Sanctuary Release Party And Transcript

Last Wednesday’s Sanctuary Q&A, recording and transcript: signed, sealed, delivered, as promised! Find out all about amphibian sequels, flaming swords, serial history getting rewritten, armour trust funds and much, much more.

Update on House Andrews: Everyone is ok, but it is a very painful and uncomfortable strain of COVID. They will be back processing the refunds and everything with the store as soon as they can breathe freely again!

Admin:

• Spoiler session starts at the 57:25 timestamp in the video. Verbal and written warnings are issued! If you don’t want to know spoilers, please do not continue watching/reading.
• If you do decide to take in the spoilers, please don’t go on other forums and blast them to other readers without notice. Be fluffy to thy BDH neighbour and all that.

As usual, nothing is official or set in stone until it’s published in a book. The authors may change their mind whilst writing and editing a future story and not go by the details discussed here.

• Publication schedule – see above. Plans for the order of future releases are discussed in this Q&A, however it is a tentative outline for the purposes of planning the year ahead and being transparent to the fans. Until it’s on the Release Schedule page, as Ilona says, it’s “written with a pitchfork on the water”.

Also, I have found my first white hair live on video with Ilona and Gordon on Saturday’s Zoom, so the Universe hath punish’d me enough. Pity this decrepit, aged husk, and lend her your kindness when it comes to pronunciation and transcript typos.

Transcript of the Sanctuary Release Party

Wednesday, July 31st 2024

Mod R: Hi everyone! I’m Mod R, I’m here with Ilona and Gordon, aka House Andrews. We’re doing a one-and-a-half-hour Q&A today. The last half an hour will be spoilers. We will announce it, and if you want to leave and don’t want to hear spoilers, that’s absolutely fine.

Hi, Ilona. Hi, Gordon. How are you? How has the release week treated you so far and the merch store opening?

Gordon: Stressful.

Mod R [sarcasm]: Not overwhelming at all.

Ilona: We’re a little bit stressed out, but it was such a great launch! Roman turned out to be very popular. Everybody seems to like him. We’re just happy we could entertain people for a little bit.

Gordon: We got a one-star review on Roman. We were both happy! See, we don’t pay people for reviews! And the only surprising thing is that they were able to leave a one-star review and say “I’m not buying this, 1 star”. I would get it if you bought it and you didn’t like it.

Ilona: Gordon was today years old when he realized you can leave reviews on Amazon without buying an item first hehe.

Gordon: It seems sketchy!

Mod R: Ok, but as one-star reviews go, “the book isn’t long enough” is probably the best one star you can get. Because it’s never long enough for the BDH!

Gordon: That’s true!

Mod R: Before we all implode, I have to ask the number one question: It’s called Roman Chronicles Book 1. Does that mean there will be more Roman Chronicles?

Ilona: Yes, absolutely. We know for a fact that there’ll be one more, and we’re going to do Something-Something Frog Prince.

Gordon: We’ll get to do the Koshchei [Note: Koshchei the Deathless, the villain stock character of Slavic tales] and the needle and the egg. All the really neat tropes of Slavic fairy tales.

Mod R: And that would be the Russian Frog Tsarevna [Princess] or Prince, rather than the Western “Kiss-the-frog” Prince?

Ilona: Different Frog Prince, yes. There’s no frog kissing, although jokes will be made about that.

Mod R: And is this #FroggySequel likely to also be a novella? Because, see above, we like big books!

Ilona: Probably, yes. It’s definitely not a short story, it will be a little bit longer. We’re trying to juggle our schedule a little bit, so probably not this year for the Roman sequel. But it’s good to have a little bit of a break between releases like that, because it allows Roman to find his audience.

Gordon: Someone’s saying he needs to make amends to Vasylisa. Yes, because she’s definitely going to be a part of it! It’s going to be a two-person quest.

Ilona: It starts with her saying “Hey, you owe me”. And he does. So they go off on an adventure together, and fun stuff happens.

Mod R: And that’s going into the next question, which is: will the next book be a bit more romantic? Are we going to see Andora as his love interest? Will he get a Happy Ever After?

Gordon: Yes. Who else could he be romantic with?

Ilona: She’s walking towards him and he forgot how to talk there for a second!

Gordon: And that was always the thing that I felt: Roman deserved a happily ever after with someone who could challenge him. And we had talked before about it being the witch. [Note: I think the reference is to Alina, who briefly appears in Magic Breaks]

Ilona: It didn’t seem grandiose enough, somehow. It’s not that the witches are not powerful, but there’s so many of them.

Gordon: Also his mom is the leading witch, so it’s likely he would want something different. She’s a Vasylisa, he’s a Volhv, it works!

Ilona: This way she’s not in Evdokia hierarchy, she’s outside of it. It always works better when you’re not working directly under the mother-in-law!

Mod R: When does Sanctuary happen in the Kate Daniels timeline?

Ilona: It is shortly after the end of the main arc.

Mod R: I think I calculated during the edit, it’s either the Christmas right after Magic Triumphs or the next year.

Gordon: Honestly, I’m leaning towards Christmas of the next year, because everything’s settled, calmed down a little bit.

Ilona: And it’s interesting because it’s a little bit of a different Atlanta, Kate and Curran are not there, Kate is not even mentioned in the story—and we planned it that way. A lot of people wouldn’t have picked it up if it was a direct tie-in. This way it’s a good entrance in the Kate Daniels universe.

Gordon: It’s a post-Kate Atlanta. Obviously, we know where they are, doing their own thing.

Ilona: And it’s not that it will never connect, but it doesn’t need to connect right now.

Gordon: Yeah, we didn’t feel like this one needed Kate or Curran or any of the other more established characters.

Mod R: Because—and I’m going to be sneaky and go into spoilers from previous sessions—you said that if anyone knows what happened to Derek, why Derek left Atlanta, and what happened to him in the meantime, that would be Roman. He is the one to ask. Have there been clues about what happened to Derek in this book and we haven’t noticed it? Or will there be in the next one?

Ilona: That would be a separate story, but it’s a story that’s better saved for Blood Heir 2.

Gordon: All of that is somewhat further set than Sanctuary would be, in the future timeline.

Ilona: Yes, and Blood Heir is then several years from that.

Mod R: When Derek leaves Atlanta, it’s a couple of years after Magic Triumphs, so it would overlap with Roman’s Chronicles timeline.

Ilona: At this point, Roman already knows what…Okay, without any serious spoilers, something happened to Derek. Something in his past, when he was a child, and it had long ramifications, magically. You can see clues about it in the main Kate Daniels series, when Jim wonders why Derek hasn’t gone loup. He stank like a loup when they found him, what is going on? Derek never quite smells right. If you read Magic Stars, you will see that the moon has a disproportionate effect on him. Different clues to the fact that Derek is not a typical shapeshifter.

Roman knows what happened. Roman figured it out, because something happened of a mystical nature and Roman is a mystical dude. It’s his business to know about those things. Derek at this Sanctuary point in the timeline is struggling with it. You have to remember how Derek was brought up, it was a very religious environment, he’s struggling with some things. And that struggle eventually leads him away from Atlanta towards trying to find what he’s capable of and all those things in a place where nobody knows who he was before.

