Hey all –

Just a real quickie as it’s some godawful time in the morning and I’m only up due to an ongoing bout of insomnia. Guess what I’ve been working on while I can’t sleep, these past few weeks?

No less than the final, final edits of Book 2. It’s been through two separate editors, it’s been formatted (for the most part) and is being beta’ed as we speak! And all I need now is a good chunk of time to get the damn toc.ncx working (took SIX attempts for book 1, you know!) and I’m good to upload.

Also, looking for advance reviewers so if I haven’t already contacted you and you’d like to review it, do give me a shout.

While we’re on the subject, I should warn you, it’s not the book you’re expecting (quite literally!).

At the end of Book 1 there was a sneak preview of the book that was to have followed, which was The Mother and dealt with the attempt to smuggle the Mother of the Shantar people out of her own land and across to Mardon City, heartland of the nation with whom her people were at war ten years previously.

However, feedback on Book 1 was that it was too short, and that you were all desperate to know what happened to Nereia before cutting to the other plot strand.So, a certain amount of rewriting later, I’ve swapped round some parts of the story to make it fall into more novel-sized chunks.

So: Book 1 of On Dark Shores, which is The Lady will be followed by (new) Book 2 – The Other Nereia. This is another novella, about 40k words in length. This will be released separately for all you who have the first book already, but also as an “omnibus” edition comprising 1&2 together, and this is the edition which should appear in paperback later in the year. (I’m just talking to someone about the cover now, which is very exciting).

Lastly, The Mother will now be Book 3.  Quite a lot of it is already written – the first 90k words or so – and there’s more story to come to even when you consider that I lose about 10k words of every 50k in the editing, that should still be a full-length novel (though don’t ask me when it’s likely to be released!).

And after that?

Well, there’s a good two books already planned out, and another two or three places they’ll be going after those, so it’s not going to be the shortest series you ever came across.

Should be fun going along for the ride though….

Anyhow, I must go as it’s way past 5am and I have to get to work; but just so you know, it shouldn’t be more than a week or so getting ODS2 onto Amazon (a bit longer in some of the other outlets maybe) so –

Watch this space!!

JAC