Happy end of February! I’ve hit the point of being pleasantly busy with my fiction projects without being stressed or burned out, which is a nice place to be. I got the revisions on The Swordmaster back to its editor, and the edits for The Realm Invisible just came in. That’s the novel coming from HarperVoyager UK in 2027ish. The draft of that one was really difficult, so I’m very pleased that my editor likes it, and now I get to dig in to revisions, which are my favourite part. It already exists; now I just have to make it better.

I’ve also started drafting a novella that has been a passion project on my to-do list for a long time — that’s the one I’ve got a Canada Council for the Arts grant to write, and I’m really pleased to be digging in to it now.

A few bits of news to share before I get back to work!

• I have a short story called “Lady Misfortune” about 16th century pirates off the coast of Newfoundland in Rising Tides, a pirate anthology coming out from Outland Entertainment on March 3. You can pre-order the paperback now (depending on where you live) and it looks like the ebook is available right away. One side of my family is from Newfoundland, so it was a real pleasure to dabble in some of its very weird history.

• If you happen to be in eastern Ontario, please come out to Bubba & Bugs, my favourite coffee shop, in Kemptville on Saturday Feb. 28 (that’s tomorrow) at 7 p.m. I’ll be one of four authors (with Scott Godwin, Beth Granger and my good friend Kevin Hearne) chatting and reading from our books. It’s ticketed ($10) and there is a cap, so email bubbaandbugs@outlook.com or call them at 613-258-2782 to hold your spot.

• It’s now on the HarperCollins site, so I can share that the narrator for the audiobook of Mercutio will be Maxim Reston, and I’m so excited to hear what he does with it. Mercutio is coming out on May 7 in the UK in all formats (and May 7 is also the ebook and audiobook date worldwide; the print date is in August in Canada and hasn’t been set yet for the U.S.). Please do pre-order if you can from anywhere you like to buy books, and put the book onto your to-read shelves on Goodreads or Storygraph or wherever you share your reads if you do. It’s available now on Netgalley UK if you’d like to ask for an early copy to review. The more evidence of interest there is now, about two months before publication, the more copies bookstores will order, and the more readers who don’t already know my work will encounter it. My publisher created some lovely graphics for it. Here’s my favourite!