Duncan Allred

Wowee, I’m sorry it’s been a while. I have no good excuse for taking this long to update anything, so let’s cover a lot in a short time, shall we? I think it’ll be fun.

My newest book is coming along really really well. I can’t be positive, but I’m pretty certain that the first draft will be done early May, and will be off to beta readers before the end of that month. I’ve been hard at work on that for some time, and for the first time, I’d like to reveal some details about that.

This will be the first book of a trilogy set in my world of Mir’talen, the same world where my debut, Iron and Snow, takes place. This one, however, occurs in a completely different part of the world, in a vast region known as the Swamp of Fallen Kings. The story focuses on a young woman who is a master in herbalism, and her story as she becomes entangled in a war with the Fae Courts, also known as the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. There’s a lot of really cool stuff involving Irish mythology and creatures, but it also hugely expands the world first explored in Iron and Snow. I think you guys will really like it.

Beyond that, I want to talk about the LTUE Writing Conference. Every February, I attend a conference named after Life, the Universe, and Everything, a lovely reference to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. That’s a book on the required reading list, by the way.

At the conference, I had the great pleasure of meeting Matt Dinniman, the Author of many books, but most recognizably, Dungeon Crawler Carl. This series is also on the required reading list. Matt was excellent to talk to, and listening to him speak was a chaotic whirlwind of humor mixed with genuine gems of literary knowledge. It was a unique experience that I don’t think a lot of people get, and I feel extraordinarily lucky to have experienced it for myself. Even if he never gets to see this, I want to thank Matt one more time for an unforgettable weekend.

Lastly, I want to talk about the state of our world right now. Anyone who knows me or follows my work knows that I place a very high value on mental health, and boy howdy has the last year been difficult for so many. We’ve seen vast, sometimes hard-to-comprehend injustice, and a dynamic shift in our society that I thought we had collectively moved past. Now more than ever, we need to stay together, and we need to make sure that the people we care about are doing alright.

In case it isn’t clear in the subtext of the earlier paragraph, I’ll state it painfully obviously here. The people in charge of our country right now are the very villains that we love to see defeated. They are tyrants and they are monstrous. And they will not last. We will stand together and we will come out the other side. No darkness is so complete that it does not end.

I want to leave everyone with a quote from Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s become something of a mantra for me since the first time I read it, and I think it’s the precise energy that we all need right now.

“You will not break me. Fuck you all. You will not break me.” -Carl.