New Years Update
With 2025 behind us, I feel it’s a good time to drop you folks an update. I’ve been quiet for a while. Many of you have never even seen an email from me. So allow me to pull back the curtain a bit and see what I’ve been up to.
The Talavara Prophecy: Book 2 Sneak Peak
The first thing you’ll want to know is that Book 2 of the Talavara Prophecy has crossed several important milestones. The first several drafts are complete, it’s been through the first editorial round, and it looks like it will land in bookstores Summer 2026!
If you signed up for this mailing list, I assume you’ve read The First Whispers of Fate. If not, spoilers ahead.
The working title for Book Two is Red Lilly. It’s a deviation from the whole novel-of-manners vibe in Book One. Proper society is behind us. Aideen is on the run as a wanted criminal now, struggling under the weight of her decisions and terrified of the monster growing inside her. After the events in Book One, she is also desperate to atone for her mistakes.
The story takes us far away from Sona, to Roseglade in the Kingdom of Lyramae. Imagine a fantasy-flavored Savannah with a dash of New Orleans. Without spoiling anything, what happens next is wild and political and violent and hopefully thought provoking. It’s Django Unchained meets Robinhood.
Meanwhile, Hamfast still has an odyssey ahead of him to get home, and the mystery of the Shard he carries deepens.
We also meet new major characters. A giant with a case of amnesia. Leanna, a young girl torn from her life and inducted into the Syani. A priest searching for a missing Shard.
Oh, and I promise it will finally make sense how all these characters and stories fit together. And it’s SO MUCH FUN when it finally happens.
No firm dates yet, but expect Book 2 to land on shelves in 2026.
On Social Media
All the advice out there said I had to promote myself across social media. My publicist insisted I be on all the platforms. So I posted talking-head essays on YouTube. I made TikToks. I posted on Instagram. I had a BlueSky.
And I hated it.
I see so many writers on these platforms turning work into an aesthetic. Candles and corkboards, notebooks and post-its, setting up a camera to film themselves typing on their Macbooks while they sip their writerly tea.
I am not an aesthetic person.
My vibe is somewhere between reindeer herder and the reindeer itself.
I struggled to find a way to do the social media thing in a way that felt honest and authentic. Ultimately I sank a lot of time and mental energy into something that didn’t really grow my readership that much. So I pulled the plug and deleted all the accounts. The vast majority of my sales come from word of mouth and Amazon search anyhow.
I might rejoin YouTube one day, but for now I’m focused on writing books and making video games.
