This book is currently in the hands of the final editor. I’m doing the last few touches afterwards. I’ve set the release date for April 5, 2017, to allow myself time to finish and edit Sapphire’s Flight, the third book, and release it two months later. One thing: World Tree Publishing will not be publishing this book or the next. I will be self-publishing them.
This decision came after much deliberation. The thing is, my publisher is so small I’m not sure it even qualifies as “small press”. It’s run by my good friend, Quenby Olson and her husband, Timothy. Our royalties are so generous that they don’t even really make money out of this thing. Quen and Tim, who runs his own guitar-repair business, have to work double time to get our books out there. Quen also has books of her own to release, as well as three other authors in the finishing stages of their books on the roster. Did I mention Quen also has four kids?
My husband, Mikhail, has generously offered his help to release the rest of this series under a division of our technical writing/industrial maintenance business, Sunbear Solutions. He will function as the editor from this point onward (and has already pointed out so many errors in Jaeth’s Eye that I wonder why I didn’t thrust it into his hands before publishing in the first place). This project was our baby from the beginning, anyway, and he is the best candidate for spotting plot errors. He also seems to have an unhealthy crush on Sume alon gar Kaggawa, but that’s neither here nor there.
The rest of the World Tree editors, including Quen, have offered to pitch in where necessary. It feels good to have friends who believe in you. I would not be here without them.
A few changes will be expected, of course, as this series changes hands.
I’m hoping to include a few maps within Aina’s Breath, including an improved map of Jin-Sayeng (which appears in the hard copy of Jaeth’s Eye, but not the e-book edition). We will also be including a character list as this series, by this point, has already quite doubled in cast size.
My contract for Jaeth’s Eye with World Tree Publishing runs out in three years. The plan is to re-publish a definitive edition, which would be a cleaner copy and would contain a few planned extras. Anyone who already owns a copy of Jaeth’s Eye can receive this for free.
Aina’s Breath, of course, is a continuation of The Agartes Epilogues, picking up exactly where Jaeth’s Eye left off. New characters are introduced and the action proceeds at a much faster pace than Jaeth’s Eye (which doesn’t pick up until the second half of the second act). We also get a clearer picture of some concepts introduced in Jaeth’s Eye, including how the agan works.
Stuff happens that readers will either love or hate–I should probably warn people in advance that if you think Jaeth’s Eye is supposed to have romance, you’re dead-wrong. Read those parts again. And again. Consider the point of view and where each character is coming from. As I like to tell my readers (well okay, just the one) who pester me about character motivations, “These characters lie. They lie to each other, they even lie to themselves. Pay attention.”
Get Jaeth’s Eye to get started on The Agartes Epilogues.
