As promised, now that Gardens is done with, here’s some news about my new series.

My editors have finally gotten back to me with their first-round edits (if you’re curious about what that means, I explain the process here).  It ended up being a fair amount of work, but since then I’ve worked out a plan for the rewrite that my editors are happy with.  Completion date is scheduled for the end of this year, and the good news is that I started the rewrite at the beginning of this month and I’m ahead of schedule – if I can keep up the current pace I should be done sometime in December.

Rewrites are never fun – they’re much harder than writing new material from scratch – and they’re especially unfun when you’re rewriting something that you’ve rewritten already.  In this case my new book is now on version 6, so it probably won’t come as much of a surprise if I tell you that by this point I’ve had more than enough of re-doing this thing.  Still, I know it has to be done.  Every time I’ve had to do a rewrite of one of my books, I haven’t enjoyed it, but every time that I’ve finished one, the book in question has ended up significantly better.  And making this book good is really, really important.  I’m hoping to keep writing this series for the rest of the 2020s, so the first book needs to be as good as I can possibly make it.

Still, at this point, all the big decisions have been made – it’s just a matter of tuning things up and making lots of little improvements.  With luck I should be done by Christmas, at which point Book 1 will go in for copy-edits and I’ll try to get started on Book 2 as soon as possible.  Even assuming I hit my deadline, this book will have taken a total of 18 months from the first page written to the end of the first-round edit, which is much longer than I’m happy with – I usually aim to get out at least one novel per year.  But when you’re building the foundation of a new series, quality’s more important than speed, so although I’ve been frustrated at the delays, it’ll all be worth it if this new series turns out to be as popular as Alex Verus.  Let’s hope that it is!