Along with the release date for The Wrath of Monsters, I share several other updates of interest:
Deets on The Allison Lee Chronicles Volume 4
A new dark fantasy short story
A new reader magnet
A recent podcast interview
Mark Your Calendars!
There is big news to announce in the world of Allison Lee! I have a release date for book three. As I suspected for some time now, The Wrath of Monsters will be an early summer book released in time for all those book dragons getting out of school. Drum roll, please.The Wrath of Monsters will hit bookshelves everywhere on June 19, 2024!
Volume 4 Update
Of course, a busy scribe doesn't rest on their laurels just because they have a book coming out! At least, I certainly don't. Oh no, I am busily hacking away at the rough draft for the fourth and final volume in The Allison Lee Chronicles. As I've mentioned before, once I've finished book four, I have plenty of other projects lined up that I can hardly wait to begin. But first things first, I need to polish off Allison's adventures.
With a bit of good fortune, book four will be out in 2025, toes and fingers crossed. So what are the stats on the fourth volume? Here are the numbers:
So far, I've knocked out 40 chapters. 40! If you read the previous books, you'll know Dragons Walk Among Us and The Blood of Faeries both clock in at around 40 chapters. Am I setting myself up for a monumental job at the butcher block, cutting away the fat? Maybe.
The chapters average 1450 words. So the chapters are short (and hopefully punchy!).
I have another 20 to 30 chapters left to go…we'll compromise at 25. Right now, the estimated word count for book four is 94,000 words. Perfecto! Ideally, the novel will come in at around 85,000 to 90,000 words, so somewhere in the realm of 94,000 up to 100,000 words for the draft is perfect. Of course, the draft for The Wrath of Monsters ended up being about 127,000 words, so you never know!
Revising Short Stories
Recently, I saw a call for submissions for dark fantasy. I wasn't planning to submit short stories anytime soon, but I thought I might have something that fits the bill. You can read the result for free over on Altered Reality Magazine.
New Reader Magnet
I've had my previous reader magnet out there for several years. I wrote the sci-fi story Project Darwin for a charity anthology supporting Australia back when the country suffered major fires.
In the story, the genetic material for Earth's flora and fauna is being transported to Mars for safekeeping, and the hope is that one day, the lifeforms will flourish on the red planet. Of course, not everything goes to plan.
My new reader magnet is a story I wrote in 2019 called The Wall, originally published on Fiction on the Web. It's a dystopian yarn about a future America. Some citizens are hellbent on escaping the country but can't. The writing is similar to what you find in The Allison Lee Chronicles. To read the story, simply sign up for my newsletter.
New podcast interview
If you'd like to listen to yours truly blather away about The Allison Lee Chronicles, speculative fiction, and writing in general, check out my interview on the The Mighty Book Podcast. It was great fun chatting books with fellow author and podcast host Ryan M. Oliver.