So we’re coming up on the Christmas holiday in the West. Happy whatever holidays you celebrate where you are.

By now a few of you have read Petron. Thank you for the lovely reviews and commentary. As I have said, it is really the end of Jessica’s story (for now), but there are places I could go from here. That much ought to be obvious from the way I epilogued everyone.

Personally, I’m the most interested in what Uly and the Bartender do, but I do know a few of you are wanting more Phil Kosnett, for obvious reasons. That’s also on the calendar, but I have a limited number of novel slots available in 2020, so we’ll have to see where we go. Maybe I’ll write shorter stuff for some of your favorite characters.

The great problem in life is having enough time to write all the stories, not in trying to come up with ideas. Any pro writer will tell you the question is “How do I make them stop?”

But we are just in an interlude with Jessica. I’m still in the middle of Valentinian at this moment. Thank you also for the lovely comments on the series so far.

This is space adventure, rather than opera. The difference is scale. In an adventure, you don’t have to keep upping the stakes novel over novel.

Jessica is opera. Always bigger. Valentinian and Dave are adventure. Leading somewhere obviously, but not with humanity and the galaxy at risk. Just an angry wife, betrayed and displaced, and hungry for vengeance.

My apologies in advance, because Phoenix cliff-hangars pretty hard. But in a good way. Like the four before it, this novel comes in around 45k words. I can work longer (Petron came in around 140k) but this is a nice length to tell a single story hard and fast, without having to have all manner of boring and irrelevant side quests along the way.

To make it up to everyone, Princess Rualoh is about 60k. I had too much to cover in order to wrap everything up, but I am quite pleased with the result and hopefully you will be as well.

Make sure you get your pre-orders in now so that the books hit your readers as soon as it gets live.

Additionally, the audio for everyone did not drop originally, but I just looked and Dominion-427 and Phoenix audio are available, and Princess Rualoh will be in a few days when they finish processing everything.

Thanks for staying with me, and lemme know if you have any questions. I’m not done with Valentinian, as you’ll see, but we leave things in a place none of you are going to see coming. Need to go back one of these days and write more.

Cheers,

b