After a tumultuous spring and summer, I have at last completed the next City of Crows novel, Night Seeker. Coming in at 71,000 words, the book is officially the shortest in the series (thus far), but word count isn’t proportional to the amount of action and adventure (and snark from Calvin Kinsey).
In fact, Night Seeker has quite a lot in the way of adventure, more so than most of the other books in the series. And during that adventure, there’s a bunch of new character introductions, new world-building information, and setups for a lot of the major plot threads of the latter half of the series.
Night Seeker is essentially a transitional book between the “buildup” half of the series and the “climactic” half of the series. Starting with book ten, things really start rolling, and they don’t stop until the end of the series.
I’m very happy that I finally got this book written. I scrapped 50,000 words of the first draft and started over…because the first draft sucked. Like really, really bad. So that was a major setback, but the restart was a great decision. The plot of the second draft is much more exciting and advances the series plot a great deal more than my original draft.
Right now, Night Seeker is in proofreading, with an official publication date of 11/15/22. So keep your eyes peeled for the official release announcement. It should be coming very soon!
—Clara Coulson
CLARA COULSON 