It’s been a long road.
Six years, several hundred thousand words, more revisions than I care to count, and at least a few moments when I wondered whether I had completely lost my mind. But here it comes at last…
Memory and Stone, the first book in The Shattering series, will be released in December 2026.
I started working on the story in 2020, when I suddenly found myself spending a great deal more time indoors—for reasons that probably don’t require much explanation. At first, Memory and Stone wasn’t supposed to be a novel at all. It began as an idea for a short story. I wrote some of it, talked about it with my family, and—with their encouragement—kept going.
The short story became a novel. And then the novel became something larger.
Fairly early in the process, I realized there were questions I wanted to explore that simply wouldn’t fit into a single book. The world kept expanding. Characters who had entered the story to perform one small role developed histories and ambitions of their own. Events in one corner of the world demanded consequences somewhere else. I began sketching out nations, institutions, wars, religions, technologies, histories, and all the other things that accumulate when you spend too much time wondering, But why would they do that?
Somewhere along the way, The Shattering became a series. That probably shouldn’t have surprised me.
I’ve always been a student of history, particularly the parts that are messier than the dates and battles we tend to remember. I’m fascinated by institutions: why people build them, why they trust them, how they change over time, and what happens when they stop working. I’m equally fascinated by the individuals caught inside those institutions—the people who preserve them, exploit them, reform them, rebel against them, or simply try to survive them.
Those interests found their way into Memory and Stone.
This is a story about a world living in the shadow of a catastrophe most people no longer truly understand. It is a world filled with institutions created to protect people, but which do not always protect the people who need them most. It is also a world deeply suspicious of those who are unusual, dangerous, inconvenient, or simply difficult to understand.
That matters because many of the people at the center of The Shattering are precisely those kinds of people.
They don’t always fit comfortably into the places the world has made for them. Some are feared for what they can do. Some are underestimated because of who they are. Some discover that who they trusted have very different ideas about what is best for them, and the world. And others find themselves with enough power to change those institutions—which raises the rather more difficult question of what they should build in their place.
The world is filled with armies, floating cities, ancient ruins, strange powers, political conspiracies, battles, and more than a few things lurking in dark places. But beneath all of that, The Shattering is ultimately about people trying to understand a changing world—and deciding what they owe to one another when the old answers stop working.
I’m enormously excited that readers will finally be able to enter that world.
Memory and Stone arrives in December 2026.
Between now and then, I’ll be sharing more here: release news, artwork, maps, excerpts, glimpses behind the scenes, and some of the history and worldbuilding that never quite makes it onto the page. I’ll also talk about the process of writing the books—including some of the ideas that changed dramatically between that little short story in 2020 and the series it eventually became.
There is quite a lot to show you.
And after such a long road, it feels very good to finally be able to start.
