What happened in September? Resting, re-charging and a little Dusk

Hi team! It’s still just about September, but this’ll be a shortish update. I’ve been trying to recharge over the last few weeks after getting knocked sideways by an illness – thankfully not the dreaded ‘C’-word, but still something that saw me sleeping a lot and generally doing anything other than working and writing.

Thankfully, this also seems to have recharged my brain a little – I’m not entirely sure how season five of Prison Break, both seasons of The Order, the first half of Once Upon a Time and quite a few books managed to do it, but I’m slowly starting to get back into Dusk. I’m still only averaging 10k words a month, which is a bit measly, but I’m feeling better about it, and we’re currently sat at around 69k. It’s definitely going to be longer than Parasites – I’m still four or five chapters off finishing one of the major story strands, and only about a quarter through the other – but that’s pre-edits, of course.

Everything else is on hold, but in the meantime, I’ve written a short blurb for Dusk – hopefully this isn’t too much of a tease; we’re probably looking at a release date of mid- next year, but it’ll be sooner if I can, promise!

You can also read this on my Books page, but here it is:

It’s two years since Kael and Alessia returned from their expedition to find a solution to the big crunch, but things haven’t gone according to plan. Despite an unexpected source of help, Lyra’s resources are being used up faster than ever before, and one of the monstrous creatures from Carthusian, the city-ship, seems to have been sighted in Vulpes, Lyra’s farming city.

With new enemies coming from unexpected places, Vega’s mayor Alhambro is determined to find a faster way to navigate the thinnings linking universes, dispatching Basteel and Slyph into the diplomatic and scientific nightmare in Vulpes. At the same time, Kael and Alessia embark on a mission crossing a forbidden asteroid, an abandoned planet previously home to a super-advanced race and into the unknown.

But as a new, hostile species capable of traversing the thinnings emerges, it seems that the sun is setting on Lyra for the very last time.

I’m psyched about it and can’t wait to bring it out to you all. As ever, take care, stay healthy, and be kind.