Post baby #2, things are moving along again in my world! Morgan in the Mirror went live today, and last night I sent the first section of Morgan on the Run to my editor. I'm well into writing that one, and already starting to think about the outline for the next Waldgrave book.
I'll admit I'm a little nervous going into a new Waldgrave book. Secrets of the Guardian was published in 2011, and it's been almost five years. I finished writing that series sometime in 2007, so really, it's been almost ten years. Appropriately, that's the approximate time gap for the characters as well. The epilogue at the end of Secrets, where Brandon finally meets his destiny, was set around ten years after Lena made her return to Waldgrave.
I've said it before in previous blog posts, but for those of you who haven't been following me the last 5 years, I have written other books in the Waldgrave universe. Several, in fact. They're unedited and a little disorganized, and I never intended to have them published. I still don't intend to publish the vast majority of them because the stories need more polishing, and some of them might threaten to bore readers to death. Some of them went a little wild and cross-genre, becoming more romance or science fiction than urban fantasy.
I've even already written a very rough and freestyle draft of Brandon's book, a.k.a. "the next Waldgrave book". I wrote it back in 2008(ish), going by the file dates on my computer, and it's currently 60,000 words long. So why haven't I published it, all of these years?
It leans a little more into the SciFi realm, because it does go into what's on the other side of the portal. (I won't be giving any spoilers here on the portal, what it is, where it goes, etc. You'll have to wait for the book. Sorry!) But beyond the genre shift, I initially outlined Brandon's story as a second trilogy, and after I wrote the first one, I found myself enrolled in two Master's degree programs and desperately in need of cash to pay my bills. Writing took a back seat to school and a job to pay for tuition and groceries. (In a grand irony, even with the relatively small following that Waldgrave has, three more books in the Waldgrave universe probably would have given me enough income to write full time by now. But alas--hindsight is always 20/20.)
So there I was. One finished book in a trilogy, ending in a pretty steep cliffhanger, no time to finish the series, and no idea when the time would come around. Would I have been annoyed with an author putting out a cliffhanger without having the next book ready? Yes, I would have. So I kept what I had unpublished and put it on the back burner.
And then I started getting fans for that series. And I started worrying I would disappoint them. And I put it off a few months, and another year, and just until the next series was done...until now.
In October, I am going to rewrite what I have, and hopefully make it worthy of all of the wonderful readers who have written me over the years wanting more from these characters.
Book 4 is coming, people. I hope we're all ready.
Happy reading,
Al
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