I reached a milestone in The Crimson Vault early this morning, so that means I can tear myself away from the grueling editing process to bang out a blog post for you lovely gentlemen and ladies.

I'm aware how the phrase "lovely gentlemen" sounds, but I'm not changing it. Take that, The Man.

As you may have noticed, the lovely scarlet-hued image next to me is, in fact, the cover for Book 2 in the Traveler's Gate Trilogy: The Crimson Vault.

Big thanks to Chelsey and Caitlin Bateson for once again doing a fantastic job on the cover! I'd especially like you to take a look at those doors. I love those doors.

This book, at the moment, is longer than House of Blades by about 40-50 pages. I can't promise that it will survive the remainder of the editing process at that length, but who knows; it might end up longer.

Also, right now, it's looking like I'll upload the book around the 29th, to give me as much editing time as possible before I leave for DragonCon. Don't take that as set in stone, though; it will be available before September, but that's all I can guarantee.

And that's all the news that's fit to print, ladies and gentlemen. Except for one thing, I guess: there are now officially over 16,000 readers like you out there who have experienced House of Blades. Big thanks to you folks for spreading the word!

SPOILER WARNING, BUT NOT REALLY: In a few days, I'm planning on putting the first chapter of The Crimson Vault here on the blog, just to give you guys something to chew on for the next week or so. I'd put it up now, but I want to put a bit more polish on it first.

Good idea? Bad idea? You're insane, Will, get back in your cage, oh no he's got it in his mouth, what has science done, we're all doomed, I can't believe we tried to play God, what sort of abomination is this?

Well, this will come as no surprise to many of you, but I won't have The Crimson Vault out by the 10th.

There are many reasons for this, but here are the main two:

1.) House of Blades was far more successful than I expected.
        As a result, I've had way more work to do. When I set the August 10th release date, I expected to have sold maybe 1500 copies by now. Instead, I just crossed thirteen thousand. It apparently takes a lot of work to maintain a successful book. Who knew?
        This also means that your expectations are higher. People liked House of Blades more than I thought they would, which means The Crimson Vault has to be as good as I can make it. At this point, rushing it out like this just wouldn't cut it.
        So, because of House of Blades, I had to effectively write a better sequel than I anticipated in less time than I expected to have.

2.) The Crimson Vault is longer than I anticipated.
        If The Crimson Vault was the length I had expected it to be, I would have finished writing it four or five days ago. Instead, I'm still not done. In fact, I had to almost completely re-write the last third of the story so that it didn't feel rushed or abbreviated. A lot of people felt that I skimmed too much in House of Blades, and I'm trying to avoid that here. After editing, I'm not sure whether it will end up longer than the first book, but it's certainly longer right now.

That said, I will have the book out before the end of August. It will not be September when this book is released. I don't care what stage of the editing process the book's in at that point; if I have to release a draft that still has my margin notes in it, I will do that. If I have to release extra chapters later as free DLC, I will do that.* But I will 100% have it to you this month.

Believe me, I hate to wait for new releases as much as you do, so I'm committed to making your wait as short as possible.

If you have further questions, or would like to tell me what a horrible person I am, please leave a comment or send me an email: <[email protected]>

Now, in a totally unrelated piece of news, a very helpful reader has informed me that the latest draft of House of Blades went out with the text entirely in bold. So if you bought the book in the past four or five days, the text was bold.

That's extremely annoying, and I apologize for it. I've changed it in Amazon's database, and it should be fixed within the next few hours. If this has happened to you, please email Amazon with the problem, and ask them to let you download the new version (as far as I know, this is the only way to get updated drafts of a Kindle book).

Once the upload is available, I will be trying to contact Amazon and have them re-release the latest draft for everyone who has bought House of Blades, so that you all have the newest typo-free--and hopefully un-bolded--version.


*NOTE: These weird things won't happen, I just use them as an illustration of how committed I am to getting it out in August.