The one (and only) big advantage of being sent to far-away places in service of the day-job is suddenly finding myself with lots of free time at very strange hours of the day. Even in sub-urban Los Angeles, there really isn’t a huge amount of touristy stuff that I want to do when I’ve just woken up a three o’clock in the morning. Actually, mostly what I want to do is have breakfast. However, it’s also turning out to be a fine time to get some writing done, and so King of the Crags has raced ahead. Word count is sitting at 113k and the book is very nearly finished (the very first draft, at least). With a bit of luck it’ll be done in time for the proofs of the Adamantine Palace to arrive next week. It’s not going to be any longer than The Adamantine Palace, but the chapter count is a little lower which might please a few people. There’s more dragon, too, but you’ll still all have to wait until book three for certain mysteries to be resolved.

And the other America news is that a deal has been struck and The Adamantine Palace and all its little friends will be being published in the US as well. More when I know it.

I was kind of hoping that rewriting King of the Crags from the start, given the revised ending to The Adamantine Palace, would cause the circumstances of two rather important characters ending up in a room together with a crossbow and a heady portion of murderous intent to go away. Sadly, the character who contrived for this to happen has still managed to do so.

Bloody pesky meddling characters.

Crags has reached about 65000 words.

Bear with me on the numerous typos and other mistakes littering this passage. The keyboard writes and having writ moves on, and doesn’t come back to sort that sort of thing out until the very end.