.

An alternate-historical American Revolution: the situation in the Northern colonies as of early 1777.

While I mull over this idea, I’ve been working through the tabletop game 1776, generating an alternate history of the Revolutionary War to serve as a scaffold for the stories. The exercise has been unusually fruitful, giving me plenty of ideas as to where Mr. Hall might be at any given time, who he might meet, what conflict or danger he might have to survive. Before long I may have the whole collection of stories planned out.

The third possibility is an extensive re-work of The Master’s Oath, which I’ve mentioned earlier. This seems the least likely, even though I do have a complete draft of that novel. It would require a considerable rewrite to be publishable.

Whichever project comes to fruition most quickly, I’ve also been thinking about improving my plan for releasing and promoting the book.

Sales of The Curse of Steel have been disappointing, to be honest. After an initial surge of sales upon release, it’s fallen to zero since the beginning of the calendar year. So far, advertising on Amazon and Facebook has been ineffective and a net loss.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I made a number of unforced errors with that novel – not in its writing, but in the plan for its release and promotion. Things like doing my own cover art, not spreading the word before release or allowing for pre-orders, not arranging for editorial reviews in advance, not arranging for a paperback edition, relying exclusively on Kindle Unlimited for sales, and so on.

For the next book, I’m probably going to bite the bullet and set myself a budget for preparation and promotion.

The Curse of Steel cost me roughly $800 to release, most of which went to a hired editor who ended up recommending no changes to my draft. The biggest chunk of funding after that was for graphic assets for the book cover. All of this suggests that I might set aside a few hundred dollars for the next book, but spend it more wisely. Maybe hire an editor (or a sensitivity reader), certainly get a professional book cover done, budget more generously for pre-release promotion and post-release advertising, and so on. Hopefully getting better results.

Meanwhile, I’ve recently linked up with a couple of communities of self-publishing authors, and I’ve been lurking and listening to their talk. Some of their advice and common practices don’t fit my profile, but some of them do, and I’ve made note of a lot of resources that might be useful.

All of this means that my next book release, whenever that comes along, is going to be more carefully planned and supported.

One or two stand-alone books might help me figure out a better workflow and see more sales. Then, if and when I do finish The Sunlit Lands, I can always go back and re-release The Curse of Steel, applying some of what I’ve learned.

This is a marathon, not a sprint.

Review: The Drowning Land, by David M. Donachie

Review: The Drowning Land, by David M. Donachie

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The Drowning Land by David M. Donachie

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

The Drowning Land is a piece of prehistorical fiction, set in northern Europe a little over eight thousand years ago. It’s an adventure story, a romance, and a disaster novel all rolled into one, set in a land that literally sank beneath the sea in the distant past. The result is an interesting and entertaining read.

This review is based on an advance review copy (ARC) shared with me by the author. The final published version may differ slightly from what I’ve read.

Edan is a young member of a Mesolithic tribe, dark-skinned and blue-eyed people, who live in what he thinks of as “the Summer Lands.” Edan’s tribe have lived there from time out of mind, migrating between the coast and the highlands every year in response to the seasons. Their lives are driven by ancient tradition, but they may soon be faced with a crisis that tradition will never help them solve. For the Summer Lands are sinking beneath the waters of the sea, and many are afraid they will soon vanish altogether.

This isn’t a piece of fantasy. The Summer Lands are, in fact, Doggerland – a region that once acted as a land bridge, connecting the British Isles to the continent of Europe. At one time, Doggerland may have been one of the richest countries inhabited by human beings. Yet as the climate shifted following the end of the last Ice Age, Doggerland was eventually submerged beneath the North Sea. Today, its remnants form the “Dogger Bank,” an underwater feature off the eastern shores of Britain.

At the beginning of the story, Edan and his tribe are already struggling to survive. Not only is the once-rich country being slowly poisoned by rising salt water, but other tribes are responding to the crisis by becoming fierce and aggressive. Edan’s people meet one such group, a band of renegades who have taken predatory wolves as their totem, led by a war-chieftain named Phelan. At first, the contact promises to be peaceful, but when Edan rescues a young woman from the other band and accidentally kills one of Phelan’s followers, the consequences are severe.

Edan and the young woman, Tara, are forced to flee together for their lives. Tara, it turns out, is a “troll,” not quite what Edan’s people would recognize as human. In fact, she is from a tribe that has significant Neanderthal ancestry. She is also a visionary, cursed with foreknowledge that the Summer Lands will be drowned within months, on a quest to see if the spirit world can be roused to prevent the disaster.

