I've dropped a lot of hints recently (especially if you follow me on Twitter) about my latest little side project, a Powder Mage novella. It's coming along nicely. The cover art is finished and the manuscript has gone through numerous edits and two rounds of beta-readers. If everything stays on schedule, I'll finish another edit tomorrow and send it off to the copyeditor, then final edits next week and a release of 1/26/14 on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and directly from me. The novella takes place 35 years before Promise of Blood. For reference, "Hope's End" takes place about 18 years before PoB and "The Girl of Hrusch Avenue" is about 10 years before PoB.

"Erika ja Leora is a powder mage in northern Kez, a place where that particular sorcery is punishable by death. She is only protected by her family name and her position as heir to a duchy.

When she decides to help a young commoner—a powder mage marked for death, fugitive from the law—she puts her life and family reputation at risk and sets off to deliver her new ward to the safety of Adro while playing cat and mouse with the king's own mage hunters and their captain, Duke Nikslaus."