It’s finally here!! The long-awaited cover to The Hidden Queen has arrived, and it is fantastic. Darin Bales is the moody nocturnal heartbreaker you never knew you needed in your life.
Desert Prince cover by Tommy Arnold
It was always the plan for The Desert Prince, book 1 of the Nightfall Saga, to feature Olive Paper as both main character and cover star, and for book 2 to feature Darin Bales in the same way. You may remember the Olive cover was done by the indomitable Tommy Arnold, featuring Olive in fighting fit out on the scorched and sunlit Krasian Desert.
Due to a scheduling conflict, Tommy was not available for book two, but we were immensely fortunate to have the amazing Martina Facová not only take his place at bat, but hit it out of the fucking park.
(Did I get that right? Sportball metaphors are not usually my thing.)
Darin Bales playing pipes in moonlight by Dominik Broniek
Darin Bales sketches by Dominik Broniek
The results were nothing short of brilliant. I love Darin’s emo vampire farmboy vibe, with his precious pipes and the dreaded demon doorway frame, mirroring the detailed Krasian-style doorway framing Olive in book 1. Darkness is falling, and Darin’s night eyes are coming to life, along with the shadowy powers he inherited from his demon-eating parents.
Darin was already a favorite for many readers in The Desert Prince, but more than a few of you lamented that he was more supporting cast than protagonist. In The Hidden Queen, Darin truly has his chance to shine.
Darin Bales may have inherited some of his parents’ magic, but it has come at a cost neither of them had to pay. Darin’s senses are too powerful, feeding far more information than he can hope to filter and interpret. As with many sensory diverse people in real life, Darin’s gifts can often seem like a curse—an insurmountable barrier to having a normal life (if there even is such a thing).
Darin struggles to connect with people. To understand their jokes and facial expressions, to comprehend their feelings even when he can smell their emotions.
Darin doesn’t like to fight. He can’t stand crowds. Or bright sunlight. He hates loud noises, strong smells, food with too many ingredients. He doesn’t like to be touched. When Darin’s senses get overwhelmed, there isn’t much he can do but hide and curl up, waiting for the offending input to pass.
But the demons have his mam, and Darin Bales will be corespawned before he leaves her to them.
Demon Cycle book 1, The Painted Man, was first published in the UK in late 2008, followed quickly by its American counterpart, The Warded Man, in early 2009. This not-so-little book I had spent the last seven years working on had finally become a real boy.
Up until that point I had been working in medical publishing, and while I never hated the work, I didn’t much like it, either. And I figured, you know what? I can always get another job I don’t like. Jobs you don’t like are usually pretty easy to get.
So I took a leap of faith and quit in late 2007 to focus on what I thought at the time would be a short jaunt of being a full time writer that I could cherish the memory of when I inevitably went back to a straight job writing emails in some grey cubicle in the Manhattan skyline. I didn’t really think writing fantasy full time was something I would get to do long term, but my book contracts offered me a guarantee of enough income to live on for ~two years, provided I turned my books in on time.
Reader, I did not turn the books in on time.
When making promises to publishers and agents and myself, my output estimates were built atop the baseless—and in hindsight absurd—assumption that I would be 3x as productive writing full time as when I was stealing two hours a day from my commute or sleep to get some words in.
LOL
Creativity doesn’t work that way.
Still, it turned out okay! For some reason, people really liked my books, and I wasn’t that late delivering manuscripts. Months, rather than years… or decades. (The bar in epic fantasy is famously low about these things IYKYK.)
So I thought I would be a “book a year” guy, like my hero Terry Brooks. Turns out I am a “book every 18 months plus a 6 month break to promote and tour” guy. I try to make up for it with really long books, though.
I am so immensely grateful to all the readers who’ve supported me on this journey, told friends, posted pix or reviews, attended launch events, shared beautiful fan art. I still can’t believe this is real life sometimes. Because of this little world I liked to escape to, I am now my own boss. I can make my own hours and spend real time with my kids every day. I can pursue my art. And when I read comics or play videogames, I can legitimately justify it as important market research.
Teenage readers who picked up that first Demon Cycle book are in their 30s now. I’ve literally watched some of them (and the children readers have named after my characters) grow up at consecutive book tour events over the years. It’s humbling, and joyful. As is the steady stream of new readers who came to the series along the way, with millions of books sold worldwide.
So it is my great honor to announce that in celebration of the Demon Cycle 15th anniversary, Del Rey Books will be re-releasing the entire five book series in trade paperback, its first US production in that larger and more readable format.
