Dear all,

August is nearly over, and up here near the 47th parallel, that means we’re starting to really see the daylight hours shifting away from the plenty of summer towards the balance of autumn. I was lucky enough to have a cloudless night last Thursday, and managed to catch the peak of the lunar eclipse - I won’t subject you to my phone camera’s mediocre attempts at night photography, but it was an eerie and beautiful sight! Not least because, standing in a city park past 9pm, it captivated any number of other normally-impervious city-dwellers in a rare shared scrap of wonder. I hope some of you were able to see it, too!

Book News: As of last Monday, Blood of Queens has officially passed through line edits and is now bound for the all-powerful hands of Production. Now, what that means is truly a mysterious question - there will be copy edits to come, I am told, and potentially more edits as UK rights go up for sale (soon?). But for now, my job on Book One is… done? It feels extremely strange to say so! This process has been fascinating and strangely enjoyable, if intense. I do like editing my books, which perhaps makes me an outlier. Now, though, I have to keep my fingers off, which is a far harder proposition!

Cover Update: is… that there is a cover!!! It is extremely dramatic and gothic, in possibly both senses of the word, and I cannot wait to share it with you. I’m sure Saga are planning a reveal so I will not risk spoiling their fun but let me just say… there may be Skellingtons involved… or at least part of an skellington >:D I definitely think it’s going to look quite different to a lot of other books on the shelves right now, which I have to hope will help it! One never knows. And if I am lucky there may even be some gloss elements involved :D

Currently Reading: When neck-deep in Book Work I tend to step away from reading fiction lest I absorb too much of another author’s voice, so I’ve been a little more non-fiction focused of late. I finished The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley a week or so ago, on how one reacts in a disaster (and got jump-scared by the appearance of Nassim Nicholas Taleb along the way) - an interesting read, though I do still find Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell more compelling. More recently, I blazed through Dark Archives by Megan Rosenbloom - not for the squeamish, this fascinating deep-dive into the provenance of the few scientifically proven anthropodermic books (ie, those bound in human skin) left me with far deeper thoughts about the nature and history of medicine and the use of one’s corpse after death than I’d anticipated. Next up, a brief sojourn into fiction in my break before Book Two drafting with a long-overdue classic of the fantasy heist genre: Lies of Locke Lamora!

Yours in eager anticipation of autumn rains,
Macey