Let me tell you a story.

Over half a decade ago I and a friend of mine wrote a book. It was half a lark, something to do while we were both being tormented by our respective PhD programs, but it became something quite serious, and then it became Line and Orbit, which was our co-debut novel. We loved it. Critics loved it. Readers seemed to mostly love it. Love love love.

We didn’t explicitly plan for a sequel, but we left the ending very much open for one. Because hey: characters we adored, world we adored, and the story didn’t feel like it was necessarily done. So after a while we started writing one.

And this was when the snags began.

Snags happen when you’re writing a book. Sometimes lots of snags. Life is sort of a thing. My co-author eventually needed to leave to spend more time with her dissertation (and she graduated and is sort of fucking amazing). I scrapped almost everything and started again from scratch. Then there were additional issues of a variety of kinds, and I ended up having to scrap that (complete) draft and write another (complete) one. Which also hit a wall. Lots of shuffling around. Lots of scrambling and throwing of chalk and erasers and turning over of tables. And at the end of it, when the dust settled, I had a sequel to Line and Orbit and no home for it.

This was, to say the least, troubling. Because it’s very hard to sell the sequel to a book absent the first one, if the sequel can’t stand pretty much entirely on its own, and even then. I thought I might have to self-publish, which I badly didn’t want to do – nothing at all against self-publishing, it’s something I’ve done, but I just didn’t have the time or the capital to do it the way I wanted. I shopped the book around a bit. No takers. I began to wonder if this story would ever see the light of day unless I did it all myself, and who knew when I would be ready to do that.

Well.

I can now announce that an angel has arrived in the form of Riptide Publishing.  The Line and Orbit sequel is happening.

It’s in the editing phase right now and will be published at the end of the summer. The final book in the trilogy – yes, it’s one of those – will be published in the fall. A third book – a sort of prequel – will see a release this coming winter, hopefully just in time for the holidays.

That’s three books from me, all in the next few months. I have a lot of work ahead of me. But it’s work I’ve been waiting a long time to be to do. I’m so, so grateful to Riptide for stepping up and being there when I really needed someone to save me and these books, and I can’t wait to do this work with them.

Adam and Lochlan also have a lot of work to do. They have a world to save. Many of them, actually. You’ll see them again soon.

In the meantime: Dance party.