In the last update I talked about the next Eldon Murphy book (A Darkness Mirrored), which is scheduled to go live on November 8th, which is now less than three weeks away. I'm happy to announce that A Darkness Mirrored has finished up the editing and formatting process and the cover has been finalized.
That's great for two reasons, firstly because that means I've been able to load it up to iTunes, where it is now available for pre-order. Secondly because that means I can do a cover reveal!
Geoffrey has been called a lot of things: warrior, werewolf killer, slave, lover…vampire…soulless. They are all the truth. He's killed hundreds, possibly even thousands of people without a single regret, but that's only part of the truth.
This is the story of the one and only person who called Geoffrey father, the story of an orphan that Geoffrey took in and raised, the girl who would become the woman that he would sacrifice everything for.
This is Lucy's story.
As I've been doing for the few new releases, I'll be discounting A Darkness Mirrored down from $4.99 to $3.99 for the first week, so if you're an iTunes customer go out and purchase your pre-order copy. If you buy your books from Amazon or somewhere else, you'll want to make sure you set a reminder on your phone or double-check that you've signed up for the Eldon Murphy mailing list at eldonwrites.blogspot.com.
The next bit of news is that the first full Dark Reflections novel (Disillusioned) is currently out to my advance readers. Once I hear back from them, Disillusioned will just need a blurb and a cover and then it will be ready to be loaded up for preorders.
When I write it all out like that it sounds like Disillusioned is just around the corner and I halfway want to push forward the release date for it, but I've decided to go ahead and schedule Disillusioned for a January 23rd release date so as to avoid the kinds of delays that I ran into with Shattered Ties.
In other news, I've done my first pass of the second Dark Reflections novel and I've sent it on to Katie to do a read through and let me know what she thinks of it. Still early days there, but everything is still on track from a scheduling perspective and I'm happy with how it's turned out. I started Dark Reflections with two main goals in mind. The first goal, that of showing just how broad of an impact one of the key characters from Reflections actually had on the world, is advanced by nearly every page of every Dark Reflections story. The other goal is still going to require at least one more book (and honestly it will probably end up requiring two more books), but this second Dark Reflections novel establishes massive chunks of the foundation I'm going to need in order to make that piece of the master plan happen. Even better, this book (Adri's book as I'm calling it) has opened my eyes to something major that I think needs to happen in the main Reflections story arc.
Sorry, I'm not going to give away any more hints, but I think it's going to really ratchet up the tension in the series.
The last thing that I should probably cover off in this update is the fact that I've finished the rough draft for the next Reflections book. This one is going to be focused on Jasmin, Ben, and Geoffrey (from the Reflections story arc I've written as Eldon Murphy).
It's hard to explain how nervous I was about actually going ahead and merging these two storylines, and that was complicated by the fact that I'm having a hard time generally speaking when it comes to deciding exactly what order the post-Riven storylines needs to be written in. I knew I couldn't do Ash, Kristen and Isaac's story yet, and I was pretty sure that I couldn't take you all off with Jess and Wyatt.
Rachel's story is another that I think is going to need to come a few books down the road because there are several things that need to take place with everyone else before you'll all be ready to really understand some of what Rachel is going through.
In the end I used some fuzzy logic to narrow things down a bit further and decided that Jasmin and Ben needed the next chapter of their story told. Originally Jasmin and Ben's book was supposed to be just them and Geoffrey, but as I started writing it I kept worrying that the storyline was too thin. I added in another storyline, essentially a third point of view, partially because I was worried that I didn't have enough material in this particular story, and partially because there is a certain individual from A Darkness Mirrored that I really wanted to get back to. I wrote a chapter or two of that third point of view, and then got so caught up with what was happening with Geoffrey, Jasmin and Ben that almost before I knew it I was only a chapter or two from the end of the book and I still hadn't fleshed out the third point of view.
Given that the Geoffrey, Jasmin, Ben piece of the book was up in the 90,000+ word range, I went back and stripped out the third viewpoint and finished off the book. I won't be reading back through this particular book until sometime in December, so I don't have a final opinion on certain aspects of it, but I can say that this one introduces a few more breadcrumbs as far as some of the things behind the scenes that are driving the overall story arc. They are incredibly subtle, but offhand I can remember three separate hints that I included in this one and they lead to some pretty huge revelations in some of the upcoming books.October is now halfway over and I need to give some more thought as to which book to write next. That's a question that's still a little up in the air, but I'm super excited to be able to get through all of the editing, formatting, print layout and the like so that I can get back to writing again sometime in the next week or two.
