Upcoming Plans and a Three-Chapter Sneak Peek

As I sit here eating a mouth-watering and olfactory-sense-loving taco bowl drizzled with olive oil (olive oil is the best thing for men ever and tastes so good on like everything), I’ve been thinking about my upcoming releases for projects.

Since these are more or less in the last form, I feel I can post the formatted interior of the works and give a little sneak peek of how the stories turned out.

Now that there are a little less than two months to go before I release Crown of the Orphic Queen and The Man Who Paints Fire (the companion novel that should be done at the end of August), I figured I’d preview the first three chapters in their final form to show the basic premise of how the story is going to be (barring Fire since it needs more time in the oven).

In the rewriting stages, I tightened up some metaphors, added different schemes to the prose, and sprinkled little nuggets of the whispers of the Muses throughout the text. Chapters with a torch tell the reader to search that chapter for the hidden story. Every chapter that begins with the torch of knowledge is an indicator that there is a hidden story within the text, and every chapter without one will not build up this extra story.

I mentioned this previously in one of my posts about the concept of the Triple Goddess and understanding the ancient mysteries of the Orphic traditions.

The last paragraphs of each of these chapters hold separate tales within tales.

I’m a big believer in leaving hints for people to find in stories to make the stories meta in some form.

Building up from these, The Man Who Paints Fire will also have linked chapters to the dominant story of Crown of the Orphic Queen. This is something I’ve rarely seen done in books, and I can’t think of a book that does this I’ve read in recent memory.

This book is my take on an ancient legend through the eyes of Orpheus in a modern sense, a simulacrum of the story in our contemporary era. It’s not the real thing, and that’s the entire point.

Please look forward to the dual-release books at the end of September!

After this, I will be shadow-dropping The Candle’s Edge: In Lunar Glass between then and the next Orchestrylus Odyssey novel.

Then following that, I will work on a collection of short stories called Glassy Night Reveries.

Every one of these books is practice for the higher heights of the craft, and I will not stop until writing at my standard of art comes out of my mind the first time as best as possible.

This story also has a unique quirk in that daytime chapters have dialogue spoken in plain language, and nighttime events are spoken in far more elegant and dressed-up language. This is because nighttime is closer to the underworld than the day could ever hope to be.

I do weird things like this in my stories to set myself apart from other writers and works that are out there. I hope it works!

Happy writing and reading!

P.S. AI is the devil.