I have an apology to make.

It’s coming up on a year since I released A Divided River: Tales From Vasini I. When I was editing and preparing it for publication I spent some time um-ing and ah-ing over whether to include a little teaser for the next The Vasini Chronicles novel, The Theatre of Shadows, and whether to include a publication date.

I was keen to give people a little taste of what might be in store for Doctors Marcus Fox and Elizabeth Reid, but I was hesitant about including any form of date.

I knew there was an inherent risk in giving a publication date that I would miss it. The flip side was that I didn’t want to include the teaser without giving some indication of when it would be available, and saying ‘Coming Soon’ for something that I knew wouldn’t be published for at least a year would just be inaccurate and annoyingly vague. So I finally settled on including the teaser with ‘Coming in 2018’. At that moment in time 2018 seemed reasonable, there was a lot of editing to do, but publishing it by the end of 2018 at the very latest was achievable.

Or so I thought.

As I’ve alluded to in other posts, things haven’t quite gone as expected for the past six months or so and periodic low-grade interruptions that have needed dealing with have taken up more time than I would have liked.

Rather than force myself to put out a half-edited book just to meet, what is in truth, an arbitrary deadline, I’m going to say now The Theatre of Shadows won’t be out this year. I will make damn sure though it is out as soon as it can be in 2019.