Available for Pre-Order: The Inverted Glass

The Ebook of the fifth and final volume of The Wizard's Scion is now available for pre-order and will be released on December 13. Sadly, it took far longer than I originally planned for, but better late than never, I suppose.

In the bad news column, I'm now lacking the services of a professional artist, though I'm waiting on a reply from another I contacted. In the neutral column, I made this cover myself, by heavily leaning into metaphors for the plot. I used public domain vector art and a nice nebula image from the James Webb Space Telescope, if I remember correctly. Someday, the art may be replaced with something better. In the good news column, the advantage of this new approach is that you'll be seeing my novels published far faster than in the past.

The wraparound cover for the print edition of The Inverted Glass is my next side project, which I'll probably be able to finish tomorrow.

The omnibus edition of The Wizard's Scion should also be coming soon, but I have to assemble a set of metaphors that work with the art available to me with my admittedly not-great art creations skills. I'm primarily a cut and paste artist, but I've got a good eye for both visual metaphors and art in general, so it's just a matter of time before I find something that works.

I hope to get through the majority of my backlog of novels in the next couple of months. In particular, I'll be starting final editing of the prequel series, Sky Children, later this week, since I already have the artwork done for the first two books. The second book will follow shortly after. The third book will have to wait until later, because it's still badly in need of a total rewrite.

In short, keep your eyes peeled and hang onto your seat, because things are about to significantly speed up.

Without further adieu, I present to you:

The Inverted Glass

Buy This Book The Steel Wizard, Captain Levi Jacobs, is woken in the night by his pregnant wife, with happy news their child is coming, but joy becomes tragedy as she dies in childbirth. Reeling from this loss, he vows to raise their daughter to be a strong hero, just like her mother, but even that fleeting comfort is stolen from the bittersweet moment as the poor infant struggles to breathe and dies in his arms!

Reeling at the loss, he staggers from one defeat to the next, slowly losing everything else he cares about.

Finally, after a particularly traumatic defeat at the hands of a new enemy, followed by a prolonged kidnapping involving the forced administration of narcotics to make him complaint, he lies in the infirmary of his ship, grief-stricken and struggling with addiction withdrawal. Just when he’s at an all-time low, he’s offered a ray of unusual hope, reminded that he once witnessed his future self travel through time.

Armed with this memory, he focuses to unlock the secrets of temporal magic, intent on undoing months of terrible events, only to find it’s not so easy, because he has to fight to gain the approval of the Moirai, better known as the Three Fates and speaking with them is no easy task.

Can Levi change history or will all that he loves remain forever lost in the past?

The cover of the novel has multiple meanings:

First, a certain troll swordswoman is back, in the form of both a summoned ghost and an inadvertently summoned demon, one good, the other evil. That's what the figures in the hourglass are about.

Meanwhile, the good one is deeply concerned about the final destination of her soul, because the necromancer, Cha'da, summoned her away from the afterlife during her personal judgment day, just as her heart was being weighed against a feather.

Second, the protagonist, Levi, has a harrowing time trying to get back everything he's lost, using time travel. The hourglass also serves as a reference to that. This last of Levi's adventures reveals how he's judged by the Three Fates, all because he tried to change history without first asking permission. In the end, he somehow has to balance the scales and justify his actions in order to change history.

Both character go through some very rough times along the way, but I find the ending of this one to be the most emotionally satisfying of the series.

I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I have.

Tags: writing, publishing, the-wizards-scion