...apparently!

As you may have figured out last time, when I shared the cover for Soulsmith (Cradle, Volume Two), that's the book I'm currently working on. I was going to write the final installment for Elder Empire next--in fact, I only wrote Unsouled to have something to release in the 6-8 month drought that it takes to a pair of books simultaneously--but the reaction to Cradle, Volume One has been so positive and enthusiastic that I jumped on to the sequel immediately.

Case in point, it gathered 100 Amazon reviews in exactly one month. 88 of them are five-star, 97 are positive, and 99 are at least pretty good. The only really negative review just said "boring."

Therefore, since installments of Cradle take half the time to write as installments of Elder Empire AND seem to create twice the goodwill, I decided it would be foolish to delay Soulsmith.

Keeping in mind that this is a release estimate, that I'm not committing to anything until I finish the book and announce a specific date, here's the deal: Soulsmith in September, OKAK early next year, Traveler's Blade after that, Cradle Volume 3 squeezed in the cracks here somewhere, and short stories to the mailing list every month.

This is looking uncomfortably like a full-time job. Curse you, adulthood!

Thanks to everyone who read Unsouled, thanks for leaving reviews and recommending it to your friends, and thanks everyone reading this for giving me a full-time job that lets me make up stories about swords and monsters for a living!

-Will

P.S. I'm not sure if I mentioned this or not, but Of Dawn and Darkness has been available in paperback for quite a while now. Just in case you were waiting on that while I forgot to announce it. I would have made a post about it like two months ago, but Amazon crossed its wires after the book was released and deleted the Darkness paperback and replaced it with this. That took forever to resolve, but everything's correct now!

If you're signed up for the mailing list, the new story is going out right now! It's actually a deleted scene from Of Darkness and Dawn, showing a historical interaction between the ancient Consultant's Guild and the Great Elders.

I've been saving it for a while, because I couldn't figure out where to use it in the books. Hope you enjoy it!

In other news,

...coming soon.