Mod R: So Roman knows, but he’s not necessarily going to tell us in his books. We’re going to have to w*it for Blood Heir 2.

Gordon: Yeah, that’s more of a Blood Heir story, I think.

Ilona: Derek will not pop into Roman’s novellas, it’s not going to be an in depth discussion.

Gordon: It’s a different Derek to me, almost, than the Derek from the Blood Heir.

Ilona: Blood-Heir-books Derek as a completely different ballgame. He is well into his power at that point. He knows what his place is, he knows what he’s supposed to do. The Derek who is contemporary to Sanctuary is still figuring things out.

Mod R: Was Roman inspired or based on a real person?

Ilona: Very loosely. Many years ago when we were writing Kate Daniels, it was one of the books where Evdokia was very prominent, I think it was the first appearance of Roman. We were trying to do some research and I was flipping through the Russian pagan sites, looking for a particular thing. And there was this really cool looking volhv. He had dark hair, kind of a mohawk, and he was decked out in all his volhv stuff. And I thought “Oh, cool guy, we should put him in a book!”.

No clue who he was, can’t find the picture again, I’ve looked while we were doing Sanctuary, I thought it would be cool if we showed, here’s how we thought of him. But that was one picture that got popped into the book and that was it. Not anyone we know.

Mod R: Someone’s asking whether there is an audio. Yes, there’s definitely an audio book version, there’s a paper format and an e-book. And the audio book is very awesome!

Ilona: We have run three rounds of ads for the audio. The Instagram account has six videos for it.

Gordon [reading from chat]: It’s not a Graphic Audio adaptation, no.

Mod R: Ilona, there is a HUGE demand for you to do Evdokia! If there *will* be a Graphic Audio adaptation, you have to get cast as Evdokia and do her voice.

Ilona: I have reached my Baba Yaga stage! Oh my god, that’s hilarious.

Gordon: Then you have to be the Vasylisa.

Mod R: Chris Brinkley does the audiobook, and he’s awesome. And as obsessed as people are with Steve West narrating Hugh, that’s how I am with Chris for Roman, just to let you all know.

Ilona: Actually, Mod R found Chris Brinkley. We were sitting there and we were sorting through dozens and dozens of male narrators and going “No.”, “Oh my god.”, “No, please no!”.

Gordon: Some were close, but nobody was as good as Chris.

Ilona: And then Mod R found Chris and she said “Oh, I think he can do the humor”. He auditioned and it was great.

And he was so conscientious! If you talk to Chris, he so charmingly slightly Southern. He was all in for all the Russian and Slavic words!

Mod R: He read all the other books, he read Gunmetal Magic, he read Magic Slays, he read Magic Binds, he did all the homework. He knows Roman backwards and forwards.

Ilona: It is an amazing audio. We are super, super thrilled. Outstanding, above and beyond.

Mod R: How does Roman make money? Does he have mundane employment? Do the Slavic gods get tithes for their priests? Is he paid through that, people give to Chernobog and it funds Roman?

Ilona: Yes. People give to Chernobog when they want a favor. The way the modern paganism works in Kate Daniels, we had to fudge things a little bit to make it viable: there are gifts given to the gods and their priests, and it’s a yearly fee. Like we give money to the IRS, don’t-put-us-in-jail money, social security money etc. Russian pagans do this for their gods, and donations made to other gods are made in order for them to do something.

Chernobog gets donations to please DON’T DO anything. “Here’s money! We love you. We respect you. We fear you. Please don’t come to the house! Don’t bless us in any way!”. He’s worshipped *against* in a way, almost. And that’s where Roman gets the money. It is allotted, there is a certain system there.

And yes, Roman is not a poor man, he can absolutely take care of a wife and possible children in style and it will be fine. His father is obviously not hurting!

Mod R: Another question in the same vein. How do the Russian neopagans decide which Slavic god to worship? Is it more circumstantial, like if I have a problem with nechist, I go to Chernobog etc? The calling, like Morena and Cherny did, is that just for priests?

Ilona: Yes, that’s just for priests, it’s not for regular people. The entire pantheon is being worshipped at the same time.

But if you’re sick, you’re going to pray to Troyan. If you have a bad business deal, and you want it to turn good, you’re going to pray to somebody else. If there is too hot, too much sun, you pray for the rain. If there is not enough sun, you pray to the sun God. It’s very situational, pick and choose.

Gordon: But obviously, as a priest, you serve the one deity that you’re dedicated to. And you’re respectful of the other gods, but you don’t serve them necessarily.

Mod R: Which leads us to the great conundrum! What is the Kind Regards story about? Who could it possibly be, this teenage boy that we see in the Kind Regards story?

Ilona: At the end of Sanctuary, a teenage boy becomes a priest of Morena and gets onto her wolf and rides off.

Then, in the short story, we see a teenage boy on top of Morena wolf, going to fuss at the priest who disrespected her. The one who created the strife between Morena and Chernobog.

It’s Finn! Finn going like: “Don’t mess with my goddess! I am going to do something about it!”

Mod R:  We can see how he’s doing, the new teenage priest! Getting revenge with Morena’s Wail.

Gordon: Do readers not know it was Finn?

Ilona: Hehe, some people were like “What the heck is that?”

Gordon: Oh, I just assumed it was known.

Ilona: I thought that we put a neon sign.

Mod R: Because it was a Roman POV, they thought it might be a flashback to Roman’s youth, because Roman interacts with Morena’s wolf too.

Ilona: What Roman is referencing is that Morena wanted to see him, and she sent the wolf, she said: “Fetch!”. And the wolf fetched him. But Roman is not going to ride Morena’s wolf in style.

Gordon: Honestly, I don’t think the wolf would allow it. Finn can ride it.

Ilona: Because Finn is Morena’s priest, so it works!

Mod R: But Morena does like Roman, right? Maybe she likes him for him, maybe she likes him because he’s Chernobog’s. She does seem fond of him a little bit.

Ilona: She’s very fond of him. She went through all that trouble to try to help him with his inability to let go of his past. She tried her best and he was very resistant, but gods think long term.

Gordon: Think of Finn too, it goes both ways. Roman saved her priest!

Ilona: Yes, Roman is not dedicated to Morena, but she is his god’s wife.

Mod R: Hehe, someone just said “Roman has a dragon, he doesn’t need a wolf”! I begged, guys, I begged for Aspid to show up.

Ilona: In the next one. It will be a lovely time when Aspid shows up, because stuff happens, Koshchei comes…And we’re not going with the lich-looking, zombie Koshchei. We’re going with the original version of him.

Mod R: The bogatyr, handsome version?

Ilona: Yes. The original myth, the First Bogatyr.

Gordon: We have to explain bogatyrs.

Ilona: Bogatyrs were the equivalent of King Arthur’s knights.

They would go off and have adventures, and we would have sagas about them, called bylinas. And it’s always about trying to repel the Mongolian horde, or fighting with whatever enemy happened to be around, dragons, evil witches, that type of thing. They ran around and tried to keep the peace in ancient mythical Russia.

And the first bogatyr, the most powerful and beloved, was Koshchei. Some untoward stuff happened and he was captured and chained, like Prometheus. Except Prometheus would regenerate because he was a god.

