Musing on the Dead

Here's what I've been struggling with: People didn't read Heart of Veridon. Not many people, at least. I appreciate all of you who bought it and read it, but I assure you that you're in the minority of genre-reading individuals. And now I have a contract for book two in the series, which I am finally starting. Took longer than I thought to recover from Horns, but I worked harder on it than I expected. Point is, I now have this project, and I need to decide how to approach it.

Do I make this second book utterly dependent on the first? That automatically limits the people who are going to want to read it. And if someone who doesn't fall into that subset picks up the book, it would be incomprehensible to them. Who is this Emily. What Cog?

The answer is obviously no, we need to make it more independent. Appeal to those who read HoV, follow through on the promise of the narrative, but without cutting out the new readers. It's a challenging thing. I've started to form in my head the changes that will come to Veridon as a result of HoV that will in themselves do a lot of explication of the first book. There's a lot I want to bring to this book, thematically, things that got left out of HoV due to the cut-chase nature of the plot. It will be a fuller book. I hope.

Anyway. It's going to be challenging. It's going to be good. I hope you like it.

And yes, it's still all about Jacob Burn.