There's a nasty splinter on that ladder sir
As I seem to have fallen into a one-a-month-around-the-15th routine with these emails, the next one will come out after the release of THE SWORD DEFIANT. I am legally obliged to beg you to preorder it from the bookstore/online retailer/mysterious stranger in the alleyway of your choice.
There's an annotated chapter up at Civilian Reader, if you want a taste.
Also, I'm doing a live web chat with Tales from the Green Dragon on Sunday the 15th, and another with the Rookery on Saturday 22nd.
And my panel at Cymera has been officially announced - it's War Stories. I'm reading Anna's A Woman of the Sword now and greatly enjoying it.
Strange days here, not only related to the upcoming launch. I handed in drafts of nearly everything I was working on (the Heart campaign, Moria, Lands of the Firstborn II, Ocean Game), so it's been two weeks of longer-term planning, doing smaller bits and pieces, signing 700 bookplates (and another 500 tip-ins are arriving next week), reading and researching. I have never surfed anything in my life, but I assume it's a bit like that - paddling around in the water, feeling a little adrift, but waiting for the swell of the next wave. (In this metaphor, all the many editors coming back to me with redlines at the same time is the wave crashing over my head and drowning me.)
Also, my father died. I have never met him or spoken to him; I only ever saw him on television or in photos, and I watched his funeral on a livestream. He remains and will now forever be an abstraction more than an absence, a concept to be redefined.
But yeah, strange, strange days.
I shall keep paddling on, and so should you.
After you pre-order, though.