Like, really well and truly done.  For the past few weeks, I’ve steadily been working on third draft edits for the first Saints novel, officially titled KING OF SAINTS.

oh my gosh, wait

Have I said that on here yet?  I don’t think so!  Good golly, this is exciting!

Recently, on a drive up to Maine, I was furiously going back and forth with Jen while I was at a rest stop about potential titles for the Saintsverse.  Because titling is hard, it took us over an hour to settle on something.  Which really just means I kept blathering on every once in a while during the hour, Jen shot down any ideas that weren’t catching her attention, and finally (finally!), here’s what happened:

THE KING OF SAINTS
THE GREY KNIGHT

THE WOLF KING
THE SEA WITCH

THE BASTARD KING
THE HERALD OF DEATH
TBD

So, that’s a lot.  Obviously, King of Saints & Grey Knight are the first two Saints books.  Each of the books in the Saintsverse are kind of about certain people, so the first one is about Landon, whose literal nickname is the king of Saints.  The second one is about Landon still (they all are, let’s be honest), but mostly about Ezra.  He’s got those grey eyes/mysteriously always silent/kind of lurks in the shadows feel about him, so he’s Landon’s grey knight.

Then, we’ve got Saints at sea.  The Wolf King is, duh, about Julian.  The Sea Witch is the only one out of all of these that might change, but I’m also pretty certain it’ll stay the same.  It’s probably going to end up being about Brennen, and well, just stayed tuned in the next few months because I’ll probably start writing Saints at sea 2 fairly soon.

Then it’s time for my super secret trilogy, Saints: the bastards.  The timeline for this is something I still haven’t decided on.  It either takes place pre-everything or post-everything.  Pre-everything, we get to learn how the bastards came to be, who they are in the beginning, all that jazz.  Post-everything, there’s a new kid in town sitting on the throne and war is still kind of brewing and it’s a wild ride for everyone.  It might end up being a mixture of both, we’ll see.  Anyway, Gordon is the bastard king, Roland’s nickname wavers between herald of death and death incarnate, so we’ll see where that goes.  And I’m not entirely sure there’ll be a third book yet, so that’s up for grabs right now.

Jen knows me so well.  There’s always room for more when it comes to writing.

But King of Saints is done!  Like, done done.  Well, on my end.  For now.  What’s up next is that I edit The Grey Knight (honestly not sure if I’m jiving with that name as I’m typing it here), and then the big stuff happens.  I’ll start drafting a query letter, a few different synopses (one paragraph & one page), make up an obnoxious spreadsheet of which agents I’m sending to, and get to work.  Somewhere in there, I’ll probably start work on edits for The Wolf King, but I’m not too concerned about it right now.  I know, off the top of my head, that there’s a ton I want to change and add, but my focus right now is the main Saints duology.  This is going to be what kicks off this world, so it’s going out first.

It’s really real, guys.  In a few short weeks, it’s going to start going out to the real world, and you can bet your bottom dollar I’m going to be updating here as things progress.  Because things will progress.  It may take some time, but the Saintsverse is going to happen.  I can feel it in my bones.