Koshchei just didn’t die. He stayed chained for a really long time, and eventually he became this immortal undead, with really strong funky powers. And there are different ways he’s portrayed. Sometimes he’s almost skeletal; sometimes he’s more like a lich or wraith; sometimes he’s old; sometimes he’s young. But in the original tales, he started off very handsome, very powerful. Nobody came and saved him, nobody helped, so he turned evil and he’s carrying a grudge. We’re going to work it hopefully well into the next novella.

I will shut up now.

Mod R: I guess we’ll just have to do that dirty thing and w*it. Speaking about bad guys, who are the bad guys in Sanctuary? The novella ends, and we don’t really know where they come from?

Ilona: Oh, you have to w*it until the next novella.

Mod R: But there’s a clue in Sanctuary, isn’t there?

Ilona: Yes. There’s a big clue in there.  

Gordon: Spoiler thing?

Ilona: No, it won’t be one of the spoiler things.

Mod R: No, I just threw that grenade to the BDH. Mwa-ha-ha.

Ilona: We’re not going to say, because it’s an overarching thing.

Gordon: Oh, I’m glad you said that, because…

Ilona: You can’t tell them.

Gordon: Ok. Promise!

Mod R: The clue is for the BDH to find and obsess about. Vasylisa! Let’s talk about her. How come Evdokia and Grigorii know who Vasylisa is, but Roman hasn’t met her yet? Do they remember her from all the way back with the school bullying incident, or do they know her as an adult?

Ilona: The way it works is that when the new Vasylisa is born, which is usually before the old Vasylisa dies, there’s a certain amount of magic that’s wrapped around her. For lack of a better word, she’s glowing for those with magic vision.

And Evdokia is part of the Witch Oracle, so they foresaw her coming. They let her grow up enough to where they needed to take charge of her education. Then they found her and they were like: “Hey, you know all the problems you’re having? This is why”.

Roman met her, obviously, in childhood, but he didn’t have a chance to interact with her as a Vasylisa. He interacted with her predecessor Vasylisa, who by then was older. You could probably be a Russian pagan volhv and take decades without ever seeing Vasylisa in the flesh, because they’re wandering around, doing the gods’ bidding.

Mod R: Do people worship her, do they pray to the Vasylisa?

Ilona: No, she’s not a god. She’s a Lancelot, not someone you would worship.

Mod R: And she’s also not like the volhvs, in that Roman is only responsible for the Atlanta area when it comes to Chernobog’s doings. But Vasylisa is responsible for…the whole United States? For the whole world? There’s only one Vasylisa, right?

Ilona: There is only one Vasylisa per continent, let’s put it that way. Russia has its own Vasylisa.

Gordon: Anywhere where there would be enough Slavic pagans. So she’s probably Vasylisa in the South, or she might be the Vasylisa for North America.

Ilona: If you look at it in terms of Christianity, you have your Greek Orthodox, you have your Russian Orthodox, the Catholics, you have the Protestants, everybody has their version of Jesus. And we all know that it’s supposed to be the same Jesus, but in reality, everybody has slightly different rites, slightly different terms in which they communicate with their god.

This is similar: large congregations of pagans differ from each other, because of being separated geographically, having a different hierarchy, probably slightly different rites, slightly different means and places of worship. And yes, larger congregations will have separate Vasylisas.

Mod R: And she functions like a referee between the gods or the various priests?

Ilona: To some extent. When there are conflicts that are not resolvable by normal means, she’ll do something about it. And it’s usually because some deity or some mythologically-powerful creature taps her on the shoulder and says: “Hey, can you do something about it?”

Gordon: So in Judeo-Christian terms, she would be more like an angel. People don’t worship angels.

Mod R: Could you talk a little bit about Beautiful versus Wise? Andora seems Wise, although she’s very Beautiful as well to Roman, what is that separation?

Ilona: For some reason, in Russian fairy tales, there are two versions of Vasylisa, and we don’t know why, because these stories are thousands of years old. This is ancient, very, very old orally-transmitted folklore.

The Wise one seems to do things like spells, being able to ride a horse and outrace men, or shoot arrows really well. Or she will get her sword and go whoop some butt.

Vasylisa the Beautiful usually gets kidnapped quite a bit, by different creatures, and has to be rescued. She seems to be more able to manipulate people by charm and conversation, so her powers are slightly different.

Mod R: But one isn’t more powerful than the other, necessarily.

Ilona: No, just powerful in different ways.

Mod R: And if there’s a Vasylisa the Beautiful, there’s not a complementary Vasylisa the Wise at the same time. There’s just the one. Does she choose which one she wants to be?

Ilona: No, I think that we are just naturally predisposed to one or the other probably.

It’s very rare when somebody is incredibly charming and urbane and also super good at academic learning, because those are different spheres. Each of them demands an investment of time and effort.

As people, we specialize. We have very gifted public speakers, and we have very gifted researchers. It’s rare when the person is both. Which is not to say that there aren’t exceptions to this rule.

Mod R: If she’s the referee between gods, or between priests, and she moves around everywhere – will she be allowed to be together with Roman? Would that give him too much of an advantage over everyone else?

Ilona: The woman carries a flaming sword!

Mod R: No one tells her what to do.

Ilona: Basically.

Mod R: Did you make up Roro? Or does the creature have any established mythical origin?

Gordon: Roro is Momo! Our daughter’s boyfriend has a black, long-haired Frenchie.

Ilona: Her name is Mona.

Gordon: This dog comes in our house. She stands up on her hind legs and does this “Heeeey!” [Mimics puppy standing on back legs with paws in the air]. You have to pick her up. And I go “Momooo!” and I grab her.

Oh, do we have pictures of Momo? You have to see Mona! She is the cutest Frenchie who has ever Frenchied! Except for Tubby.

Ilona: I don’t know if I will be able to show properly, I have a video of her somewhere. She jumps on the couch and she’s like: “Hey, Tuna! Kissy kissy!”

Gordon: Tuna does not dig that.

Mod R: Oh, look at that tummy! Awww. Drop, Roro!

Ilona: She’s hilarious. When she comes over, she’ll run around and then inevitably she’ll go outside. And she’ll come back very quietly, ninja-sneaks in, and when I turn around she’s eating a stick. Where did you get the stick? Why is the stick now in pieces? You should not have a stick! That’s not good for you.

Gordon: Can you see it?

Ilona: It’s a very dark picture, but that’s Miss Mona.

Gordon: She’s crazy. She doesn’t calm down for the first hour or two hours when she comes over.

Mod R: A very menacing creature!

Ilona: Our oldest came over to help with the store, so we had Mona yesterday, and at some point she realized I was very stressed out. So I looked down and she had curled up by my feet and was like: “Heeeey, I will lower your blood pressure if you pet me.”

Mod R: And in the books, will we get a reveal about whether she’s some sort of creature from a different mythology?

Gordon: No, she’s just what she is.

Ilona: What you see is what you get!

Mod R: But all the adorable creatures and nechists, we’ll continue seeing them right? Because we’re very invested in that!

Ilona: Yes!

Mod R: Is Sanctuary a good intro into the Kate Daniels series?

Ilona: I would say it is…

Mod R: It can definitely be read on its own!

Gordon: Here’s the problem. Geographically, it takes place in a very small radius, and it’s even somewhat outside of Atlanta. To me, an introduction to the Kate world would be in Atlanta proper.

