We are now 11 days into 2026 and I have been going through the manuscript for Castle of Three Kings. It has nearly 70k words and was never completed because I realized I had broken something in the world building that made no sense. This stalled the ending because the things I needed to fix were extremely important and, quite frankly, I got frustrated by how much needed to change.
It is important to note that I began this story because of my son. He was playing Minecraft with his friends and they were building a ‘castle of three kings’ and the title wormed its way into my creative brain. Obviously the castle they were building was a joint effort between two other friends, so they were the kings meant to inhabit the fortress.
Here we are several years later, and several books later, and I finally feel prepared to dig into this book and fix it. It is hitting somewhere between MG and YA insofar as language and tropes feel to me, and I’ve decided to keep it that way. This was always a book meant for my son and when I began it, he was very young.
That said, I may release it under a different penname so that Readers aren’t wholly shocked by the change of tone.
We’ll see.
Pennames are brands and brands take time and effort. If I intend to do more books inside YA or MG in the future, it would make sense to pursue a whole new brand, but aside from Last Child of Winter, I can’t say I’m terribly inspired to write in that age group.
At any rate, that is where I am at and what I am doing.
Happy reading. Happy writing.
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