Let me begin by apologizing to any regular readers of my site. As I plunged myself deeper and deeper into the final rounds of revisions and edits on my latest novel, The D’Karon Apprentice, I somehow shifted to doing my updates almost exclusively on social media, particularly Twitter and the Facebook Fan Page. If you don’t follow me there, you’ve been missing out on the day-to-day nuggets. But lately the flood of updates has been coming at a stiff enough pace that I can’t really justify packing the info into a single Facebook post, and spreading them out to even on a day is causing me to fall behind. So it is time for the official site to triumphantly surge back to life again! (At least for this one post. I don’t anticipate turning over a new leaf.)
Where do we start?
Well, let’s start with The D’Karon Apprentice, shall we? If you’ve been keeping your eyes peeled, you’ve already seen a neat (and rough) little sneak peek of this story, which is a direct sequel to The Battle of Verril. It releases November 12th, 2015, but the pre-order is available now: iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo. Check out the exceptionally bland Placeholder cover!
There’s a lot to do in order to prepare this for release, but it’s already churning through the patented Lallo Literary Mill. The first round of beta readers are looking at as I type this, my editor is ready to get it at the end of the month, and my cover artist already has the rough idea of what I want on the cover. Once that cover shows up, we’ll kick this thing into high gear. And roundabout August it’ll go into pre-order on Amazon and I’ll really start promoting.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg! Newsletter subscribers got their hands on a fun little side project (hopefully the first of many) called Entwell Origins: Ayna. This is a novella focusing on, you guessed it, Ayna. It tells of her history and how she ended up in the role of Highest Master of Wind Magic in Entwell. It was great fun to write, and as my schedule permits, I’ll probably pick other Entwell natives to write about. Solomon and Calypso leaped to mind, but I’ve since had a request for Azriel, which could be a fun one too. Here’s the cover art for Ayna’s story. It’s by my new cover guy (not a replacement for Nick, but in ADDITION to Nick), Georgi Slavov.
And all of this digging into the Book of Deacon setting has sparked something in a long time and cherished fan (and beta reader, by the way), who has begun fan casting/face claiming the Book of Deacon universe bit by bit. Here are the first two batches:
So good. Some really inspired casting in there. I HIGHLY approve.
Last but not least, something to help non-fans get into the series without having to hunt down and arrange every Book of Deacon title.
Yep! I’ve created a Book of Deacon Anthology! This collects every story from the first five years of Book of Deacon releases, including all three books of the Trilogy plus Jade, The Rise of the Red Shadow, and both previous Newsletter perks: Entwell Origins: Ayna and The Stump and the Spire. Every book involved has received a slight to major formatting upgrade including (gasp) chapters! Yes, The Book of Deacon Trilogy and Jade are split into chapters in this book, addressing one of the most frequent complaints about the series. It’s been submitted for pre-order, but oddly enough, Google Play is the only one to get it through so far. Correction, Amazon has it too, and iBooks! It releases June. 25th on all major retailers. The value of the books within is $10, not to mention it includes two very hard to find stories that have (so far) never been sold separately, but I’m charging $6.99 for it. If you’re a long time fan and have read all of my stuff, there’s not much in there to make the purchase worth your while. I’ve added a short foreword to each book, but those tell anecdotes you’ll have heard a dozen times if you follow me, and there’s a “Message from the Curator” which introduces the series and sets a bit of the timeline, but you can read that in the preview on the sites once it shows up. HOWEVER, if you’ve got friends or family who are interested int the series but haven’t picked up anything (or perhaps only picked up the free book) this is a great way to get the series so far in an easy to consume and economical package.