I should have mentioned this in my post yesterday, but all six ebooks in the Elder Empire series are free today through Sunday!

Here's where the Shadow books are hiding.
Here be the Sea books, yar.

Even better, if you own the ebook it looks like you can add the audio version for like two bucks, which means the audiobooks are even cheaper than a normal Audible credit!

And here's some more free content news: today at 3 PM Eastern, Travis Baldree and I will be appearing on a digital convention panel at Denver Pop Culture Con, where we'll be answering some questions and Travis will be reading a two-page excerpt from Wintersteel!

(It's a real excerpt, and while there will of course be some spoilers since it's from the middle of an unreleased book, I removed the most spoileriffic lines. You should be fine unless you are allergic to even the most minor spoilers.)

And I'm still editing Wintersteel today, and I'm in a saxophone duel this afternoon, plus tonight is my stalker's birthday party, so things are getting pretty busy around these parts.

​-Will

I've been working on the second draft of Wintersteel, which is currently at 143,452 words. Making it the longest book I've ever written.

Naturally, I don't know what the final word count will be once I'm through with editing. Usually my books get longer during the editing portion, but the first draft is also usually a lot shorter than this, so we might have to cut significantly. Not sure yet.

But at the moment, I can tell you this thing has some meat on its bones.

By contrast, the three longest Cradle books currently are Blackflame at 111k words, Underlord at 103k words, and then Uncrowned at 93k words.

Wintersteel will almost certainly stay the longest of the series so far, even if we cut it all the way back to the 120k range, but I'll be interested to see where it ends up.

I'm as curious as the rest of you!

As for what this means about the release date, I'm not sure yet. It really depends on how long it takes me to make the changes to the first draft and what the readers have to say about the second draft.

So I'm thinking it will probably be released shortly before Florida rejoins Atlantis at the bottom of the sea.

​-Will