It feels strange to be picking up with a series I’d more or less stopped writing years ago. I’m officially working on book 3 of the New Aeneid Cycle. There, I said it.

I hadn’t expected to be doing so, quite honestly. As you can see from the left column over there (to the left, as you can probably imagine), the series consists thus far of A Shadow in the Flames and A Memory in the Black. I first published ASITF in late 2007 in paperback, mostly just to be able to get it out of my mind so I could move on to writing other books. Yet in the time since, people would often ask, upon hearing I’d published a novel, “Can I get it on Kindle?” I’d gotten tired of telling them no, so last June saw the release of the revised version for Kindle.

It’s a different publishing world than it was in 2007. (Strange how only half a decade can bring so much change!) My experience with getting ASITF to Kindle went so smoothly that I decided to finally release A Memory in the Black. After all, it was mostly finished already. I’d simply not bothered to release it for logistical reasons which, these days, are moot. With a bit of final polishing and a cover design by Amalia Chitulescu, it came to Kindle on August 20th. To date, there have been over 2,000 downloads and the average Amazon review is 4.5 stars!

And so, with what appears to be a growing audience for the series (and some plans of mine to further widen that audience) coupled with some troubles at getting a different manuscript project past the outlining stage, I decided that, hey, I should write book #3! So far, it’s a bit of a challenge picking up where I left off. The act of getting AMITB ready for publication did help me re-acquaint myself with the characters, and I do know where I want things to end up by the end of book 3 (this is a trilogy, by the way), but I don’t yet know quite how to get there, each character’s part, or how to put it all together. I’m having to re-evaluate some long-held ideas for book 3, but I’m also finding new and more interesting options.

But it’s still in the early stages. For those of you who’ve finished book 2, however, I can tell you: I DO know what’s going to happen with the, um… Well, you’ve read it. You can probably guess to what I’m referring. The working title for book 3? Here Be Dragons.

So why do I call it book 5 in the title? After writing AMITB, I wrote two other manuscripts: a comedic contemporary fantasy titled Murdering Zeus for Fun and Prophet and a more serious contemporary fantasy titled A Memory of Dragons. (Okay, so I have a thing for memory and dragons.) I’ve not forgotten about these! But that’s all I’ll say about them in this entry…

Incidentally, watch this blog and my Twitter feed for more news about A Shadow in the Flames in a little while…