It. Has. Begun.

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UPDATE for fans of the Blood Magic books!

Now that I'm employed once again and the awful monkey of unemployment is off my back, I've decided to begin Blood Magic Book 3! That's right - we'll all finally learn what happens to Kirin, Lia, the Mor and everything/everyone else!

I never set out to write a fantasy trilogy (that most hackneyed of literary conventions), and yet here I am, contemplating just that. In case you don't know it, the first Kirin Book (Blood Magic) was originally written to be completely stand-alone, and I thought I'd ended it in such a way that no sequel was required or even possible.

Then Paula Guran, my then-editor at Juno, asked me specifically if I had a sequel in me, and seeing as how she was offering to purchase it on nothing more than an outline and her confidence that I could finish it, I decided to give it a go. Book 2 (Nights of Sin) came out better than I could have dreamed, and I'll be forever grateful to Paula and Juno for the opportunity to write it. Now that Juno has been acquired by Pocket Books, there's little chance that Book 3 will be released under the Juno imprint - too bad, but that's just how these things go.

So... what's in store for Book 3? Well, for one thing, I know I'm going to return to the back-and-forth chapter style that I used in Book 1, but rather than alternate past/present events as in that book I'm going to use a shifting POV (point-of-view) between Lia and Kirin. I thought that this would be interesting since (IMHO) Lia's viewpoint and opinions have been sort of given short shrift in the previous books. So far, researching her unique voice and her interpretations of events chronicled in Books 1 and 2 has been very entertaining for me.

Also, you can definitely expect a final explanation of the Mor's reasons and motivations. Why did they invade? Why do they fear humanity? Why do they particularly hate Kirin? Where exactly did humans come from and where might they be going? Who or what is Ico,the Imperial Wizard? All this, and more, will be explained by the last page.

Hopefully this news will come as a welcome thing. I think it will, given the mail and messages you, the readers, have sent me over the past two years. I'd encourage you, as I always do, to mail me at imagox@yahoo.com if you have any lingering questions.

Wish me luck!

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