Ilona: Questionable Client is probably the best, and that’s available free on the website, if you’re thinking about diving in.

The Kate Daniels series is a little bit uneven in tone, because although Questionable Client is a prequel to it, it was written a little bit later and you can see that we have matured into a certain style.

When we started Kate Daniels, it was our first published work. So Magic Bites, especially, is really different in tone because we were not sure what the heck we were doing. We all have to start somewhere! We started hitting our stride with Magic Burns and by Magic Strikes, we knew what we wanted to do. It’s weird, because when you’re a writer, you base a lot of what you think writing *should* be, what novels are structured like, on the stuff that you read before. And a lot of our reading came from things that were popular with the Boomer generation.

I distinctly remember the moment when we took off with the series. It was Magic Burns, and I was really struggling with it. Gordon was like: “I’m just done”. Out of desperation, I called our editor. And at that point, she was editing something like 54 books a year. Every week, she had a different book. We caught her and I could tell that we had, maybe, a third of her brain engaged and she didn’t remember any of the characters.

And I just remember telling her the stuff and her going “Uhuh. Uhuh. Uhuh.” And she’s a spectacular editor, but you have to get her into that one week where she read the book and she’s in and she’s working on it. And I hung up and I looked at him and said: “You know what, let’s just do whatever the hell we want. Let’s not worry about what it’s supposed to be or the market, because I don’t think there’s going to be a third one. We might as well just entertain ourselves.” And we wrote Magic Burns to make ourselves laugh, at certain points.

Mod R: And that was the magic!

Ilona: Yeah, that’s where it started. Magic Bites reads a lot like kind of every other Urban Fantasy that was on the market at that time.

Gordon: And someone asked, did we cut it? Oh yeah. And it wasn’t even “cut this or that”, it was just “cut words”.

Ilona: “Cut words! Make shorter! Must sell at certain price points!” It was something like a quarter of the book that we had to get rid of.

Gordon: We’ve had this question on panels and different things: “Did you know the series would be ten books long?”. No! Hell no, we didn’t. We didn’t know it would be three books long, for Christ’s sake!

Ilona: We never thought it would go that far!

If you’re going to start somewhere, start with a Questionable Client, and then I would suggest skipping maybe book one, or two, and trying Magic Strikes, and then going back and getting the rest of it. Because if you like Magic Strikes, you will like the rest of the series.

Mod R: And then come on Facebook and say “I read Magic Rises, and I can’t get over it. Magic Rises traumatized me!” hehe.

Ilona: But that’s the book that made us the number one New York Times bestseller. Because it was so shocking, all the reviews were “OMG, you have to read it! Stuff happens!”

It was high stakes, and people are so mean to poor Curran over it! When you think about it, this guy was out of his territory, not to mention that he saw his parents being eaten And now he’s in an alien land, with something that is eating shapeshifters, clearly cannibalistic monsters. And here’s Kate, and Kate is human, and so he tried his absolute best to protect her, whichever way he could, bless his heart.

It’s interesting because we hold fictional characters to be infallible. We get so much crap for Jim and for Doolittle, who didn’t want Kate to heal him. There’s this whole thing about it, but they’re meant to be real people, they’re meant to have flaws. Otherwise, it’s not very interesting. They’re not archetypes, they’re characters.

I have gone off on a tangent!

Mod R: Speaking of knowing what you were going to do, did you always have this backstory for Roman about his brother and his brother’s betrayal?

Ilona: We knew the brother died, but we didn’t know in detail what happened. When we conceived the character, we wanted him to have enough of a backstory, to have done cool stuff in the army and so on.  

Gordon: He’s reluctant. He may have been Chernobog’s first choice, but this wasn’t Roman’s first choice! So I think he’s always been a reluctant volhv, a put-upon priest.

Mod R: And that’s what Sanctuary is mainly about, isn’t it? The relationship of Roman with his priesthood, the philosophical take on it.

Gordon: I don’t know if anybody’s familiar with the movie Clerks, there’s a character there, Dante, who says: “I wasn’t even supposed to be here today.” To an extent, that’s Roman. He wasn’t supposed to be the volhv of Chernobog.

Ilona: General, very broad generalizations, please don’t hold me to it. There’s a certain similarity in the way Irish mythology, and people in the Celtic mythology stories deal with gods – and the way the Slavic pagans deal with gods. There’s an overlap there, where gods are treated with less reverence than you expect.

There’s this wonderful moment in one of the movies about Slavic mythology that I watched as a child, where a girl is brought to a volhv. This young woman, who was shot with an arrow, and he’s trying to heal her, and he’s trying, and there’s just not enough divine power. He gets really frustrated, so he gets his stick and he goes and he wallops the idol of the god and he’s shouting “You are a bad god!”

Gordon: There’s a reciprocity. “If I worship you, come on, you got to do your bit! Nothing in life is free.”

Mod R: Maybe I’ll drag the tree, but that’s it!

Ilona: We’re just maybe more pragmatic in that respect? I’m not sure. But it’s an interesting style versus just outright worship and reverence.

Mod R: I think that kind of speaks to the dual faith thing that’s happening in Eastern Europe. The population is mostly Christian, we go to church, but when it comes to daily life issues, like protecting our crops, fertility, newborns, we all have rituals and folkloric ceremonies. “Give me what I need, I’ll give you X or do Y in return. But then I’ll go to Christian church at the weekend and have no issue doing both.”

Ilona: Like Gordon said, reciprocity and almost expectation of fairness. Roman says about Chernobog “He may not be a generous god, but he was always fair.”

Gordon: If you’re talking about the Irish side of it, they show a bit of that in American Gods, maybe more the book than the show. There’s a girl who grew up in Ireland and came to America. And she has this sort of relationship with a leprechaun or one of the fair folk. She put stuff out for them, and it’s two-fold: “Don’t do bad stuff to us. But also, if you want to do something nice for us, we’ll leave you a bit of cider after the harvest. We’ll put some milk out at night.”

Ilona: These are very old traditions. They’re so old that we don’t even know when they started.

Gordon: But a lot of it survived.

Ilona: For some reason, it survived.

Mod R: And, of course, they survived in Kate Daniels’ world, when the pendulum swings back into magic. Because people are the same as they’ve ever been, and when all these things come back, they build the same type of relationships. We’ve rambled enough about religion, but that is the point of the book, in a way!

If you get the rights for the Kate series, will you edit the first Kate books?

Ilona: No. In the collector edition of Magic Bites, we tried to address the things that were so badly cut that parts of the book don’t make sense. We tried our best and the publishers fought us tooth and claw.

Gordon: And if we rewrote Magic Bites and Magic Burns, they would be different, because we’re so much older, it’s been 17 years! Our kids were little, we were living in Savannah.

Ilona: I used to say the books are old enough to drive, but in a few months, they’ll be able to enlist in the army and vote!

Books are meant to be snapshots of both the time they were written in and also the inner world of the writer when they were creating them.

We were different people. And yes, you could make an argument that they may not have aged well, some themes are probably not as culturally sensitive as they are now, when we have a bigger, better understanding. Back then, we didn’t. Our children were probably the first generation that started accessing the internet in childhood. It was a completely different social world, a different time and place.

