Firestorm Forever, as you all know, is the final Dragonfire novel. Some of you may know that there are three firestorms in this book, and that it takes place over a year. This has necessitated some choices on my part.

First off, there’s the structure of the book itself. Ideally, each of those three firestorms would have been individual books—to hold to the model of the previous Dragonfire novels—but the nature of the story made that impossible. The three firestorms are entwined and influence each other, AND they all come to their happy conclusion around the same time. Because the three romances are concurrent and interwoven, I decided they should all be in one book.

Secondly, the book is long. Every time I look at it, it gets longer. This makes sense, as there can’t be three firestorms (and the world saved) in 95,000 words, but also creates some structural issues. If we were still in the realm of print-only books (or if a print publisher was making the publication decisions) this book would have been split in half, into Part I and Part II, which then would have been sold separately. This would be like a serialization, and Part I would end with a cliff-hanger. I think this is not a really good solution for a paranormal romance, because just about nothing is resolved after Part I. As a reader, cliff-hanger endings make me feel a bit cheated, like I have to pay for two books to get the whole story.

Firestorm Forever *is* split in half, but both halves are in the same volume. So, when you get to the cliff-hanger at the end of Part I, you just have to turn the page to find out what happens next. 🙂 This means that the print book will be a big volume, but I’m checking out some ideas as to how best to deal with that.

The third thing is that I’ve discovered that I needed to create The Dragonfire Companion at the same time as writing Firestorm Forever, to ensure that I don’t miss any loose ends. This is a huge job—although it’s fun, it’s taking a LOT of time.

So, there just aren’t enough hours between now and March to get all of this done, and ensure that it’s edited and proofed the way I want. As a result, the publication date for Firestorm Forever has moved to May 13. That’s two months later than the original publication date,. I’m sorry to make this change, but it had to be done. On the upside, The Dragonfire Companion will probably be published this summer, which is sooner than I’d expected.

If you pre-ordered at iBooks or Kobo, the date for fulfilling your order has been updated. If you pre-ordered at Amazon, your pre-order has been cancelled. Amazon does not allow any changes to be made to publication dates on books available for pre-order.