The first draft of my fourteenth novel is done. There’s backfilling and revising left, but it should reach you in mid-November.

The Stormcrows tunnel down in an ancient drill the size of a mansion, to reach a city that has been sealed under the earth for three thousand years and is running out of air. Urban os Storm goes along as the translator: a scholar and monster-hunter who has had eighty years to get good at both, and looks about half that. Mara, twenty years his junior and equally long-lived, keeps the peace in the underground city, trying to shield the common folk from the wrath of their deathless, evil Queen. Then this stranger from the Drill takes apart the centerpiece at the Queen’s midwinter feast and hands it out the gate to the city’s children, one at a time, with a greeting for each of them. Mara has served the Queen for decades and dealt with all kinds of scum, but she’s never met anyone like Urban.

It’s a prequel, but it will be numbered book four in the Hunter Healer King series. Urban and Mara are Maxim’s parents, and I feel like their story works better if you already know Maxim and his world. Since it’s a single book rather than a trilogy, and Urban is a bit more urbane than his son, he and Mara get where they’re going considerably faster than Maxim and Chloe did. Still no explicit content. As with the other books in the series, this is a gaslamp fantasy adventure with a romance growing up around the adventure, rather than the other way around.

I’ve been self-publishing for around ten and a half years. I’m a little horrified to realize that Phantom Queen would bring my average to something like 1.33 books a year. And also…I just turned fifty recently. It seems like I ought to have some kind of wisdom to share, but I can’t think of much. Here’s a few suggestions:

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