Featuring slick new cover designs by Szymon Wójciak with terrifying coreling art by long-time Demon Cycle illustrator Dominik Broniek, the printed books will also include bonus novellas and short stories (previously published separately) that are part of the series canon.
The Warded Man 15th anniversary trade paperback releases TODAY, July 18, 2023, followed quickly by The Desert Spear and The Daylight War, both publishing November 7, 2023. The series concludes with The Skull Throne and The Core, on sale March 5, 2024.
This will also give readers new and old a change to get up to speed just before the launch of The Hidden Queen, book 2 of the Nightfall Saga, which releases concurrently on March 5, 2024!
I am not allowed to show you the cover yet, but my loves, Darin Bales is going to break your heart. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
One of my favorite things about my unexpected late-life literary career has always been the travel.
I didn’t have a lot of stamps on my passport for the first 35 years of my life. A high school trip to Canada. 3 weeks with my grandmother in Ireland when I was 15, where I was mostly just there to carry the bags while she visited her sisters and they all attempted to stuff me with meat and potatoes while telling me about my 2nd cousin, once removed who is dead now, by the way. In my 20s I took a few Caribbean vacations that were amazing, but nothing that left me feeling at all worldly.
But then, when I was 35, my first book published in the UK. I went there for the launch, and it feels like I never stopped traveling after that. Book tours, literary festivals, pop culture conventions, the list goes on. Any time I was invited someplace I’d never been before (or had been and loved), I said yes without hesitation. The Demon Cycle is published in 27 languages and I can’t even say how many countries worldwide, and I’ve tried to visit as many of them as I can.
I started feeling like an international man of mystery. I’d amassed a travel wallet with “walking around money” in close to a dozen currencies, and my passport had so many stamps and stickers they started to overlap. I took time on every trip to be in the moment and walk or tour the cities and take local sights, and was beginning to feel like I had a better understanding of the world and my place in it.
Then came the plague. Covid put the kibosh on my planned 2020 travel completely. I did a couple of eastern seaboard events after the vaccine rollout in 2021, and actually got on a plane a few times in 2022, but it was all still US travel.
But at last, the fog has lifted! I’m headed back to Europe TWICE in the coming months and I couldn’t be more excited. I hope this is a sign of a return to normal in the years to come. Fingers crossed for a proper book tour in 2024.
My first European trip since 2019! I am super excited to visit beautiful Luxembourg, where I will be doing talks, panels, signings, and possibly a drunken D&D livestream.
My last trip to Serbia for the Belgrade Book Fair was amazing, so I am thrilled to be able to visit again and see a bit more of the country at the Fantasy Festival in Niš.
Unbelievably, The Demon Cycle is entering its 15th (!!) year. Who would have imagined I’d still be around, getting to do this weird thing I love? Not me, certainly.
It was an honor to have the original series published in hardcover, and the mass market paperbacks have gone back on press over 20 times in the ensuing years. Still, the books have never been in trade paperback (TPB), which is currently the most popular format for booksellers in 2023.
So we’re celebrating the 15th anniversary by re-releasing the original Demon Cycle 5-book series for the first time ever in TPB, with slick new cover designs, and bonus materials, including the tie-in series of Demon Cycle novellas. The spines will line up with a terrifying image to add tension and excitement to any bookshelf.
The new edition of The Warded Man will include the novella The Great Bazaar, which tells the tale of how Arlen acquired the map to Anoch Sun, changing the course of history.
The remaining 4 books will be released one every three months following. More awesome cover reveals to come!
Hello! Today is a good day. Yesterday I wrote those delicious words, “The End” on the first prose draft of The Hidden Queen, book 2 of the Nightfall Saga, AKA Demon Cycle book 7. Publishers hate “The End” so it will be swiftly be excised from the manuscript, but I write them for me.
The Hidden Queen was challenging logistically (the world was on fire!) as well as creatively, where the story was morphing away from my neat character arcs and into something deeper.
In The Desert Prince, Olive was lead singer and Darin was mostly on tambourine. I had planned for The Hidden Queen to be the reverse, but Darin doesn’t like the spotlight, and Olive isn’t one to play rhythm.
But sometimes life puts you in the spotlight whether you like it or not. Darin carries a heavy burden in The Hidden Queen, but don’t let his sensitivity fool you. The common thread of heroes isn’t strength, courage, or purity of motive. Heroes are stubborn, and there ent many in the world as stubborn as Darin Bales.
