I won’t make my current WIP a big secret: it’s the third installment to the Blackwood Marauders series of action-packed fantasy standalones.
I tend to write the Blackwood Marauders novels as palate cleansers between heavy projects. They’re fun, action-filled fantasies (the old term was sword and sorcery), and they used to be these pulpy, plot-driven, page-turny novels. Obviously, since it’s me, these ones are pretty character-driven, too, just not to the extent my other novels are. They’re just fun. Fun to write, and hopefully fun to read, too. I go a little crazy with the banter, humour, and camaraderie in these books. For the dark, epic fantasy fan, this kind of stuff is a comfort read.
This current novel is aptly titled Lady Blackwood and will be the first of the Blackwood Marauders novels to primarily feature the titular character, Roena Blackwood. For fans of that series, you’ll remember that Roena was one of the main POVs of the first standalone novel, but the structure of that primarily revolved around young Luc’s misadventures. This one’s going to be all Roena, and boy, does she have some misadventures to rival her partners, too:
Roena barely ducked in time. The woman’s blade struck thin air. She spun on her heel and slashed downward. The woman deflected her sword with her dagger and tried to cut low. Roena jumped backward. She wasn’t used to fighting this way. Half the time, she’d taken advantage of her opponents’ lumbering size and strength against them. She’d developed a habit of looking for openings—of finding the limits of her opponents’ weapons and their blind spots and exploiting them in her favour.
She’d never been on the other side of this equation. To battle someone smaller, faster, and more agile than she was…she never imagined it was possible.
“Did Yn Garr send you?” Roena snarled, the third time she managed to avoid the woman’s spinning blade. “Tell him he’s wasting his time. Tell him he’s wasting his money! Killing me won’t change a thing!”
She heard movement behind her. At least three of her soldiers—her ex-soldiers, she reminded herself—had caught up with them at last.
“Get her,” the assassin hissed.
“Hey, if we kill her, do we split the reward money?” Orus’s voice.
“This isn’t the time!” the woman snapped.
“Rorar’s dead and Ben’s cracked his head,” Orus said. “You didn’t say this was going to be dangerous.”
“She—she’s your employer,” the woman gasped. “You should know what she’s capable of!”
“We thought she just cleaned the shop and did odd errands,” Orus grumbled. “You never told us she could fight!”
Roena could’ve sworn she saw a vein pop on the assassin’s forehead.
If I finish this before spring, we’ll be gunning for a release before Outlaw Mage arrives. Let’s see what happens.
Since you made it all the way here, you may be interested to know that we have a digital boxset of Legacy of the Lost Mage available in our (brand new) store–and you can get it for much cheaper than if you buy the ebooks from Amazon!
