The other thing that is going really well is the Chernevog imminent release and the Yvgenie edit—I may finish that before Monday.

These are the Russian novels. And they had so much baggage—back in the day. I’m not going to describe the wretched details—we’d all get depressed, but suffice it to say it involved a several year stretch of writing uphill both ways in a blizzard of catastrophe for, oh, much more than one year. The result was that—these books, while successful, had flaws.

Well, the beauty of e-books—is you get a re-do. I did a fairly light rewrite on Rusalka. Jane chipped in and helped me on the Chernevog rewrite, which was in 2012—she was, by then, in far better shape than I was. And then there’s Yvgenie, which I am about to finish up. Oh, my. Chernevog has major, major fixes. And I just flat rewrote Yvgenie. There’s hardly a line in the book untouched, new bits, some erasures, and it is finally a work I’m really happy with and that I’m proud of, the way I’d wanted to be when I first wrote the set.

These books are, for those who don’t know, set in long-ago Russia, draw pretty heavily on Russian myth and folklore, but are definitely not about Russian elves and fairies, or wizards in long black robes. They’re about two young men who land in deep trouble in their town and end up in worse trouble in a lonely woods. The way wizards work in this story is a deliberate departure from the modern method of magecraft…it’s effortless, it’s ‘free’, it’s dangerous, and the more you try to wish yourself out of trouble, the deeper you can dig the pit. A rusalka, for those of you who’ve not run into that word before, is the ghost of a maiden who died for love, specifically by drowning, and they’re quite, quite dangerous. And lest you think these books are cover-to-cover dark and grim, our two troublemakers have a very lively sense of humor. I mean, if you’re in love with a dead girl, what worse can go wrong with your week?