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Keeping the Road Honest

October 8, 2026

There's a ten-month calendar taped above my desk, and it has a coffee ring on it. Of everything I keep for this series, it's the page I check most.

The Five Crowns don't count to twelve. The year runs ten months, the week runs eight days, and the three seasons aren't equal. Deepfrost takes the last five months. When I'm drafting, my fingers want the old shapes. A character says she'll be there by the end of the month, and I have to know which of ten months. Someone's meant to arrive on a Thursday, and there is no Thursday. There's Thalday. I've caught myself typing the word weekend and had to stop and ask whose weekend that is.

It sounds like fussing, but a calendar tells you what people dread. Because Deepfrost holds half the year, a road in this world isn't only a distance. It's a question of when. Take a lute on your back through Dravemir and you'll know it in your knuckles before you read it anywhere. Wet wool. Breath that hangs. That's why yesterday's inn scene opens late in the year, with a bard whose hands have stopped feeling like hers. The weather came first. The scene grew around it.

I write the body first. Cold, weight, the knock of a lute case against a doorframe. Then I ask what the person inside the body is thinking, and the answer is usually not much. People on a long road mostly think about their feet. Honey taught me that. Hadna winces for the wood before she winces for herself, and I didn't plan it. It showed up in the draft, and I left it alone because it was true.

Book 2, The Ember and the Thread, is coming soon. I'll keep the details close for now. I can say the calendar is still taped up, the coffee ring has company, and Dhaelen is still carrying two swords.

When you read a cold scene, what do you notice first, the weather or the people in it?

Whispers of the Wyrm, Book One of The Bard and the Blade Saga.