Luna | Michelle West & Michelle Sagara

Cast in Silence

I meant to actually post this at about the same time as I posted it on my Livejournal, so forgive me for the delay. I really, really like the cover, which comes across on my computer as much lighter in the scan than it is in real life. The on-sale date is the 28th of July, 2009. What this means is that in theory it should be available on the 28th of July in any store that has ordered it. What it means in practice is that some of those stores will have it earlier, some possibly a bit later. I’ve been saying “August 2009” in the store.

While doing this, I realized that I have not actually responded to comments here; I have been trying, since the final revisions on Cast in Silence were finished, to make headway into my sadly neglected email box, and needless to say, there is much groveling to be done there. As well as here.

But my excuses are as follows: I’ve never been the world’s fastest writer, and I break my day into two working blocks. One of those is devoted to the Michelle West novels, and the other to the Michelle Sagara books. I wasn’t entirely certain if it would work, but to me the books are so different that they don’t bleed into each other and get in each other’s way. This, as you can imagine, was a huge relief to me.

When I reach the end of a book, though, it still devours most of my mental acuity, and at that time, I’ll put aside whichever book isn’t ending and concentrate solely on one. This has worked out really well — for the writing. But I used to use one of those blocks of time to do the already small amount of things I did on the internet, and unless the writing is going really well, or I’m working on Page Proofs, I tend to disappear for long stretches.

This is not because I hate people, or I don’t appreciate the fact that they like my books, and that’s one of my constant fears in all this. It’s because I have found a way to work on two novels at once, and it doesn’t really leave me with a lot of other words to say which might be interesting or relevant. Or, you know, sane and professional.

But I have news:

Luna has bought three more Cast novels, following Cast in Silence.

I only know the (working) title for the first of these three: It’s Cast in Chaos, and is the one I’m working on now. Or was, until the Page Proofs arrived.

But as a number of people have emailed to ask me what someone also asked here on this blog, I wanted to segue into something that looked like an intelligible answer.

Sandra said,
October 11, 2008 at 5:15 am · Edit

Michelle,

I’m really loving the new ‘Cast in’ series. How many books are you planning to write for this series?

I hope the answer is not too upsetting for people, because the answer is: I don’t know. I have a series of events that are unfolding entirely in the background (with a little in the foreground in Shadow and Fury), and those events will culminate in closure for Kaylin.

But… Cast in Silence is about the missing six months of Kaylin’s early life. Cast in Chaos is what I refer to as my Refugee book. I very much want to write a Dragon Court book, and I would like to write a book about the Aerians; I would like to write a novel about the Wolves, and in particular the Shadow Wolves. I need to write a book about the fiefs (this last will become clearer after Silence, about which I will say no more). I would like to write one book which sees Kaylin actually leave the city. I’m not sure if his would be on holiday, but given her life, I kind of doubt it.

I hope, with every book I write, that the story contained in it stands enough alone that people coming to the world for the first time won’t get lost the minute they hit page one, but at the same time, I want Kaylin to change and grow as she experiences things.