The Archive Escaped
The Archive escaped.
I had a release date.
This feels important to establish.
Favors, Fangs, & Feral Fluff, the second book in The Archive of the Unfound, was supposed to release September 22nd, the first day of fall.
I picked that date on purpose. I announced that date. I planned around that date.
Amazon apparently did not care about any of that.
On September 21st, I discovered that Book 2 was already out!
Not available for preorder. Not sitting patiently behind some little digital velvet rope waiting for midnight.
Out.
My immediate reaction was somewhere between, “Are you fucking kidding me?” and staring at my phone as though I could personally intimidate Amazon into putting it back.
And then my author brain did what it does best when reality becomes inconvenient:
I made it lore.
The Archive had escaped.
Honestly I should have expected this.
The Archive of the Unfound has never been particularly interested in behaving itself. It’s a living library full of impossible things, questionable decisions, dangerous magic, and at least one fairy who I absolutely would not trust with a clearly labeled release date.
I’m not saying Lark did it. I’m just saying Muse would’ve respected the calendar.
So fine. The Archive escaped one day early.
Cute.
Except apparently it wasn’t finished.
The next day, the actual release day, I got another surprise.
All the physical copies of the second book I’d ordered for my October book tour showed up at my house.
They weren’t supposed to arrive until Friday.
At this point, I stopped questioning it.
Apparently Book 2 had places to be.
And Honestly? That’s a pretty fitting beginning for Favors, Fangs, & Feral Fluff.
This book has over 600 pages of the Archive doing what the Archive does best: getting bigger, stranger, funnier, and considerably less interested in following anybody’s plans.
There are moon-bitten jackelopes. An old debt that needs collecting. The Vault of Signature. Rumors of a golden serpent. Missing creatures. Favors owed. Promises made.
And, because apparently fictional chaos wasn’t enough, the book itself couldn’t even make it to release day without causing problems in the real world.
I spent a long time writing this giant ridiculous thing. I edited it. I formatted it. I held the prerelease copy in my hands and laughed because it was so enormous it could probably double as a weapon.
And now it’s not mine anymore.
That’s the strange part of publishing a book that I don’t think I’ll ever completely get use to.
For months, it’s this private little world living on my computer. I know where everybody is. I know what they’re doing. I can change a sentence at 2 a.m. because one word suddenly bothers me.
Then release day comes. And I have to open the door.
People I’ve never met get to walk into this place that lived inside my head. They get to meet these characters I’ve spent hundreds of hours talking to. They’ll laugh at the things I wrote alone at my desk. They’ll pick favorites. They’ll notice tiny things I hoped somebody would notice.
The story becomes theirs too.
Apparently this one was so ready for that part that it opened the damn door itself.
So welcome to the first real blog on my brand new website.
Book 2 is officially out.
The signing copies have arrived. My October book tour is coming.
And somewhere in the Archive, I imagine Muse is filling out an incident report while Lark insists she has absolutely no idea how any of this happened.
I don’t believe her.
Welcome back to the Archive.
Try not to make a wrong turn.
-Aj