I meant to get this up yesterday, but…it seems to be Thursday.  I’ve been working through a great many writing projects in the last few weeks, which have been keeping me very busy – but I’ve made good progress with them!

I finished final revisions for Guardian II at the beginning of the month, and my paperback proof copy arrived yesterday.  Always exciting!  Stay tuned for a cover reveal soon.  With the book due out at the beginning of September, release date will be here practically before we know it.

I finished revisions for the two short stories I’m contributing to an anthology, due out some time this fall.  It was fun getting feedback from the other writers – among other things, I learned that “long guns” are an actual, specific thing, not just a phrase J. M. Barrie chanced upon in Peter Pan. 🙂

Last weekend I wrote Chapter Fourteen of Pesto, Pirouettes and Potions, the novel (novella?) I and three other authors are writing round-robin style.  We’re actually getting close to the end, so it’s cool to see the story taking its shape.

And currently I’m revising some new Guardian short stories.  I wrote up a few prequel stories earlier in the month, focusing on key characters before the trilogy began, and setting some of the threads that eventually led them to meet.  Right now I’m revising, and stay tuned for those stories releasing very soon!

Perhaps an early peek at that last project?  Enjoy!

********

He came back to the Opera in darkness.  He had left through the darkness of the tunnels and catacombs beneath the half-built building’s foundations, and he returned through the long shadows of night-time boulevards, to stand at last across the street and look at the great edifice rising against the starlit sky.

He let his gaze linger on the marble pillars, the copper dome, the line of masks already in place decorating the upper edge of the building’s frontispiece.  His mouth twisted in a self-mocking smile at the sight of the masks.  So appropriate.

Mostly he felt a kind of relief mingled with almost incredulous wonder.  Part of him had never thought he would come back.  Many times in the past few years he had given up any hope at all that both he and the building would survive the turmoil around them, enmeshed as they were in separate crises in separate countries, but both surrounded by people who thought they had no right to exist.

Now he was back, and his opera house was still here, waiting for him, silent in these dark hours before dawn.