What follows is a small odyssey, as Edan and Tara travel from one end of the Summer Lands to the other, fleeing from Phelan’s people and the rising seas, visiting other tribes, and seeking a solution to the imminent end of their world. Along the way they both grow and change, and they fall in love. Their fate, and the fate of the entire Summer Lands, is bound up in the rest of the story.

Once I got past the first few chapters of The Drowning Land – which felt a little slow of pace – I found it a compelling story. Edan and Tara are sympathetic characters, and even villains like Phelan have depth to them. As a piece of historical fiction, the story is very thoroughly researched and plausible; Mr. Donachie has certainly done his homework. I was rather reminded of some of Jean Auel’s work.

The story shifts viewpoints with each new chapter, a technique I don’t always appreciate, although Mr. Donachie does take care to label each chapter so that the reader won’t be confused. The prose was also not quite as clean as I usually want to see, with a few typos, and occasional mis-paragraphing during dialogue. None of this rose above the level of a minor distraction, nor did it pull me out of the story.

On the whole, The Drowning Land should work well for anyone who’s interested in historical fantasy, or tales of human survival under punishing circumstances. Recommended.

Status Report (25 February 2021)

Status Report (25 February 2021)

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The last few weeks have been a bit of a ride, so I have a few updates for everyone.

First, for some time now I’ve been dealing with some minor medical issues, and that seems to have come to a head in the month of February. Nothing life-threatening, by any means, but it was kind of hard on my productivity. Chronic headaches, lethargy, inability to focus or keep on task well into each day. I was having a hard time keeping up with work for my day job, much less my creative projects.

It turns out that my treatment regimen for type-2 diabetes has been throwing me for a loop.

Ironically, my lifestyle has been a lot healthier ever since the COVID-19 pandemic crashed down on us. I’m getting more exercise, my diet is much better, I’ve lost a significant amount of weight, and so on. However, until recently I hadn’t adjusted my medication routine to fit, and it’s looking as if my blood sugar was becoming chronically low in the mornings. Again, not low enough to be a serious threat, but more than low enough to account for the difficulties I was having.

The good news is that this is all correctable. Now that I understand the problem, I’m adjusting my treatment regimen, within parameters approved by my physician, and I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to recover my mornings.

The bad news is that working on this has taken up most of the month of February, with the result that I haven’t hit several of my goals, and probably won’t before the end of the month.

As a result, there will be no charged release or bonus release for my patrons this month. I also don’t think there will be any updates to Architect of Worlds or the Human Destiny draft sourcebook until sometime in March.

That having been said, here’s a summary of the creative projects I have under way at the moment, roughly in order of priority:

  • Book reviews, still at the rate of one or two a month.
  • An update for Architect of Worlds, revising some of the existing material and possibly adding a new section (on the subject of “using real-world astronomical data”).
  • Further progress on The Sunlit Lands, the second book in the Krava’s Legend series.
  • An update for the Human Destiny draft sourcebook, with some new material.
  • Development for a new book-length project, building “A Fire in Winter” out into a novel-length collection of short stories. More about that in an upcoming post.
  • Re-evaluation of The Master’s Oath, with an eye toward giving it an extensive rewrite and preparing it for eventual publication.

I’m also starting to think about how to improve my strategy for publishing and promoting my work. Sales of The Curse of Steel have been kind of disappointing – after an initial surge when the book was published, they’ve faded down to essentially zero since the new year. I’ve tried a few things to promote the book, with very ambiguous results. In the meantime, I’ve gotten hooked into one or two communities of self-published authors, and have been learning a lot about ways to improve presentation and promotion.

Within the next few months, I’m likely to have another book to publish, even if that isn’t The Sunlit Lands. I’m going to take that opportunity to prepare and apply a more aggressive publication strategy. If that works, I may go back and re-launch The Curse of Steel, using some of what I’ve learned. This is a long-term investment, but with luck, it will pay off.

Rehabilitating “The Master’s Oath”

Rehabilitating “The Master’s Oath”

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Thinking about the “new project” I mentioned in my last post, I’ve gone back to re-read the final complete draft of The Master’s Oath.

I usually describe The Master’s Oath as my “first complete, mature, original novel.”

I specify it that way because it wasn’t the first novel I ever wrote; that was a rather juvenile swords-and-sorcery piece that I produced when I was about twelve, and no, that one isn’t remotely salvageable. I also distinguish it from the next five novels I wrote, all of which were fan-fiction and therefore not fully original work. The Master’s Oath was entirely mine, written as an adult with all of my skills fully developed, and it was the first such novel I ever managed to finish.

