With the final book of my Archibald Lox series due to see print later this month (July 26th), I've already had a few fans asking the question that I get whenever I draw near the end of a lengthy series...

WHAT NEXT?!?

I used to always have a ready answer to that, because of the way I work -- I normally start a book at least a couple of years before it sees print, so I'm usually well into a new book or series by the time the last entry in a series is published. But... not this time.

As I mentioned in a lengthy post in late 2020, when I finished the first complete draft of the Volume 3 Archibald Lox books, I haven't been doing a lot of writing over the last several years. I wrote the nine Archibald Lox books since finishing Zom-B, and I've done lots of editing to bring them to publication level, and I edited and released a few of my Darren Dash books for adults too, and I tried hard to get a Koyasan musical off the ground, which included writing a few different drafts, which took quite a bit of time. A fine return for the vast majority of authors -- but back in the day I'd have done all that AND written first drafts of at least another 8 or 10 books!!

I don't know if I'll ever get back to writing as much as I used to. I've taken things much more easily of late, and I've quite liked the change of pace. BUT I'm not quite ready to down tools and retire just yet! I've had ideas for a few books in recent years, and I'm hoping to start work on two of those in the near future -- one for adults, one for children. And I'm trying to get a picture book off the ground too -- if that works out, I might do more of those as well, and juggle them with the other stuff. And there are still several first drafts of books I wrote for adults many years ago, which I want to return to and rewrite and edit into shape, to release under my Darren Dash pen name.

But I don't, at this moment, have a definite answer as to what will be next out of the gate, or when you guys might get to read it. I suspect that first up will be another of my Darren Dash novels, either later this year or in the first half of 2023, but after that... your guess is almost as good as mine!! Don't worry -- there WILL be more books, and hopefully LOTS more books. You'll just have to stay tuned a while longer than normal to find out what they are and when they're coming out...

In the meantime, we all have the end of my Archibald Lox series to enjoy, and you can read all about that in my monthly online newsletter, here: https://darrenshan.com/news/shanville-monthly