Down with the Queen is currently at just over 80,000 words, which is only 13,000 shy of what Born a Queen was. With the scenes currently left to the book in my head, I’m expecting to finish the rough draft sometime this coming week, likely with 95,000-105,000 words. I can’t be more precise because I’ve learned I’m pretty bad about estimating actual lengths of a novel.

That being said, assuming I finish at some point this week or early next week, I’ll be going through the book again from the beginning and fleshing out details and refining things to what I consider the actual first draft. At this point I can tentatively say I expect to release Down with the Queen in late March or early April. No matter what, I’m avoiding April 1st to ensure that no one thinks I’m just making a poor joke.

The cover art for Down with the Queen is looking good so far, and I expect to get the final piece by June Jenssen sometime this week. I’m looking forward to sharing it with everyone, as I’m a sucker for good art. I’ve also been in discussions with her for doing other artwork for characters from Ancient Dreams, and possibly a novella I’ve hinted at for the universe, but I’m not going to say more than that, not until I’m certain it’s happening.

Also, the production of the audiobook of Marin’s Codex is proceeding as well, and last I heard was slightly ahead of schedule! This likely means it’ll be out in mid-March or so, likely a couple of weeks before Down with the Queen, but there’s no guarantee. I’ll let everyone know if something goes wrong with it, but I don’t expect it to happen.

Now, as to a bit of randomness that I realized yesterday. I was figuring out scheduling for the year, and I realized something that’s potentially problematic. I’m going to a convention in Seattle in May, a gaming convention called PaizoCon, and it’s extremely likely that I won’t have a book done by that point. I really, really don’t want to get thrown out of my groove by a convention in the middle of it. Because of that, I may do some work on the Ancient Dreams omnibus at that point, as well as doing some short stories to stock up for the newsletter. I’ve always said I wanted to tell the story of why Albert was under house arrest… maybe I’ll get the chance to tell it. I also may do something with Chris and company from A Date Gone Awry. We shall see!