It’s a novel about a White American man (or at least he thinks he’s American, at the start of the story). He’s a U.S. Army veteran who is recovering from serious wounds, suffered in action in the field. Since leaving the military, he has been living comfortably at home, but his existence has gone hollow: no life-partner, few social contacts, no occupation other than watching his investments tick over, no purpose.

One day, he discovers that he is not American in origin. In fact, he isn’t from our world at all. He comes from an alternate-history Earth, one in which things went differently starting in the twelfth century, and where Hermetic magic rather than technology is the foundation of civilization. He accepts an invitation to travel to this other world, where he is welcomed and elevated to the aristocracy. Naturally, this doesn’t work out well for him, but that’s where the story comes from.

The Master’s Oath is a fairly political novel, probably the most overtly political novel I’ve ever written. It’s about democracy as opposed to aristocracy, justice as opposed to elitism, knowledge that everyone can use as opposed to esoteric occult insight. It’s about a man coming to terms with his own inherited privilege and deciding to do something positive with it.

It is also – and this is where I realized how problematic the current draft of the story is – about race in America.

The alternate-historical kingdom where my protagonist ends up is geographically placed in the southeastern part of North America, and it’s temporally placed in the mid-19th century. It’s culturally French rather than English, but that doesn’t evade the central issue. It has all the same original sins as the real-world United States: imperialism, genocide, chattel slavery, and white supremacism.

As a White American author, I have to be really careful how I approach a story like this one. There’s the technical problem of writing with tropes that will alienate a big chunk of the potential audience if badly handled. There’s also the moral problem that arises from the possibility that I’m exploiting the historical experience of others for my own benefit.

So The Master’s Oath has been sitting in my limbo pile for years, and I’ve often said that it will never be published, that it isn’t actually publishable.

And yet, and yet . . . I poured a lot of myself into that story, a lot of the things I believe and that are important to me, more than most of my other fiction. It’s decently well written, with (in my humble opinion) an interesting protagonist, a neat action-adventure plot, and a ton of world-building detail. Going back and reading it now, I see some things I would rewrite if I wanted to take the time. Would that be enough to mitigate the technical and moral issues with the current draft?

It would be nice to have another full-length novel in my catalog, and this one would take much less work to release than writing a new one from scratch.

It’s a conundrum. I need to wrestle with it some more, and maybe seek out some fresh perspectives.

Notes for a New Project

Notes for a New Project

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Soon after I stopped spending most of my creative effort on work for the tabletop game industry, I started work on what would eventually become my first mature, original, and complete novel. Its title was The Master’s Oath, and it will never be published.

When I finished working for Steve Jackson Games, I still had a lot of that company’s influences in the back of my mind. In particular, a book Ken Hite had written for GURPS in 2001 (GURPS Cabal) made quite an impression on me. It was that book that made me aware of the Western esoteric traditions for the first time: kabbalah, Hermeticism, Johannes Trithemius, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, the Tarot, the Golden Dawn, that whole utterly snarled yet gorgeous ball of yarn. I studied esoterica for years afterward, building quite the library of relevant works, all of which are still in my possession.

Mind you, I’m not by any means a believer or a practitioner. The Western occult tradition was a false trail in our intellectual history, not something that has any pragmatic reality. I still find it useful as a source of creative inspiration. To this day, the attentive reader might notice little scraps of it in my fiction – alchemical or Tarot imagery, that kind of thing.

The Master’s Oath was one product of that period of my life. It was an alternate-history novel, a portal fantasy too, with Golden Dawn-style magic built into the plot. I worked on it from about 2008 through 2012, and that was a fierce and terrible struggle. I learned a lot about planning and writing long-form fiction, about world-building in the service of literary work, about a lot of things not to do. I don’t regret that time spent.

On the other hand, as I mentioned, The Master’s Oath is utterly unpublishable, a fact I only realized after I had congratulated myself on finally finishing my first mature original novel. I’m still proud of the research, the world-building, the quality of the prose in it. Unfortunately, it’s also a deeply problematic piece of work . . . not outright racist, as such, but thoroughly insensitive, with tropes built in that an American White male author really needs to be very careful about. Much more careful than I knew how to be at the time. Probably more careful than I have the skill for even today. So I’ve chalked The Master’s Oath up as part of the “million crappy words” that every novelist probably has to write before he can start making real progress.

Still. Nothing a writer ever learns is likely to go to waste forever. I still have all that esoterica lurking in the back of my head, along with everything I’ve learned as a Freemason, and whole reams of early-modern history.

Finally, I think I may have discovered a way to put all of it to use.

