While 2025 was an uneventful year on the surface, there was a lot happening in the engine room of my brain and on my computer hard drives. This year, I get to share the results with you all.
The Apidecca Duology began in 2019 as an idea. The nonhuman characters and the moon that had been with me for a long time started to become more solid in my mind. Maybe life had just matured me to the point where I had the patience to structure a novel and not just a short story. Like many people, I finally had some time to hone my craft in the lockdown years that followed, and Far Removed was released on 5 September 2023. At that time, I had a 30k outline/early draft prepared for the sequel.
2 ½ years later
As I write this, I am putting together my cover reveal media kit for the sequel, aka Book 2 (the title will be revealed at the same time as the cover). In November, my beta readers provided me with some excellent feedback on Book 2. I spent December implementing changes, and in January, I sent the resulting manuscript to my copy editor. On a sentence-level, the story has a few minor tweaks remaining. It will be sent to my proofreader in April, and I hope to make ARCs available in May.
I tend to get quite technical when talking about my books – it can be difficult to explain your vision to readers. But when I take a step back from the process, I start seeing Oklas and Prismer’s emotional journeys playing out, and I remember why I felt such an urgency to tell their story. I have so many feelings about these characters, and it is moving to realise that other people care about them too.
You can expect to see the sequel out in the world towards the end of June. However the cover reveal I mentioned will take place on 12 February.
SPFBO
Many readers are only willing to start a series when they know it will be completed. Far Removed is living in a few hundred TBR libraries, so my hope is that the duology’s imminent completion will encourage some readers to pick it up for the first time. This year, my debut made it into SPFBO (Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off) 11. This was exciting for me, given my 2026 publishing schedule, and a pleasant surprise as books have to make it through a lottery to even become entrants in this competition. Far Removed is in Noah Brisk’s judging group. If it garners some interest and gets a little exposure ahead of the duology’s completion, I’ll be happy.
Interactive Short Story on the Unearthed Stories App
If you’ve downloaded the Underwater update on the Unearthed Stories app, please consider giving Little Bead in a Squall a read. It’s a choose-your-own adventure story that’s around 3.5k words long, depending on your story path choices. It follows a new character, Abulon (someone disconnected from the main Apidecca Duology). He is involved in harvesting the young knyads who wash up on the shores of Inclatia (a clan you may be familiar with if you’ve read Far Removed). His role allows you to get a better understanding of knyads’ unusual origins and the precarious nature of their populations. It also touches on finding community away from home and belonging to more than one place.
If you’d like to leave a review for it, you can find the title on Storygraph or IFDB.
I did an interview about my experiences on Little Bead with Prowess Games.
Other News
I have had the pleasure of working on a variety of character artworks and covers. It will be a long time before you see them all, but here are previews of the character portraits I’ve done for Dave Lawson’s Envoys of Chaos, and L.L. Stephens‘ women of Sordaneon.
I’ve also contributed a short story, that is somewhat related to my sequel, to an upcoming anthology. The anthology will likely be released before Book 2 comes out. It features a collection of short stories by a group of female and queer authors.
Website Clean Up
I started this website months before the release of Far Removed, and now have a growing list of other titles to add to it. Ideally, each book or short story should have it’s own page. The site is not easy to navigate in its current state, but I plan to fix that. I’ll see you next month with my cover art and more.
C B Lansdell 