Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

The Thief and The Demon is on sale this week. Thief gets in trouble, then more trouble, then more trouble, then more. Every choice can lead to death, but he seeks freedom, and, eventually, redemption. The Demon also seeks freedom, but primarily craves power. The two are bound together, and around them are spun webs of intrigue and conspiracy that both, in their own way, want to escape. Dark fantasy written by a real person. Try it.

Last week was a good weekend in writing. In terms of writing it has been another good week. One and a bit fragments have been collaged in plus new material written.

The world rolls on, darkly. As you may know, I write pretty grim fantasies. I want to write a noble, hopeful tale one day. I’ve written out its cosmology and know the shape of the three books it will become. But I’m not ready for it, I need to be a better writer before I start it. The next book I am writing, The Red Palace, is a tale of terrible people who have done terrible things continuing to be terrible to each other and who will *spoiler alert* go on to meet their rewards in various possibly terrible ways. Who will be the hero of that tale? Is there one? *spoiler alert* – yes, kind of.

The Red Palace is my reaction to a lot of what has been happening in the world over the last quarter century. And three millennia: I like my history. It makes explicit a lot of what is implicit in The World Belt novels.

And this week, it does not feel bleak enough, the terrible people not terrible enough. My fiction cannot outdo reality. I used to think that would be easy. Hubris on my part, clearly.

I’m not going to bend the story, change the characters. It is what it is. But goddamn.