Gordon: We do know an author that was allowed to go back and rewrite her earlier books, but honestly, I’d rather write the next Iron and Magic for you guys. Or the next Julie books.

Ilona: Or start something completely new, rather than going back to rewrite. There’s some stuff that we can do, we can go back and adjust word choice. That’s just basics. If some word becomes culturally inappropriate, for whatever reasons, it’s very easy to replace it, because it’s just a word.

But you cannot rewrite the themes of the book completely. We own our mistakes, but we also would not want to spoil the experience for those of you who have read the older books. And then when you want to go back and read it—because let me tell you, the Kindle will update it for you!—they would be completely different. We would not do the bait and switch on you like that.

Mod R: We’re coming close to the spoiler section, so before the people who don’t want to hear spoilers leave, I have to ask you about the future schedule.

What are the plans? There is currently a post on the blog that says that we are going to maybe get a novella for the holidays this year. Is that still in the works?

[Negotiation on spoilers takes place off-mic]

Gordon: Maybe I meant to turn the microphone off! No, haha, we had a discussion about this today, we cleared it with NYLA [Note: House Andrews’ agent, also referred to here as Nancy]. We got the okay, so I think the next thing is going to be Wilmington 3.

Ilona: We have to finish Maggie‘s edits at the end of August. It’s due and it is a massive book.

Gordon: At the end of next month, we have to go to Dragon Con and be there for five days, and that’s going to wipe us. We don’t travel well, we travel like fruit.

Ilona: We’re fragile and bruise easily hehe!

Gordon: So there goes September. But then we need to release something! Here’s why Wilmington Years 3 makes sense. We can finish that. We can somewhat serialize it, which we have always done with the Wilmington books. [Mod R enters “No, you haven’t” mode]. Then, if we do the third book and it doesn’t suck, Wilmington 1, 2, and 3 can be bundled in the very pretty way.

Ilona: And you can get the pretty edition that you guys have been asking for, because we’ve had so many requests for it.

Gordon: Then we need to shift into Iron and Magic 2.

Ilona: That’s the plan right now, barring unforeseen circumstances, health problems or Tor coming back and saying: “Hey, guys, this is not what we wanted. We bought a different Maggie. Fix it.”

We’ll serialize Wilmington 3 on the blog and release it, up to a point, and you can read it while we are working on Iron and Magic 2. The flagship release for 2025 will probably be Iron and Magic 2, and we *may* start Innkeeper in 2025. We will have to see.

Mod R: As a serial too?

Ilona: As a serial, yes.

Gordon: Everyone knows by now we owe Tor two Maggie books and something else. At some point, guys, we have to write that stuff, because they gave us the dough.

Ilona: And, for some reason, Maggie is weird, this universe is weird. Usually, when we write something, like Hidden Legacy, we can do a project on the side and it’s relatively easy to take one day out of the week and do that. Not with this.

Gordon [to chat]: The contract is for 2 Maggies +1, but the third could also be a Maggie. We just don’t know.

It could be 2 Maggies and a Shadow Forger [Note: Shadow Forger is another project, no snippets or info have been shared publicly yet, and Cherny will revoke my Nav privileges if I spoil too much on it, so don’t ask me].

It could be 2 Maggies and a Puffles.

Ilona: We’re not sure.

Mod R: Now you’ve *really* thrown the grenade in there. You’ve said Puffles. Rest in Peace, BDH.

Ilona: I got this most annoyed email on the Maggie announcement post which said “You never finish anything.” And I was like, we finished Hidden Legacy. We finished Kate Daniels. We finished The Edge.

For now, Wilmington 3 makes sense for us to knock out. Prep it for Blood Heir 2, get it all set up. Then we knock out Iron and Magic 2, which you have guys been w*iting for forever.

Gordon: And we also owe France Iron and Magic, we signed something. [Note: The French publishers.]

Ilona: And they’re so nice and we have to deliver, so we’re going to concentrate on that. We are aiming for the serialization of Wilmington 3 in the fall to winter season, and then we’re hoping to self-publish it in the early first quarter of 2025.

Gordon: We’d love January! But then there’s always the audio and blah blah, so we’ll say January, and then Nancy is like “But what about November?” and we’re like “No!”

Ilona: She doesn’t mean November before, she means November after. But we would like you guys to have a release from us. We’ll concentrate on Iron and Magic 2. Hopefully it will be self-published somewhere in mid-2025, that’s what we’re aiming for.

Gordon: We’re balancing what we owe you guys and what we owe Tor. And there does have to be a fair balance.

Ilona: We don’t really know what promotional expectations there will be with Maggie. Because they backed the truck up and they dumped a bunch of money and now we have to make sure that we deliver something awesome. Otherwise it’s such a letdown. We’re working super hard on that and hopefully we’ll pull ourselves together and get all of that done.

Maggie makes it very difficult to work on other stuff. It’s consuming.

Gordon: Before the store really took over in this release, we were in the study doing Maggie stuff. Maggie tends to take over. It’s new, it’s shiny!

Mod R: And she GROWS! Can you share what the word count is at the moment?

Gordon: Oh, it’s effing huge.

Ilona: It’s freaking crazy. Hold on, I’ll tell you what it is. [looks through computer folders]

Gordon: Why does it say Old Maggie on that folder?

Ilona: Because there are 50 million drafts of it. Okay, the two-thirds edit…

Gordon: Oh yeah, I got pretty far with that before the store hit.

Mod R: In the meantime, let me say for the chat questions: Wilmington 3 will happen before Blood Heir in the timeline. All the Wilmingtons will happen before Blood Heir, and yes, it will also be self-published.

Ilona: Here’s the thing about Kate Daniels, as much as I’m a fan of Maggie and everything: whatever problems the first books had, it’s our baby. It’s where we started. We really love that universe. She’s our oldest child. Woo. (Also super not fair to the children!)

Okay. I just don’t have the right Maggie file here.

Gordon: I saw 138k words.

Ilona: No, that’s the two-thirds count. It’s *around* 180k right now. I don’t have the exact numbers, but basically two Magic Burnses put together.

Gordon [to chat]: No, we totally serialized Wilmington 1 and 2.

Ilona: We didn’t.

Mod R: No, you didn’t! I don’t know what you’re talking about haha. It was a mega surprise. “Look, Magic Tides. It’s ready done.” [gets the full giggles]

Ilona: Remember how we pottered down? And then we called Nancy and said “Put it out right away.” And she was like: “You are taking advantage of my kindness!”

Gordon: Oh, that’s true. Didn’t we serialize the second one?

Ilona: No.

Gordon: So we can’t serialize this one?

Ilona: Why not? It’s self-pub.

Gordon: Okay, never mind. I thought we did serialize Magic Clams [sic]. Well, we’re going to serialize this one.

Ilona: Am I…Have I lost my whole bag of marbles?

Mod R: No, no, you’re right. Magic Tides was a complete surprise.

Ilona: We serialized Innkeeper. I don’t believe we serialized a Kate Daniels.

Mod R: Blood Heir was serialized during the pandemic.

Gordon: I would like to serialize the third one.

Ilona: Yes, because we promised you a serial novella, and Wilmington 3 will fit the bill. It will be fun, it will be entertaining, it is probably going to be a winter novella. So it will be very à propos for it to go up in the fall.

