There is a peculiar sort of courage involved in handing readers a book.
You spend so long inside it. You know which conversations left you staring at the page, which scenes fought you at every turn, and which characters apparently mistook your carefully considered plans for suggestions.
Then release day approaches, and you are expected to smile pleasantly while strangers walk straight into the place where you have left pieces of your heart.
Perfectly reasonable arrangement. Whoever devised it has much to answer for.
With Vow of the Forsaken drawing closer, I keep thinking about that moment when a story begins to belong to its readers.
Until then, I can still reach for it. Read another passage. Worry over a sentence. Convince myself that one more look will somehow settle the thousand small doubts that gather around a finished book.
Eventually, though, I have to open the door.
And you get to decide what waits on the other side.
You might fall fiercely in love with a moment I nearly cut. You might want to shake someone I spent an entire chapter trying to understand. A quiet exchange might stay with you longer than the scene that took me days to write.
That is one of my favorite things about stories. We enter the same pages carrying different wounds, different hopes, and wildly different tolerances for a stubborn man making a spectacularly poor decision.
Some of us have rather generous tolerances.
We should probably examine that eventually.
For now, I am preparing to send the fourth book in The Vale Series into your hands, and there is something deeply moving about reaching this point. Thorns of Ash, Hunter’s Mark, Echoes of the Broken, and now Vow of the Forsaken. Each title marks another stretch of a journey you have chosen to take with me.
Perhaps you have been here since the beginning. Perhaps you have only just discovered the Vale and are wondering how much trouble these people could possibly cause.
You may wish to bring provisions.
As November approaches, I hope you find something in these pages that follows you after you close the book. A moment you return to. A feeling you recognize. Someone whose choices leave you aching, furious, hopeful, or awake well beyond a sensible hour.
Thank you for giving my stories a place in your life. However quietly you read, wherever you turn the pages, you are part of what makes this worth doing.
Vow of the Forsaken is available for Kindle preorder, with the ebook releasing November 3. Paperback and hardcover editions are currently scheduled for November 10.
Before you go, tell me: what makes a book stay with you long after the final page?
With love and a little trouble,
Zoey
