It's been nearly two years in the making! Which seems ridiculous... But it's here. Somehow yesterday I had the courage to click 'Publish'. I'm already paranoid it isn't 'spot on'.

So what's it like? Well, it's 94,000 words long. So 12,000 words longer than The Blood Queen and Rise of the Archmage

It's also horrendously complicated (At least to me! It'll probably seem simple to the readers!) Why? Well at one point there are five separate storylines going on at the same time. They DO converge, but keeping time in sync for each story and making sure I know who knows what and stuff...

The process of battling with this book has actually led me to think. 'Maybe I should sit down and plan out book 6?'

Will book 6 be the last book in the series? I don't know. I looked at my read-through statistics today. Book 1 - 2 has a bizarrely low 2 - 4% readthrough rate. now the rest of the books have a 75-100% readthrough rate.

Are people DNF'ing book 1 because it's not their cup of tea? I honestly don't know. I DO know people generally say my writing gets stronger with every book. I really didn't think book 2 was THAT much better than book 1 though. Certainly not enough to explain a 4% read through to a 90% readthrough!

I might actually try and wrap this series up in the next book. It'll be another monster, it might well end up 120,000 words or more. But it would kind of be nice? Failing that, maybe book 7?

Will that be it for Deathsworn Arc? Well, probably yes. I DO have plans for a future series following the on-going story of Fox Fletcher. It might be called Torea Tales or something... I don't know yet. At the moment I just can't wait to hear what people think of book 5. I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Best wishes,

Martyn Stanley