Sales on my first fantasy novel, Strange News, are going reasonably well — knock wood! In terms of costs, I may be on track to break even on this one by this time next year, at which point I hope to have a new book ready to hit the streets.
As for that work-in-progress, I’m halfway through the first draft, coming up on what the writing expert YouTubers call the “midpoint reversal.” The middle of every book is a bloody mess to write, and this one is no exception, but I think (I hope!) I’ve learned a few things by now. I’m moving a little more smoothly than usual through this difficult stretch. Thoughts and prayers, everybody.
The upcoming book will be titled Apocryphon, and it dips into the fantasy genre a little more deeply than Strange News. Still no dragons or swords or incestuous royal families slaughtering each other at weddings, but most of the story takes place on an alternate Earth where something that might be called magic is common. Get ready to pay a visit to Palliset, the City at the Center of Time:
As long as you have the necessary time banked up, any westbound train will take you from Boston or Bengaluru or Beijing to the Grand Plaza Station, but no earthly airship has ever looked down on Palliset’s dusty sprawl, and no Pallisene explorer has ever found the slightest trace of a superhighway or a McDonald’s, no matter how far from the plateau they’ve traveled. Palliset is an island of civilization in an otherwise empty world of endless scrub desert and shortgrass prairie at the other end of a train ride from anywhere on Earth.
A paradox. A whole city of paradoxes. The center of all things, the Book of Secrets called it. Is this magic? It’s certainly not logical, not reasonable. It’s a place Mac might have invented just to fluster me, to make me laugh. Maybe that’s all magic ever is.
In Palliset, nobody cares about the contradictions. They’ve always been here. They’ve always been who they are. They expect to be here until the end of time.
But then, don’t we all?
— From Apocryphon: Bishop Berkeley’s Book of Secrets, by David Lee Holcomb. Coming in 2026.
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