It’s been a long time between updates. Almost a year, in fact. But while this blog has lain idle, I’ve been working away at a revised draft of The Lordless City, which I’m pleased to say is now complete. This draft is even now winging its electronic way to my alpha readers, who will read it and tell me how closely it resembles the story I want to tell.

The second draft of The Lordless City is shorter than the first: down from 157,000 words to 152,000 words. Interestingly, this is the opposite of what happened with the second draft of The Unbound Man, which grew by some 9,000 words. This difference reflects the kind of changes that were required in each case. For The Unbound Man, several sequences in the first draft had to be scrapped and replaced with some entirely new pieces. But there was very little of that for The Lordless City — aside from a small section in part 1, most of the work for this draft involved clarifying, cutting, and generally tightening the story.

Of course, the big question is: when will The Lordless City be out, already? Alas, it’s still too early to tell. Much will depend on the feedback from alpha readers and the editing process to follow. Needless to say, further updates will appear here as they become available — and, I hope very much, with significantly greater frequency than in the past year!