Updates 2

At the time of writing, I am just doing some final line edits on the second main volume of the Spell Books of Meklir series, The Blue Book of Sevadon. It's taken a long time to get to this because there are so many plot and character balls (ahem - didn't think that metaphor through before I wrote it and it's clearly too late to change it now) up in the air at once. The main issue is that this series exists alongside a number of other properties that I'm working on at the same time or that I'm planning for later. Every time I made a change in one novel or short story, I had to go back and check it didn't make things in The Blue Book fall apart. At last, I'm confident everything is on track, so the book is planned for a summer 2026 release.

The Blue Book of Sevadon picks up a few months after the events of The Red Book of Errabrec. It begins with a synopsis of the events from the first volume, since there's been a big gap between publication dates and people can't be expected to keep everything in their heads for a year and a half, can they? However, I think all the important things you would need to know have also been woven into the text (seamlessly, I tell you!!), so feel free to skip the synopsis if you don't like those. Anyone who has read the novella, The Bridge Over Magad's Gorge, will have some rough ideas of which direction we are going in with The Blue Book, but you absolutely haven't missed anything important if you didn't read that one.

What else is going on? Well, I can finish editing The White Book of Taelonia as soon as I send The Blue Book off to readers, so hopefully volume 3 in the series will also appear in 2026. I might just hold it back for a little bit while I check a few more details for the next series, but I don't think there is too much to worry about there.

Meanwhile, I'll get on with editing The Theurgic Centrum, the first Tale of Malivene Grode. This one is a stand-alone novel, also set in the world of Meklir. It's a little bit shorter than the Spell Books and it probably fits more into the cosy rather than the epic fantasy side of things. The main character wants to bake a cake, for goodness' sake! But when she starts to discover she has innate magical powers, Malivene realises she has a big problem: she lives in Ilwin, where magic is completely illegal. At the same time, she finds out someone has been kidnapping gnomes in the city and becomes determined to do what she can to help. I said it was more of a cosy fantasy, didn't I? Well, there's also a bit of action and adventure and there are some shady characters involved - both directly and also in the background where you (dear reader) can't quite see them yet...

I have a bit more work to do on A Legionnaire in Prel, which is a Talgar of Sen stand-alone novel. Again, it has to fit in with some other things I've been writing, including a few Talgar short stories, so I wrote it nearly two years ago and yet I haven't ever gone back and fixed it yet. That book will necessarily end up somewhere down the priority list because of all this other stuff I've told you about and because of the new series I'm developing. More on that later!