Volume Two is in revision
It is written. Every chapter exists, start to finish. That is not the same as finished.
Volume Two is called The Sleep of Walili. The draft is complete and has been for a while. People hear that and assume the work is nearly over. It is closer to the opposite.
Revision, on a book built this way, is not polish. Polish is the last afternoon. Revision is walking back through the machine and checking that it actually runs.
Three passes, in this order
Nobody wins by accident. Every outcome in the volume gets traced backwards to the page that made it possible. If I cannot find that page, the outcome is not earned and the scene comes out. This pass is arithmetic, not taste, and it is the one that removes chapters.
Show, never explain. I go looking for the paragraph after the scene — the one that tells you what the scene meant. It is always there in a first draft, because a first draft is a writer reassuring himself. Every one I find is a scene that failed, and the fix is upstream, not in the paragraph.
The mystery keeps its speed. I know what is underneath this story. The only real risk in Volume Two is telling you too early because I have been living with it too long. So I check each reveal against what Tafar knows, not against what I know.
There is a structural problem particular to this volume, and I will say it plainly: it goes underground, and it does not come back up quickly.
Above ground, a book keeps time for free. Weather turns. Light moves. Somebody says it is the fourth morning. Underground, none of that is available. Time has to be carried by the characters — by what they have left, by what they have stopped saying to each other, by how far away the last sound was. Get it wrong and the reader loses the thread of how long this has been going on, which is the one thing that has to hurt.
That is most of what I am doing right now.
No date
I am not putting a month on it. A date announced early is a promise made by someone who has not yet found the problem, and there is always a problem. When it is ready it will be ready in both languages, French first and English behind it, because I translate the series myself.
When it moves, the mailing list hears first — and for a while, only. One email when there is something real to say.
Chapter one, free.
A boy comes down off the mountain with a flute at his belt and no name worth saying out loud. Read it on the site, no account, nothing to sign.