Well. It’s, uh, been a while since we least heard from Amra and Hogren. According to Amazon, the first publication of Thief Who Wasn’t There was on June 5th, 2015, so at the time of this writing, it’s been four years and two days. That’s a long time to wait for a sequel. Not GRRM long, not Patrick Rothfuss long, but long. Too long. And for that I’d like to apologize and explain a bit.
When I wrote Amra #4, my youngest was still a baby. I’d entered Mark Lawrence’s first ever Self Published Fantasy Blog-Off (the SPFBO) with Amra #1, and been offered a contract with Ragnarok Publications. I’d already put Amra #4 up for pre-order when the offer was made, and so a grand total of 32 people got the book before I had to take it down, so that Ragnarok could issue their own versions of the series.
If memory serves, that was only supposed to take about four months. In reality it took around a year.
Anyway, money was tight for us then. I mean, really, really tight. I was teaching English as a Second Language at the time in Vietnam, but they’d just put in place a new law that you had to have a degree to do so. I had a decade of experience, but no degree. I worked under the table for a while, because family’s gotta eat, but it wasn’t a sustainable situation. So I ended up moving to Cambodia for a time, where I could work legally, and at the same time worked like hell to finish up my Bachelor’s.
Long story short, Amra and Holgren’s next misadventure got put on the backburner, since I knew it wouldn’t be published by Ragnarok in any reasonable time frame and thus would buy no diapers. Then, by the time I left Ragnarok, it had moved from the back burner to the closet.
But I never stopped hearing it bumping around in there. Amra isn’t the kind of character who waits patiently for attention.
It has taken me roughly two years to get this book out. I’ve written and then discarded more words for it than you now hold in your hand – four previous versions went onto the scrap pile. Sometimes I had to stop, because I was completely lost and devoid of confidence. I wrote Prayers in Steel, An Unclean Strength and The Last God in the gap between Amra #4 and this book, as well as another untitled and unreleased book that’s quite different from all my others, and still not ready.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I’m super late with this, and super sorry, but I swear I wasn’t being lazy.
The Thief Who Went To War is currently being picked over by some amazing beta readers. After that, it'll be off to a proofreader, to kill typos and bad punctuation with fire. It will be in all the usual places on August 10th. I've just set up the pre-order on Amazon, and when the link becomes available I'll share that in a new post. I'll also set up the pre-order for all other venues besides Amazon sharpish.
I hope you’ll judge it worth the wait.