Gordon: Because otherwise, if we stuck strictly to what we’ve serialized previously, it would have to be Innkeeper.

Ilona: We need to be able to give the Innkeeper finale our full attention, and it’s just very difficult.

Gordon: 100% of our attention. We can’t do it part time.

Mod R: Are you still planning for it to be a Maud POV?

Gordon: Okay. Here’s where we go into spoilers. If you don’t want spoilers, you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

Ilona: We love you! Thank you for coming to see us!

…W*it. You have to give people time to log off.

Mod R [singing the song of her people]: We can’t w*it for spoilers! We can’t w*it for spoilers!

Gordon: So this is the spoilery bit. We see the next Innkeeper as being a two-parter. Part one is the wedding of Maud and Arland, and the attack and blah, blah, blah. The second part is go get the parents. A split.

Ilona: We just don’t know how long each part will be. We would have to write it out first, because it’s very difficult to say.

Gordon: Yes, House Ervan needs to get their comeuppance!

Ilona: House Ervan, the big wedding, the Mukama. All of that stuff is tied up with the corrupted Innkeeper thing.

Gordon: And the ad-hals.

Ilona: The difficulty here is that both Maud and Dina are point of view characters. And people really liked Sweep of the Blade. Ok, I know that people love the Innkeeper series in general, but Sweep of the Blade stood out.

Mod R: The classic!

Ilona: Yeah, there was something about. I don’t know if it was the men in armor or the women in armor or being in space…

Mod R [cracking wise]: You’d have to ask Maggie.

Ilona: Hahaha, this is a Maggie the Undying joke.

At some point, Maggie sees this guy, the quintessential knight, and he’s huge, like 6’6, and he’s walking towards her in the brilliant sunshine, like a moving picture. And she’s like “I’m looking for a man in armor. 6’5,  blue eyes. He probably has a trust fund.”

Gordon: That armor’s not cheap.

Ilona: So that’s what Mod R is referencing. What the heck was I yapping on about? Now I forgot.

Mod R: The points of view being both Maud and Dina. Any chance we’re going to get a Klaus POV?

Ilona: We really want to make sure that Klaus will be in there, but probably not the POV. We want to make sure that each of the sisters has a very strong storyline. So it may be a two-parter, it may be a duology finale, we just don’t know.

Gordon: It would be a lot to put into one book, because it really is two different things. It’s Maud and Arland’s wedding, which I think could be funny if it was told from Dina’s point of view?

Ilona: I absolutely would not do that! Because you’re missing out on all of that emotional payoff with the former mother-in-law.

Gordon: Ok, so we’ll do it more traditionally.

Ilona: I want the full impact of that revenge! It needs to be first person.

Gordon: Then the second bit needs to be from Dina’s point of view, she needs to be the one who rescues the parents.

Ilona: Yes, because Dina’s the one who started it, that was Dina’s thing. That was Dina’s from start to finish.

Gordon: Maud split.

Ilona: Maud’s struggle was different, and it’s more personal in nature because there is a child involved. It’s different storylines we have to mash together.

Gordon [reading chat suggestions, chuckling]: Do it all from Helen’s point of view hahaha.

Ilona [loses it too]: That would be hilarious. Helen and the cat. The dynamic duo. Oh my gosh!

Mod R: There you go, you got to see a little bit of *this* dynamic duo writing together and agreeing on stuff. [Puppies jump on the Zoom] Hi Nykee! Oh my, who’s just woken up?

Gordon: Alright, let’s go! Hang on, I’ll let the dogs out. Pardon us for two seconds.

[to dogs]Oh, Charlie, big jump! No, don’t eat weird shit on the ground. Go outside.

Ilona: Unfortunately, he trained this dog [Note: Charlie Tubbins, the Frenchie]. The first time we had a Zoom, he picked him up and now if we sit down together at the computer and Zoom is happening, he’ll come over. Charlie needs to sit on his lap and everybody needs to tell him how amazing he is.

Mod R: He needs air time! Of course, he’s a celebrity.

Is this Innkeeper, which might be two Innkeepers or at least a dual POV – is it going to be the last one or just the last in the finding the parents arc?

Ilona: To be fair, I think we’ll wrap it up with finding the parents.

Gordon: At least for a little bit.

Ilona: I cannot deal with any more “You never finish things!”

Gordon: Maud is married, Dina finds the parents, which was her quest all along. Everybody’s happy, hopefully, at least in that part of their lives. And for Dina the ad-hal aspect of it, because she is an Innkeeper. That part’s more important to her than it probably would be to Maud.

Ilona: It’s two different struggles. It’s Maud fighting the Mukama and Dina fighting the corrupted Innkeeper and everything that comes with it. It’s a very long involved storyline and we will knock it out. Don’t worry.

Gordon: I do feel like the person that criticizes, they’re not wrong. I mean we do finish *sometimes*….

Ilona: The thing is, it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t. When we finished Kate’s series, we had literal suicidal threats sent to us. Then, when we went back and did Wilmington or Blood Heir even, it was like: “I thought you guys were done. You’re now milking it.” So make up you mind. Do you want more, or do you not want more? And if you don’t want more, stop bugging us for it hehe.

 Mod R: As long as you have stories to tell, we are here to read them, is the conclusion!

Gordon: I think that part of Innkeeper would be done for a little bit. But then we could pick it up later.

Ilona: The interesting thing about the Innkeeper is you can pick it up at any point and just spin off more stuff onto it, because it’s just adventures in the galaxy. And it’s fun, it’s a flight of fancy. We can do whatever we want, because the galaxy is so huge.

It’s a lot of fun for me. I don’t want to let go of it yet. But by God, I will!

Gordon: I feel like we should give you guys a satisfying ending to at least that arc.

 Ilona: Just be done for a bit and then do something else. [Pouts]

Mod R and Gordon: Awwww.

Gordon: Sad Ilona is sad!

Ilona: Sad Ilona *is* sad. My precious baby!

Mod R: Speaking about sad things, are you a bit more okay now to potentially think about an Arabella continuation?

Gordon: We even thought about serializing that. Nancy [agent] was wondering, do we give that to Tor? And I was like: “No, hell no!”

Ilona: No, I don’t think so. I think Tor needs to have an original property.

Gordon: Arabella, I think, we’ll keep for ourselves. We are more open to an Arabella thing.

Ilona: Next question!

Mod R: Will you start any other new projects except Maggie or are you focusing on sequels?

Ilona: As far as the new projects go, It’s gonna be Maggie. And the other stuff is just us tying up the loose ends: Iron and Magic 2, Wilmington 3, at some point Innkeeper finish, and Blood Heir 2. And that concludes everything that we reasonably owe to the BDH.

Gordon: Whilst, we have to say it, we are officially under contract with Tor to give them three books.

Ilona: And those books will take precedence over whatever else we’re doing.

Gordon: If it comes down to it, because they have given us advances, and there’s the publicity. We can’t just… oh, Tuna’s here. Hi, Tuna!

Mod R: Ermmmm, the gentleman! Please. The handsome man that is Tuna.

Ilona: We have misgendered our cat!

Gordon: For eight years, I thought he was a girl.

Ilona: In our defence, he “Miaoooooou”s very cutely. I never heard him viciously growl in a manly way.

