It's been more than three months since I finished this story, so I think it's only fair that I notify those of you who might be waiting on word for the print/ebook project. After moving house, etc., I buckled down to write the short stories for bonus material and found that, as with Pyrebound, I have one hell of a time making myself revisit a world I'm done with. My brain really, really wants to move on to the next project. In terms of short stories, I have the beginning of one story featuring Keisha in her pre-emissor days, and the beginning of another story featuring a grown-up Nadia in 2022. I don't even have a good idea for the story that would accompany the middle volume. The two I have are less than half done and have some promise but aren't easy to write and I'm a bad judge of quality given my present mood. I feel the second one mostly functions as a kind of ten-year reunion, though, and the story is sufficient in itself so it might be better to just let my readers imagine the future of this world for themselves. Epilogues veer towards the self-indulgent.
Anyway! As it stands, my wife is going through the book with a frowny face, pointing out every instance of janky, web-serialtastic, published-two-minutes-after-composition quality writing (I know I'm better than a lot of RR stuff; her standards are higher). She's finishing up volume II now. When she's done I plan to take her notes and tear through the draft (I can do that much), simultaneously fixing a lot of early installment weirdness and contradictions, maybe just rewriting important but somewhat underwhelming chapters like For Gods to Grieve. If I suddenly get bitten by inspiration I might come up with short stories too, but I'm not counting on it. Possibly I'll polish the text to the best it can be, then publish it with the best covers I can wrangle on my non-budget, and possibly stub the online version.
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Realistically, Pyrebound has sold all of fifty-four copies to date, and I'm pretty sure I make way more in a single shift at my actual job than I have from those copies, so I'm probably overthinking this anyway. But that's where we stand. I'll try to make the next announcement a link to the actual books, and maybe to my next project as well. Thanks for your patience and support.
