The Darker Road (at last)

It’s time for my Midweek Recommendation, in which I commend to your attention books or music or movies or anything I find worth recommending.

All right, so maybe I’m cheating a little bit, but I’m going to talk about my new novel The Darker Road for this week’s ‘midweek recommendation.’

For those of you who read my first fantasy series, The Binding of the Blade, I know this has been a long time coming. That series wrapped in late Spring, ’08, so more than 5 years have passed. I do hope, though, that when you dive into my new series The Wandering with The Darker Road that you will find a true reward for all your patience.

You will find that The Wandering is a very different experience than The Binding of the Blade in a lot of ways. The world will feel very different, the main characters are much more flawed, it is in many ways a story of judgement more than restoration, which was the ultimate theme of BOTB. At the same time, there are many common elements, in terms of the massive world and sprawling scope, the fantastical creatures and powers around each corner, etc.

In general, I think I have matured as a writer a good deal since I started The Binding of the Blade. This doesn’t mean that you will automatically prefer The Darker Road to my earlier work, but I still think it is true. I have learned some lessons along the way these last twelve years and hope that you will find the new series to be, perhaps, more polished in some ways than the first.

Some of the common questions I get have to do with series length and publishing schedule, so I’ll mention those things briefly here. I am under contract with AMG for 3 books, so the plan right now is for a trilogy. I would say, though, that the story that begins in The Darker Road is bigger than 3 books, and the tentative plan is for a second trilogy that will continue and complete the story. So, the end of the third book will be an ending, just not the ending of the whole thing.

As for the publishing schedule, the tentative plan is for book 2, which I have given the working title The Lesser Sun to be released in the spring of ’14, and for the third book which I call The Colder Moon to be published in the winter of ’14/’15. Those are hardly firm dates, however, so don’t etch them down on stone anywhere.

I am eager to see what the response to the new book, story, world and characters will be, and so I look forward to hearing from you (and perhaps reading your Amazon review:) soon!