But the… what the heck was I saying? Oh, I was saying something smart! I’m so scatterbrained from the store, oh my gosh.

Mod R: Maggie, two books and something else.

Ilona: So we can’t just continue to write sequels, as much as we love our existing universes. We need to write something new, and Tor have been amazing to work with. Oh my god. It’s like movie editing. You talk to the editor and the editor knows what’s going on, and discusses “but does it make sense from this point of view?”. I’ve had deep conversations with our editor regarding our character! It’s amazing.

Gordon: It’s very different than self-pub.

Ilona: Or even some of the other tradition work we’ve done.

Gordon: This is amazing. And we want those three books to be the best books we can give them. That’s why she says it takes precedence, we’re contracted for it.

Ilona: We’re trying our absolute hardest,

Gordon: Which, of course, we also try for the self-pubs.

Ilona: We always try our absolute hardest, it’s just that this is a longer, more involved project. It’s a whole new world.

Gordon: I think Maggie’s the longest book we’ve ever written, easily.

Ilona: And we got to put all the stuff into it now. At some point, Mod R read the first draft, she was so funny, she was like “You realize that in chapter 8 suddenly we have both flora and fauna, which was not there before?” We had introduced eight different species all of a sudden, in a clump. So yeah, none of that is happening now, we can give you Relas in all of its glory!

Mod R: Maggie is fantastic! It’s this rich, yeasty dough, and the more it develops, the more delicious it gets, with more depth of flavor and world-building, and characters and love letter to fandom and…I can’t w*it for you guys to read it!

Does Tor have an idea about the publishing date yet?

Ilona: Very early 2026, that’s what they’re aiming for.

Gordon: And that’s not even spoilery. That’s just what we know.

Ilona: They want to do this thing, where they print a bunch of ARCs and then they send them out and give everyone several months to read it. Because what people don’t realize is that reviewers, critics, and journalists, they get books all the time. There’s usually a stack you have to get through. Which is why it takes them a significant amount of time to get to your book, so you can’t throw your book at them a month before publication and expect that they will read it. Tor wants to give them, at the minimum, six months to get to it, read it, hopefully talk about it…we’ll see.

Gordon: That’s their business, we’re not going to tell them what to do.

Ilona: We are writers. They have marketing professionals, publishing professionals…

Gordon: Editors.

Ilona: We stay in our lane, when it comes to that.

Gordon: We’re going to finish pecking around with Maggie, the first Maggie, and then give it to them. But if Tor come and say, “We need Maggie 2 in six months”, everything else is put aside and we’re doing Maggie 2.

Mod R: Is the title final? Is it going to be called Maggie the Undying?

Ilona: No, nothing is final.

Gordon: I like the Maggie the Undying title.

Ilona: I love that title! It’s such a juxtaposion!

Gordon [reading from chat]: How old is Maggie? Maggie’s about 25. The same as one of our daughters.

Ilona: She graduated from college, and she actually tried really hard to get a few jobs and work them, but they didn’t work out for different reasons. So she’s a little bit more mature, and it’s so good that she’s a little bit more mature! Because the sharks she finds in that fantasy universe…

Gordon: She’s Gen Z, I guess.

Ilona: Yes! I really like it. I like messing with it, I like writing it,

Gordon [from chat]: Did you miss Blood Heir? No, there’s no Blood Heir 2 yet. We need to do Wilmington 3 and Iron and Magic 2, and then do Blood Heir 2.

Ilona: In the timeline, not the timeline of writing, but the chronological timeline of the series: we have Magic Triumphs, then Sanctuary, then we have Wilmingtons 1, 2 and 3. And then Blood Heir 1 and 2.

Iron and Magic is on the other side of that. It takes place *before* Magic Triumphs. There are big spoilers. We’ll let you know what’s going on with the chicken. But we need to get that out of the way, so that duology can be completed and be done. And that way nobody will come after me with pitchforks.

Mod R: They just asked, will there definitely only be two books in Iron and Magic, not three?

Ilona: For now, yes.

Gordon: I don’t even know what we’d do with a third book.

Ilona: The Iron and Magic books are not sequential, in so far as they don’t have an overarching plotline, aside from Elara and Hugh’s relationship.

Gordon: They tend to be more episodic.

Ilona: They’re very episodic. And yes, could we theoretically do three, four, five? Absolutely. And they’re super fun to write.

Gordon: And we might do one day.

Ilona: But, right now, I want to get the metaphorical beast off our back. To finish the second duology, leave that couple in a good place, and then go tie up the loose ends elsewhere.

Mod R: So we’ve shifted from you thinking in trilogies, which you used to do, to now thinking in duologies. Iron and Magic duology, Blood Heir duology, Maggie potentially duology?

Gordon: A super fat duology! Potentially. That’s the difference between self pub and traditional pub. They like three book deals.

Ilona: On self pub, we now lean towards duologies more.

[Tuna conquers the desk] Oh my gosh. Okay. Just. What is your deal? What do you want, princess?

Mod R: Prince Tuna, please!

Ilona: Your majesty. What are we doing?

Gordon: Will the little girl rescued in book 1 [of Iron and Magic] be adopted by Hugh and Elara?

Ilona: Yes!

Mod R: So I’m not going to ask actual spoilers. You just have to say “yes” or “no” if it’s going to be addressed.

Will they find out what is happening with the plants in Iron and Magic 2?

Both: Yes.

Mod R: You already said we are going to find out what the chicken is about.

Ilona: Correct.

Mod R: This is between you and me, Ilona! Look me in the eye: did I guess? Because I asked you and you said, “Ha, ha, ha I’m so glad you enjoyed it!” but that wasn’t a yes or no.

Ilona [butter wouldn’t melt]: I don’t remember.

Gordon: What is this?

Mod R: Okay. Fine, we’re going to talk about that later. I *think* I guessed about the chicken, but I’m not 100% sure because Ilona just answered ambiguously. See, guys, even I don’t know!

Ilona: There’s a battle at the end of Magic Triumphs that will make more sense. That’s a spoiler for you!

Mod R: We’re definitely going to find out what/who Elara is, which entity shares the body with Elara?

Ilona: Yes, we absolutely will tell you. We’re not going to tell you now, but we’ll tell you in the next book, because we don’t want to ruin the reveal for you.

Mod R: Will we get to see—probably not in Iron and Magic 2, but in Blood Heir 2— will we get to see Hugh and Elara’s kids? In particular, the one who lifts cows and walks around like a Greek hero?

Gordon: In Iron and Magic 2, probably not. They’re not at that point yet in the second book?

Ilona: There’s probably going to be an appearance in Wilmington 3.

Gordon: Because you know Hugh d’Ambray is Curran’s favorite, most favorite person.

 Mod R: They bond over moats!

Gordon: They share a love of moats.

Ilona: It’s really funny, at some point, everything is going well, and then suddenly Conlan turns around and he’s like “Uncle Hugh!”. And he just leaves his parents, and takes off down the road hehe.

Gordon [reading from chat]: Oh, geographically, they’re so far! [Answer to] Will we see Erra and Hugh together in Iron and Magic 2?

Ilona: Remember where it is in terms of the timeline. It’s before Magic Triumphs.

