Benedict Jacka

February’s almost done, spring’s nearly here, and here’s a brief overview of how things are going with the Inheritance of Magic series!

Inheritance of Magic #5 is coming along well.  It’s currently sitting at around 25,000 words and making good progress, and I’m expecting to reach the 30,000 word mark by the end of the month.  30,000 is about the 1/3rd point for my books (they usually come in at around 90k or so) – my ideal is to aim for 15k a month so as to produce a 90k first draft in six months.  I haven’t managed that for the last few books, but this one is currently on track for that, which is putting me in a good mood!  Of course, I’m sure all that will be delayed once I have to start work on the edits for book #4, but I’m hopeful that I can keep making progress on #5 in the meantime.

Speaking of the edits for book #4, I haven’t had them back as yet – I did finally get a message from my editor, but it was of the ‘sorry it’s late, we’ll try to get it done soon’ type.  This unfortunately does happen from time to time in traditional publishing and there’s not much authors can do except make the best of it.  However, it does make me VERY grateful that I decided to just forge ahead with book #5 rather than waiting on the edits for book #4 first.  If I’d chosen to wait, I’d be bouncing up and down with frustration right now, imagining my projected completion date for book #5 receding farther and farther into the distance.  As it is, I can just shrug, say ‘oh well’, and get on with the more interesting work of writing the next book.  It’s done wonders for my general mood.

As regards the website, I’m finally planning to get back into continuing the Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft series.  Last week was Country Affinities, and the next one I’m planning on doing is a one- or two-article series on sigl attunement.  After that I’m planning to go back to the series on the drucraft branches – the next one on the list to cover is Life.  (I’ll probably wait a while before doing Primal and Dimension, since neither have played big parts in the story as of yet.)

And that’s it for now.  Next week should be more worldbuilding posts.

First three chapters of Book #5 in the Inheritance of Magic series are done.  This is much faster than usual for me (I only sent off the manuscript for book #4 three months ago), so I’m quite happy!

No other news except that I’ve got a new computer, which means I’ve had to update my word processing software for the first time in several years.

Things are continuing as before.  Book #5 is making good progress.

Still haven’t heard from my publishers.  I think this might be the longest I’ve waited for a set of edits.

Book #5 of the Inheritance of Magic series is going well!  I’ve got about two chapters done and should finish the third by around the end of the month.

Still haven’t had the edits back on Book #4.  At this point it’s been radio silence for two and a half months, which is longer than usual – in the past I would have been very stressed out by this, since I would have felt that I couldn’t start the next book until I was completely done with the previous one, but since I’m going with my new approach of “whatever, I’ll just keep writing and things will sort themselves out somehow” I’m far more relaxed about it.  It’s actually rather nice;  I think I’ll keep doing my books this way from now on!

For those who don’t have it already, the second Alex Verus novel, Cursed, is currently being promoted as an Amazon Kindle deal.  It’ll be $1.99 until the 18th of January.  (The offer is US and Canada only, as far as I know.)

Hope everyone’s New Year went well!  I had a good break and now I’m back to work.  Here’s what’s going to be happening with the Inheritance of Magic series in 2026.

Inheritance of Magic #4 is still with my publishers.  I haven’t heard anything from them for a while, but as of the last time we talked, the plan is still to release around 3rd November 2026.  Of course, this assumes there aren’t any major delays or issues with rewrites, but the last couple of books didn’t have any massive problems as far as that went, so I’m hopeful that the same will be the case this time.

One slight issue is that I still haven’t had the first-round edits back for book #4.  (For an explanation of what ‘first-round-edits’ are, look here.)  The amount of time my editors take to get back to me with their edits varies – sometimes I get them back in only a month, sometimes it’s longer, and in this case, it’s been longer.  In the past I’ve often been a bit annoyed by this, since it’s left me in the position of wanting to start the next book, but feeling like I can’t do so until the last book is finalised.  This time, I’ve decided to take a different approach and just start book #5 anyway.  Which has actually been going very well – I got a lot of notes written over the December period, and started writing on the 3rd of January.  So far I’m about 8 pages in, which isn’t very much in the grand scheme of things, but is actually quite a big deal for me.  I often find that two of the bigger hurdles in a new book are writing the first words, and finishing the first page – getting past both of those often takes me a long time, so I’m very happy to have them both done.  If I can keep up this pace I’ll actually have the first 3-chapter section finished by the end of January, which would make me very happy.

Of course, this all assumes that I’m not changing anything major in book #4.  But at this stage of my career I’m a lot more confident in my writing than I was in the early stages of the Alex Verus series, which makes me more willing to look at a newly-finished manuscript and decide ‘this is basically good’.  So I’m not expecting to be doing a big rewrite of Inheritance of Magic #4 in the way I did with Alex Verus #1 and #5.  I will have to make some changes, which will probably take a fair amount of time, but with a bit of luck I might be able to do those alongside writing IoM #5.  I’ve generally found it very doable to do the copy-edits for a previous book while working on the first draft of the new one;  I’ve never tried doing the same for first-round edits, but it can’t hurt to try!  At worst I’ll have to pause Book #5 for a bit while I take care of Book #4, in which case I’ll at least have made a bit of progress.  At best I might be able to do them in parallel, which might be a long-term solution to the slowdown problem that I wrote about back in November.  If I can overlap ‘first-round-edits on book X’ with ‘first draft of book X+1’, then that’ll speed up my per-book writing time by a good few months, which could actually get me back up to 1 book a year again.

. . . Hopefully.  This is all still very speculative.  But it’s worth a go!

So for now, I’m going to keep working away at Book #5 while waiting to hear back from my editors about Book #4.  I’ll let you know once I do!

Hope your New Year’s went well, and that 2026 is starting off on a good note for you all!

I had a quiet holiday season;  not too much news to report for now.  We’re getting into the lead-up period to me starting work on Book 5, but I’ll write a more detailed overview of how things are looking for the Inheritance of Magic series next week (when hopefully I’ll have heard something from my publishers).

Hope that you had a good Christmas yesterday, and that the rest of your holiday season is a good one!