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Progress Report August ’26

August 31st, 2026

Delighted to say that sticky summer is now fading into the rear view mirror and the season of falling leaves, tweed and corduroy fast approaches. Much more my speed…

What is UP you say? Well, holidays over the last couple of months of course. Spent a lovely two weeks with the family in Oslo, Gothenburg and Copenhagen. Also visited my usual haunt of Aviles in Spain for Celsius Festival, which continues to become more impressive by the year.

In the arena of book writing the sequel to the Devils, the Heretics, is now copy edited, so the text is basically done, only a proof read and final tweaks to go. Joel Daniel Phillips (who was responsible for the byzantine icon style images in the first book) is even now struggling manfully with the internal art, with magnificent results as always. Let’s say the themes are stained glass and family trees, this time around. Ooh, there’s even what we in the business call copy:

“When saints turn away, devils must do god’s work . . .

Germany trembles on the brink of war. The feuding kings of Prussia and Bavaria are fixed on a collision course, and the crumbling city of Zeitz is trapped between the gathering armies.

Hugo von Klotz will do anything to inherit the place while it still stands. His only obstacles are the six loathsome cousins ahead of him in the line of succession . . . and an outbreak of suspected witchcraft.

Mother Beckert is dispatched to begin an Inquisition, and burn out the sickness of heresy even if she must use heretics to do it. But with a scatterbrained werewolf, a depressed necromancer, and a beggar haunted by visions among her reluctant tools, the cure may prove worse than the disease.

Even she cannot suspect how deeply the rot has burrowed into Zeitz, or guess at the ancient secret buried beneath the city . . .”

Book’s out in May ’27 in the UK and US, but literature never sleeps, so I’m already at work on a first draft of the next book, the third in the series, as yet without a title. Maybe 30-40,000 words in, just very loosely experimenting with the character voices and letting the plot shift around a bit as I go. My plan with this one is to write a first part, then go over it a few times, rewrite a bit, develop the voices of the new characters, get comfortable with what’s working and what’s not before forging ahead and planning the rest. We’ll see whether this freewheeling approach brings me joy as I continue, or whether, as is more usual, I subside into doubt and gloom as the drafting continues, only to emerge into the sunlit uplands towards the end of the process. Maybe.

Still an awful lot going on in the special edition space. I’ve now signed the last latecomers for Lit Escalates special editions of the First Law trilogy and most of those (I believe) have now wended their way to their owners. Pleased to say that it looks as if we’ll be continuing with an edition of Best Served Cold, but that Lit Escalates are going to be collaborating with Curious King, creating a more affordable artist edition below Curious King’s usual three tiers of sumptuous letterpress, with art by Joel Daniel Phillips that’ll match the First Law set but (hopefully) with considerably higher specs than we were able to manage through the kickstarter. Then there are not one, not two, but three different new special editions of The Devils forthcoming, a couple in subscription boxes and one high end letterpress, of which more in due course, as well as the Broken Binding releasing a special edition of The Shattered Sea with some very cool new artwork. I keep expecting the bottom to drop out of this market but for the time being it seems there’s no limit to readers’ appetites for a sprayed edge and a bespoke endpaper…

Looks like the next couple of months as the leaves turn brown I’m going to be largely at my desk, which will make a nice change as I’ve done a lot of events lately. Fair bit of film and TV work on the horizon which as usual I can’t really say much about, but I’ll be trying to make sure book 3 grinds forward at the same time, if at all possible. Then events step up again in November/December, as it looks like I’m doing Guadalajara Book Fair and Dragonsteel Nexus in Salt Lake City, as well as chairing some individual evenings with Garth Nix, John Gwynne, and Pierce Brown in the UK.

And that is all…

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