Sad news & progress on book three:

There has been a tragic set-back with book three in the Shadow Sovereign Series.

My husband died very suddenly last November, as a result, my writing has stalled. For the past eight months, our children and I have been learning how to survive without him.

Eric was a wonderful and supportive husband and an extremely involved and loving father. We miss him so very much.

This is a picture of him reading The Lost Emerald of Briarwood. It was the first time (after decades of writing in secret) I’d let him read anything I’d written. I was terrified, but he was amazing and quickly became my biggest fan and cheerleader.

I’ll be honest with you, working on these books without him is extremely painful. My husband was a gigantic part of my writing process. He was integral to my book business and it has been difficult to figure out how to go on.

Despite my heavy grief, there has been progress on the book.

I really hoped to have the book out by the fall, but I don’t know if that’s going to be possible. It might not happen until next year. I am considering releasing book three chapter by chapter as I work on it. (Perhaps via Patreon?) I’ll poll my newsletter to see if there is enough interest. The finished book would likely look different after editing and re-arranging, but it might be a good way to satiate your wonderful and appreciated appetites for these characters. I don’t know. I’m still thinking on it.

I haven’t wanted to send out a newsletter until I had some less depressing news, but I will be sending one soon because….

An audiobook is coming!

My husband would have been so excited about this announcement. He couldn’t wait until we were ready to have audiobooks produced.

I’ve been working with AB Book Services to produce the audiobook for The Lost Emerald of Briarwood! I think you’re going to love the narrator, Von. He does such a great job at all the voices!

I’m listening to the final take now, and hope to have it available for you next week. (This is new territory for me, so I’m not familiar with how difficult it is to get it listed at all the usual places, or whether or not it needs to undergo review once it has been submitted. I’ll keep you posted.)

Blog notes:

I don’t really want to have to patrol spam comments over here, so I’m going to leave comments off on these posts. But please, feel free to contact me if you’d like, or I’m pretty active on my personal Instagram account (it’s a lot of grief stuff right now, I warn you), and will post the important stuff on the Vona Stewart Instagram account. I answer DMs on both.

Thanks for checking in,

Vona