I have had a blast writing A Forged Weapon, and becoming immersed in its world. As an indie writer, you wear many hats. The first and foremost of these is writer, and so I will thank the people helping me with the rest. Arsal Khan did a wonderful job on the cover, and all the iterations thereof.

The Book Publishing Experts are working on marketing and getting the word out. There is much to do. Expect to see a presence on X, Facebook, and Instagram before long.

Mostly, its about the writing. A writer can get lost in all of the other tasks of social media, and my main excitement is writing book two: A Battle of the Planets:

The god who saved the world is gone, and the daughter who takes her place was built to be exact.

On Earth, the arks are still full. Lottery Day still runs once a year, with the band playing and the chocolate rations passed out freely, and the winners are still cheered through the doors by their whole section. Letters still come back from the colonies — real hands, real weather, real green places, read aloud from the platform before the names.

Asha has watched those doors for ten years. Four hundred people have gone through them out of her hall, and four hundred letters have come back, and eleven of them asked her for anything at all. She has done the arithmetic. She has never told anybody, least of all the man she loves most, whose entire hope depends on it being wrong.

And below all of it, unseen and uncounted, something that used to be a girl is learning what it can open.

The Battle of the Planets is a novel about the exodus that follows — what it costs to be saved twice, and who gets left standing on the field.

I know readers will be excited to see a Mars colony come to life. I'm jazzed to build it.