Mod R: So she’s a ghosty-ghost! [Note: Actual technical term]

Ilona: She’s not in the flesh, yes! Next question.

Mod R: Are we ever going to see the teased adventures of Julie and Erra? What happened to Semiramis in Mishmar? Did they save her bones?

Ilona: That book would not sell. It’s very interesting, it would be fun to write, however it would not sell. Between us Kate Daniels diehards, the series is set commercially as a urban fantasy series with a romantic arc.

Julie and Erra would be a girl adventure, very much a departure from the previously established format, and because of that, people would be disappointed, and we cannot take time to write it. We need to think about all the rest.

Gordon: When I think about writing her, I just don’t know what we’d write about!

Mod R: Damian could court Erra, the Angevin!

Ilona: He’s trying, the man is trying. He’ll probably succeed, who knows.

Mod R: But we’re likely to see, or at least hear, from Erra and maybe Julie in Wilmington 3?

Ilona: We’ll see!

Mod R: I think we’ve talked about most of the…[squirrel!] oh is Arabella anywhere in the writing schedule? Not…really?

 Ilona: We flirted with it a little bit. And it’s very clear that if we’re going to start, it’s going to be a novel. It’s not going to be a novella, because she’s so much fun to write.

Gordon: Someone asked what the key is for. [Note: The key that is at the end of Lollypops, Part 2] The key goes to a lockbox in the bank.

Ilona: I can tell you what’s in the lockbox, if you want to know.

Mod R: Yes, it’s the spoiler section!

Gordon: It’s a hand. The key goes to a safety deposit box with a severed hand in it.

Ilona: And the hand is not decomposing. So the question is why?

Mod R: At some point after the merch store – definitely after the merch store ends! – might we see the end of Lollypops?

Gordon: We need to work on it, we realize that. We *were* working on it, and then everything crunched down on us.

Ilona: The problem is that Lollypops is leading into the novel!

Gordon: If there’s an Arabella novel, Lollypops is the beginning of that.

Ilona: And please don’t hold us to the schedule, because things are subject to change. We may start Iron and Magic 2, and just not be able to be in the right frame of mind.

Books are not widgets, and sometimes you’re just not feeling it. I would hate for it to be like the experience we had at the end of Hidden Legacy. While Ruby Fever is a good book and I’m really proud of us for writing it and finishing the series, we were just not in the right frame of mind for it. It was like dragging rocks. And I don’t know why, because Emerald Blaze, oh my god, we knocked it out, we flew through that book!

Gordon: That may be the duology part of it, because had it been up to us, we would have said: Emerald Blaze, that’s it.

Ilona: Wrap up the arc, they’re together, they’re happy, yay.

Gordon: But, again, we were contracted for three books.

Ilona: And we did have some stuff to finish, like Alessandro’s family issue.

[Tubby hijinkery happening in the background]

What is he doing? Do you have a stick? Please don’t have a stick!

Gordon: Charles Tubbins! Are you chewing on the rug?

Ilona: What was I going to say again?

Gordon: We may not be feeling it.

Ilona: If there’s anything I learned in our almost two decades of writing is that sometimes when it doesn’t go, if you try to force it, you’re just going to write yourself into a block.

And then nothing gets written, and you feel horrible. When you’re stuck in the writing block, it’s the worst feeling, nothing works. You can’t play computer games, you can’t watch TV. You’re just gonna exist in this tortured limbo. I really hate being there.

Gordon: I will say about Arabella, the little bit that we did on Lollypops was really fun.

Ilona: We enjoyed it, and this is the problem. We enjoyed it entirely too much!

Gordon: I wish that we could just sit and knock out the Arabella thing and serialize it, it would be amazing.

Ilona: But we need to finish Wilmington 3, because it’s unfinished.

Mod R: Whatever you feel like writing, whatever story you feel like telling, we are here for it, we thank you for them, and we’re very grateful, and we hope you do enjoy writing them.

Ilona: You guys have been so patient with us, we’re popping all over the place, and this book, and that book, and you guys are still like: Yay!

Gordon [reading from chat]: Karat’s love interest. That’s an excellent question. Yeeeeees.

Mod R: I’m already shipping who the love interest would be!

Gordon: Who is it for you?

Mod R: Oh, definitely the Under-Khan! #Karakun4ever!

Ilona: Dagorkun. The funny part about this is, Lord Soren would just have an apoplexy.

Gordon: Oh, he would go crazy. Oh, talk about a Romeo and Juliet. It would be so much fun.

Mod R: And there can be a treaty, and then the Lees can come in!

Gordon: And you know the vampires are all about bringing different humanoid stock.

Ilona: No, you’re thinking of the other ones, the Dominion. Vampires are the opposite, they’re xenophobic.

Gordon: So are the Horde, to some extent. It would be very interesting. Who raises the children?

Mod R: Just imagine how much coffee will you need to get Lord Soren drunk enough. We can’t w*it for all of these adventures and for you to take us there!

Ilona: It wouldn’t have to be coffee, it would have to be espresso at that point.

Mod R: Barrels of espresso!

Gordon: Oh, Dina can host the wedding, that’s such a good idea. It would be so cute!

Ilona: There we go, the duology of weddings haha! Maud’s wedding, Karat’s wedding!

All of this is, like the Russians say, written with a pitchfork on water, meaning that we plan and plan but something could happen tomorrow. If somebody picks up film rights to Innkeeper and starts developing it, everything going to be like shoved to the side and we’re working on Innkeeper.

Gordon: But It’s good to have a plan. We would like to do so many things and I hope we get to do some of them.

Ilona [reading questions from chat]: I am hoping for a Kate anime as well! I think it would be amazing. If I could have a magic wand though, I would get Studio Ghibli to do Innkeeper. Orro would be so cute.

Gordon: Oh, Orro would be adorable!

Ilona: Just that scene when she goes to get him and all his needles stand up!

It’s not gonna happen, guys. We’ve got this Hollywood agent dude. His name is Sean. And we had a showrunner for Kate, and that didn’t go anywhere. And I know it didn’t go anywhere because they ghosted us. It was all love and dove and: “Here’s our first pilot. This is what the script is going to look like. Blah, blah, blah, blah.” And then silence. So yeah, we have done the song and dance before.

Mod R: One day!

Ilona: No, no. Here’s the high note for you: we love being writers. We enjoy when you guys read our stuff. That’s enough for us. We are perfectly happy with that! And yes, if the show came along, that would be great, but if it doesn’t, we are lucky and we are fortunate. At the risk of being corny, we are #blessed with great, amazing readers. There we go.

Mod R: And we love you back, and thank you so much for all the books and all the adventures that you take us on!

Thank you so much for Sanctuary and finally telling Roman’s story! We’ve been w*iting for him for so long! Me! I did! It is such a wonderful book. And thank you for putting up with us with the merch store and the Horde invasion.

Ilona: Thank you for hosting us! And to Mod R, who really has done a huge amount of work on Sanctuary and on making sure that you guys are always updated on everything. There are times when I don’t know what’s going on, and then she sends me a list and says, “Hey, what about all those things?”. And I’m like, oh, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing! We absolutely enjoy working together and I hope it continues.

Mod R: Obviously, you’re not getting rid of me anytime soon hehe.

See all of you on the blog and on Saturday!