So, this is a good news and bad news kind of post. The good news is very exciting but, sadly, it does mean a delay for the next book release.
First, the good news..
The good news is that I’ve been working REALLY hard on building and organizing a Canada-wide book festival that has both indie and traditionally published authors working together to shine a light on Canadian fiction books and authors, and it’s going to happen this summer!
It’s called Canada Fiction Fest, and there are 121 authors involved, from 11 provinces/territories. We’ve got a book showcase with books for all ages, from picture books on up, and with a fantastic array of fiction genres including: fantasy, horror, science fiction, mystery, romance, and more! The showcase can be filtered by genre, length, format (print, ebook, or audio), preferred store, and spice level, and the filters are interoperable so you can choose to just see the moderately spicy romance novellas available on Kobo as an audiobook, or just the no-spice sci-fi novels on Indigo, for example. There’s also an author gallery that you can filter to show authors from specific provinces, too.
AND… and here’s the really exciting part… we’ve got 36 live virtual sessions (author readings and discussion panels) that you can attend FOR FREE, from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. All the sessions will livestream to our YouTube channel so you can just tune in when the sessions you’re interested in are scheduled to run, or you can register for the sessions you want to go to and we’ll send you an email reminder with the link so you don’t forget. Check out our full event schedule on the Fiction Fest events page!
I am super excited about this. As I said, I have been working really hard to build the site and the code base for data processing (there were a lot of sign up forms), and doing outreach to get other authors interested and involved, and scheduling all the live sessions (with everyone’s wildly different availabilities and time zones), and setting up mailing list handlers and researching form builders and ticket handlers and so much more. And now I’m at the stage where it’s to let everyone know about it!
Please sign up for the notifications list on the landing page — you’ll get an email reminder when the event starts at the end of June so you don’t miss it. Your email will only be used for Fiction Fest related stuff, and you won’t automatically be put on any authors’ email lists (including mine. but you should totally sign up for mine as a separate thing because then you get my whenever-I-remember-to-send-it newsletter with book news and random cat and garden pics).
And now the bad news…
So, that’s the good news. And now here’s the bad news: The upshot of all this is that book 5 of The Arcanium Saga will be delayed until 2027. Fiction Fest was my random I-wonder-if-something-like-this-would-work idea back in February, and I pretty much dove head-first into it. I’m the only one organizing it, and I have been putting ALL my not-day-job hours in the evenings and on weekends into making it happen. On top of that, I had several major house-related disasters requiring expensive repairs hit all at once in the middle of all this, and I also had a significant injury happen that required a trip to the ER and several weeks of healing before I could walk properly, and I still can’t drive again yet. So, I haven’t been doing much writing. Or, you know, sleeping.
In any case, as you may know, I’ve been working on the final books in the series (books 5, 6, and 7) concurrently, just because that seems to be what my brain had decided it needs to do this time around (and I really need to make sure certain bits happen in specific orders, which means I’m moving stuff all over the place across the final story arcs and trying to make sure all my threads get tied up properly). The first draft of book 5 is currently at about 95% completion, and I’m hoping to have it ready for publishing sometime over the winter (likely around March).
I am a bit dismayed about the delay — I’ve released a book every year since I started the series, and this will be the first year in which that doesn’t happen. But such is the way things sometimes go. When it DOES come out, rest assured that book 5 will have all the magic and mayhem you’ve come to love about The Arcanium books!