Anyway, today is the day I wax introspective and do postmortem on the spreadsheet numbers and lifecycle of the project. Read along if you’re into that sort of thing.
I first created a bespoke file for the book that would become The Hidden Queen on November 13, 2019. I think it was called Olive_2_Stepsheet.docx or something clever like that. Said file contained 1,245 words of notes.
I was giving 99% of my attention to The Desert Prince at the time, but ideas for upcoming books always spill over, and occasionally I would dump notes and ideas into that file. I didn’t really begin work on The Hidden Queen in earnest until March 1, 2021, after all the brush fires and promotion for The Desert Prince quieted down, and the newly vaccinated world began to open back up.
The bulk of the writing, including outlining, took place over 79 weeks of work, wherein I wrote an average of 3,541 words a week. Not the 5K average I strive for, but gimme a break. There was pandemic and war and I have a kindergartener and a teenager at home. I had some amazing weeks and some so-so weeks, but overall I work best at a solid steady pace.
At some point the Stepsheet was split off into two files, one with a chronological bulleted outline of every chapter in the book in my personal shorthand, and one with the more digestible prose my readers have come to expect. I maintain both files over the course of writing a book, keeping all my notes in the stepsheet until it’s time to turn them into prose one chronological chapter at a time. No skipping ahead in the prose file! Everything must follow what has gone before.
I used to create bespoke files for each chapter, copy/pasting the bulleted outline for that chapter into a new file, converting it to prose. By this I mean fixing grammar, adding literary flourish, expanding on unexplored ideas, bringing emotional resonance to cold plot points, etc. If the bullets are the easy part of writing, the prose is the hard part. When the conversion was complete, I would copy/paste it again into a growing file of finished chapters.
I did it this way because since the beginning of my career, mobile writing was a real boon to my productivity, but it came at a cost. It allowed me to write The Warded Man on the F train from Brooklyn to Times Square, but the technology of 2006—when I was on an HP Ipaq phone synching Word files with the Docs to Go app—couldn’t handle more than a chapter or two at a time without glitching and losing a day’s writing (or worse), so to be safe I could only work on tiny files.
Things gradually improved over the years as Microsoft got on the stick and mobile devices grew more powerful. I juggle the bulk of my writing between desktop and an ipad pro now, rather than my phone. But even as recently as The Desert Prince, when the document got long at the end, there were file corruption scares that discouraged me from trusting mobile devices completely.
The Hidden Queen is the first book where I have worked in the main file for the entirety of the prose writing, all the way to the end, without a problem, volleying the file from desktop to ipad to iphone and back without a hiccup.
And that’s impressive! The first draft, completed January 4, 2023, is 200,927 words. Short for a Peter V. Brett book, but impressive for a mobile device!
That said, I took no chances, creating 52 dated backup files over the life of the project, saved both locally and on the cloud. If something had gone wrong, the losses would not have been devastating.
Do you make backup files? No? Well, you should. Some rules of writing are pretty subjective, but making sure you can’t lose all your work isn’t one of them. It’s easy, too! Every once in a while when you are about the close the file, just click “save a copy as” and add the date to the filename. I hope you never need to open one, but if you do, you will be glad to have them.
The next phase is editing, which is done in MSWord Track Change mode. Tracking changes makes the document hold and organize massive amounts of metadata in the form of inserted comments, line edits, rewrites, and notes, tracking who made each and when. Traditionally, I am chained to my desktop during this phase, and even then I get the spinning color wheel and a brief panic attack when the load is heaviest at the end.
I am not sure The Hidden Queen will be the book where that changes to allow mobile freedom, but I may dip a cautious toe in the water.
By this point some of you may be asking, “All the obsessive numbers are great, but when does the book actually come out?”
Good question! The short answer is “I don’t know”. The publishers will determine the exact date, but that is TBD.
The long answer is there will be months still of editing, then production, then a place on an ever-lengthening print queue as paper and print supply chain problems increase lead time on books. Back when things were rosy it was usually 9-10 months from first draft to store shelves. These days, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the worldwide English language release of The Hidden Queen in early 2024.
On the international side, this extra lead time may prove a boon, giving translators a head start that allows native language publications closer to the worldwide English release.
Regardless, once we have a solid pub date I will shout it from the rooftops.
If you made it this far, congratulations on your attention span! Social media has not broken you. And thank you, with all my heart, for helping me make a career doing something I love so much (even if it makes me crazy sometimes). You are my true friends.
