New Series Announcement

As those of you who’ve been following my posts may know, now that the Alex Verus series is finished, I’m working on a new project.  I started writing notes for it late last year, and I think now’s a good time to give you all some early news!

So here are some bits of general info:

• The new project is going to be another series of novels, each of which will probably be roughly around the length of the Alex Verus books.  I don’t have an exact idea of how long the series will be, but if I had to make a wild guess, it’ll be a little shorter than the Alex Verus series, say 5-10 books.  This is very speculative, however.
• I haven’t sold (or shown) the series to any publishers yet.  So it’s possible that it’ll be rejected, or there’ll be some issues with contract negotiations that cause some disastrous breakdown.  However, if I had to guess, I think the new series is probably going to be traditionally published in the same way that Alex Verus was.
• The genre is going to be urban fantasy, but the series has no connection to the Alex Verus universe.  This is a completely new setting.

And here’s some info about Book 1:

• I started writing the first draft in late June.  Progress has been good, and right now the manuscript’s sitting at a bit under 25,000 words.  Using the Alex Verus books as a baseline, that means I’m probably around 25% done.
• If all goes perfectly, I’ll finish the book by the end of the year, about a month after Alex Verus #12 comes out.  Though even if I do, the most likely release date is going to be somewhere in late 2022 or early 2023.  Writing and publishing is a slow business!
• Unlike Fated, this book has been planned from the beginning as the first in a series.  This has meant that I’ve been able to do the world-building first and the story second (with the first Alex Verus books, it was mostly the other way around).

As you’ve probably noticed, this is all very general.  More detailed information about the book will come later – I’m keeping the specifics a secret for now!

I’ve already built up quite a bit of setting notes and world-building, and I’m adding more and more as I go, so once I have a publishing agreement I’ll probably put up a series of world-building articles on this blog, in the same way that I did for Alex Verus with the Encyclopaedia Arcana.  Though they’ll obviously contain a lot of spoilers, so I might decide not to post them until after the first book’s release date.  We’ll see!