For the past couple of months, I've been working on two new book projects, provisionally titled THE CURSED MAN, and THE DRAGON MISTRESS. At the time of writing, I am over 80,000 words into the first draft of THE CURSED MAN. The goal is for the finished manuscript to be around 100,000 words, once all is done and dusted. I had the idea while I was in Japan, and spending time zipping about the country on the bullet trains; the trains are fast, but you can still spend upwards of an hour on them (in one case, close to two hours). I started to make notes about how the stories would proceed, the characters, the world, etc. I can't really say where the main idea came from, suffice to say that Peter V Brett's DEMON CYCLE was of a small influence on THE CURSED MAN.

THE CURSED MAN concerns a man named Duncan Nilus, who has been afflicted with a curse that makes him very sensitive to the cold, to the point where he is forced to move with the spring and summer months, to avoid the pain and agony that the colder autumn and winter seasons inflict. To undo the curse, Duncan has to reassemble an amulet, the four parts of which are scattered across the world. When the book opens, he has been searching for the pieces for close to a hundred years, and has so far recovered three of them. The book will concern the final year of Duncan's quest to rid himself of the curse.

The second novel, THE DRAGON MISTRESS, is still coming together (that is to say, I have yet to write a single word), but there will be some overlap with THE CURSED MAN, as they are set in the same world, during the same period. This will be a lot of fun to write, I expect, and will probably provide a little bit of a challenge when it comes to getting timings of events and people right.

I'll say more on the books in a future post, when they are more complete.

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