Imagine a world that diverges slightly from our own about the time of Elizabeth I, and becomes significantly different sometime in the early eighteenth century. A world where people like John Dee, Michael Maier, Robert Fludd, and Elias Ashmole were really on to something. A world where the Rosicrucian movement wasn’t just a weird historical joke.

A world in which different ideas and different historical currents might give rise to a different kind of modernity. A different kind of United States, in fact. Maybe even a better one.

As always, when I’m tinkering with alternate-historical ideas, my first impulse is to bring a few games to the tabletop out of my extensive library of historical simulations. For example:

Imperial Struggle is one of the most recent purchases in my library, a grand-strategic simulation of the conflict between Britain and France in the long eighteenth century. Its mechanics are deceptively simple, but the resulting gameplay is deep, rich, and nicely balanced – a great tool for developing alternate histories.

Here’s another one, ironically the very first historical simulation game I ever owned:

1776 is a much older game – my copy has been on my shelves for well over forty years now – but it’s a decent simulation of the American theater of a war that was fought across half the world, and ended with the formation of the United States. It’s nicely customizable too, easy to build alternate-historical scenarios for.

I can think of two or three other games I might be able to bring down and use, too. I have more than enough material to start building a timeline and a “bible” for stories set in this putative alternate reality.

As for the stories themselves? Well, “A Fire in Winter” fits nicely into the emerging structure. In fact, thinking about what else I could write to follow that story is probably what got my hindbrain working on this notion. I’m sure that as I start writing down and organizing all of this, more stories will suggest themselves.

None of which means I’m going to be setting aside other projects, to be sure. I still need to keep making progress with Architect of Worlds, the Human Destiny setting, and The Sunlit Lands. Still, I’ve been in a bit of a rut for the last few weeks, and my creative brain seems to work better when I can shift to a new project once in a while. This may be a promising candidate.

Human Destiny Sourcebook – Partial Rough Draft Released

Human Destiny Sourcebook – Partial Rough Draft Released

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Just a quick note to announce that I’ve released a first partial rough draft of the Human Destiny setting bible (and potential Cortex Prime sourcebook) to my patrons.

The Human Destiny setting is my primary space-opera universe, which has had a few short pieces published and is under continuing development.

If you’re interested in learning more, check out earlier Human Destiny posts from this blog. You might also sign up for my Patreon, which will get you updated material from this and my other projects on a (more or less) monthly basis.

Status Report (28 January 2021)

Status Report (28 January 2021)

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The past two weeks have been just about a wash for my creative work. A task at my day job pushed aside just about everything else for about a week and a half. Then, just as that was winding up, I took a nasty fall outside my house and got rather banged up. Nothing was broken and I didn’t need a trip to the hospital, thank goodness, but I collected a fair number of gouges, scrapes, and bruises. I’ve been in a fair amount of discomfort for several days. Kind of hard to focus on creative work, especially since my dominant hand is one of the parts that are stiff and sore. At this point, I’m not likely to hit some of the creative milestones I had in mind for this month.

Not all the news is bad, to be sure. I’d like to praise a couple of my readers, Brett Evill and K. Nakamura, for their work “playtesting” and providing feedback on the current Architect of Worlds draft. The two of them have been going through the current sequence with a fine-toothed comb, and they’ve already found a number of things that could stand to be fixed or improved. I plan to get back to that project in February and will probably be releasing a new minor version to my patrons fairly soon.

Another piece of the Architect of Worlds project will involve writing some material on how to use real-world astronomical data with the design sequence. If you want to build a realistic “solar neighborhood” for your SF setting, incorporating what we know about the stars and exoplanets around us, how do you go about that? I’ll probably at least start working on that next month too.

Meanwhile, since I had more than enough hours on the books at my day job, I’m taking the rest of January off to heal up from my accident and get some writing done. I’m focusing on producing a new partial draft of the Human Destiny sourcebook for Cortex Prime. Right now that’s at about the 16-kiloword mark, and I’m hoping to get a few thousand more words down before the end of the month.

The partial draft of the Human Destiny sourcebook will be this month’s charged release for my patrons. Once that’s out, they’ll get free updates as I continue to work on the project, until the rough draft is completed.

I don’t have any new original fiction to release this month, although I’m considering dressing up a bit of work from my fan-fiction period to show off. I’m also reading a very good candidate for my next book review.

Finally, I’m continuing to make slow progress on The Sunlit Lands, which will be the first sequel to The Curse of Steel. No clue yet when that novel will be finished, but at the moment I’m hoping to release it late in 2021.

The name of the game is persistence and resilience . . .