Whew. That took a bit, didn’t it?

The Stone Skymarks more than just the end of another trilogy, for me. For a variety of reasons, the period in which I wrote this book has turned out to be a time of tremendous change in my life. Among other things, I quit my day job and became a full-time writer in July of 2016. Now, I liked my day job, where I got to help people make healthy decisions – or at least survive long enough to do so – at one of the most crucial transition points of adult life. I do still help people, I think, as a writer, or at least that’s the impression I get from those of you who’ve sent letters or online messages telling me how much my writing has touched you. But in my day job, the work was more direct, as were its agonies and rewards. I miss it a lot.

Oh, don’t get me wrong; this was a good and necessary life transition to make. My writing career has exploded in all the best ways, and after all, I love being a writer, too. But it’s my nature to reflect in times of change, and to acknowledge both what was lost as well as what was gained.

This change was facilitated by a Patreon (artist crowdfunding) campaign that I began in May of 2016. And on a more somber note… this Patreon funding is also what allowed me to focus wholly on my mother during the final days of her life, in late 2016 and early 2017. I don’t often talk about personal things in public, but you can perhaps see how the Broken Earth trilogy is my attempt to wrestle with motherhood, among other things. Mom had a difficult last few years. I think (so many of my novels’ underpinnings become clear in retrospect) that on some level I suspected her death was coming; maybe I was trying to prepare myself. Still wasn’t ready when it happened… but then, no one ever is.

So I’m grateful to everyone – my family, my friends, my agent, my Patrons, the folks at Orbit, including my new editor, my former coworkers, the staff of the hospice, everyone – who helped me through this.

And this is why I’ve worked so hard to get The Stone Sky out on time, despite travel and hospitalizations and stress and all the thousand bureaucratic indignities of life after a parent’s death. I definitely haven’t been in the best place while working on this book, but I can say this much: Where there is pain in this book, it is real pain; where there is anger, it is real anger; where there is love, it is real love. You’ve been taking this journey with me, and you’re always going to get the best of what I’ve got. That’s what my mother would want.