Hey, Weekly Update time. So, things have been going very well with Defiant. I am, Bing!, 85% done with that book. I hope to turn it in very early next week with my self-imposed deadline, February 1st. And then I can turn back to Stormlight 5. So I’m feeling very good about that. The book is almost done. It’s looking pretty good, from beta reader comments. Unlike Cytonic, I will not have to do giant revisions on this one, so that’s feeling pretty nice. I did add a prologue. It didn’t have one before. But anyway, what else have we got going on?

Secret Project 1, Tress of the Emerald Sea, we finally got our copies in, at least one shipment of them. They’re sending them in truckloads. And so the warehouse team has been assiduously sending these out. They actually plan to have them shipped out by Friday. So when you see this, we will have sent out the entire shipment that we got, which was about 14,000 copies, which is only 14%. But the next truckload should be coming soon. And we’re just going to keep sending them out as they come. They are gorgeous, and already people are getting theirs, and we’ve seen unboxings starting to happen. So we’re really, really pleased that we were able to at least start shipping it in January, even if a lot of the shipping will still happen during February.

If you are interested in some of the worldbuilding behind that book, I hopped over and visited Mark Rober, and we did a little collaboration video. This is because when I was researching Tress of the Emerald Sea, some of the science behind the magic, I landed on one of his videos that he did, which was really helpful in doing my descriptions and things. So we reached out and said, “Hey! Hey, Mark!” Or “Oh, hi, Mark.” And we went and visited and it was awesome. We had a blast. You’ll probably be seeing some behind-the-scenes posts and things on that coming up. But anyway, go watch that video. He is a super cool dude and treated us really well and let my children shoot his giant tennis ball cannon, jump in his foam pit, play with all of his Nerf guns. They absolutely were in heaven.

So anyway, we will be back next week, where I will hopefully tell you that Defiant is finished and turned in, and that I am back on Stormlight 5. One little thing. We found out that my team is having to work on weekends to get these Weekly Updates out on Mondays, so we’re going to move them to Tuesdays because I would like my team to be able to take their weekends off. So in the future, at some point, you’ll start seeing Weekly Updates come on Tuesdays instead. This is just to give them a little more time and to have a more relaxing and better work/life balance. I didn’t know they were working over the weekend, specifically this guy behind the camera that you can’t see. And so we would like him to be able to take his weekends off. So therefore Tuesdays, maybe not next week, but pretty soon we’ll move these to Tuesdays.