Beware the omen of the deep

Hello from Hollow Stone Towers,

Sunset's back, baby! That's right, the sixth season of my epic sci-fi horror serial is here. Omen of the Deep, the first episode, is out today, available in both print and ebook. Both are only available from Amazon (booo) for the moment, but you can check them out right here:

As for what you can expect? Well, this season is where everything that's come to a head over five seasons to date boils over into chaos. We're talking alien invasions, telepath mind wars, governments coming apart at the seams. Murder, executions, chaos, and a great big monolith.

Here's the blurb:

For ten years, a dying world looked up and begged the Minos to come home. Today it gets its wish. Humanity's last hope is falling out of the sky, wreathed in fire, and it is not coming down alone.

Aboard a crippled ship, Wyn has crossed the solar system and buried most of her crew to return home. But with the controls dead in her hands and the creatures from the ice loose in the corridors behind her, the planet she fought a decade to reach is rushing to meet her, too fast.

In Atlanta, the power dies in a rolling wave across the skyline, and the transit pod carrying Yan and Bong rips loose from its track and drops toward the streets far below.

In the last command hub of a collapsing empire, Oban watches as Sunset captors turn their screens to the sky. He came to find his daughter. Instead, he watches, helpless, as her ship burns its way home.

In a dark field, Roman stands between a huddle of frightened, gifted children and the man who has come to take them. An old friend, bound mind to mind with every telepath alive. But Judd has never been more dangerous, and Roman will face an impossible choice, one with deadly consequences.

Five seasons of plague, conspiracy, murder and monsters have built to this: the day the Minos comes home, and the world learns what it brought back.

Season Six of The Sunset Chronicles begins with the sky on fire.

Doesn't that sound exciting?

A note on preorders

If you preordered your copy on Amazon, you're probably reading this now and feeling pretty smug that it's already on your e-reader, right? Well, I need to apologise, because I messed up the deadline for submitting the final file by about twenty minutes, and Amazon cancelled the whole thing like a child having a fit when it doesn't get the right cake, and so I had to delete that whole listing and start again, sorry. Make sure you get on the new link, though, and there's definitely a file there, this time.

Sorry.

That being said......

You can also now preorder Inertia, the second episode, due out in two weeks, and this time there'll be no cancellation, because the book is all loaded and ready to rock and roll. I promise.

Not started the Chronicles yet?

In case you're reading this and thinking 'well that all sounds great, Paul, but I'm literally six seasons late to the party here,' have no fear. You can totally start from the beginning, and get caught up ahead of the seventh and final season, coming January next year.

What is The Sunset Chronicles?

The Sunset Chronicles is a sci fi serial. Think of it like a series, much like you’d get on your favourite streaming service, except in book form. There are seasons (five to date, seven in total), split up into episodes (five per season). Each episode is designed to be read in roughly two hours, though fast readers may blast through them even quicker, and those who like to really get stuck into the story may take longer.

They’re intended to be thrilling and exciting, and are released regularly every few weeks so that you can keep up with the story even if you have a hectic schedule. And who doesn’t, these days? It’s perfect for if you want to slip some space horror into your lunch break, or if you want to binge it of an evening.

Okay, but who is it for?

Anyone who watched Aliens a few too many times as a kid and never quite recovered, fans of Event Horizon, of Carpenter at his bleakest. There's shades of Babylon 5 in there, but also Firestarter, and Chuck Wendig's Wanderers. It’s horror with its feet planted in science fiction, with creatures that'll haunt your nightmares, telepaths who really shouldn’t be allowed in anyone’s head, a monolith that is absolutely up to no good, and a fair bit of rage about the state of the world thrown in for free. If that sounds like your kind of bad day, you’re going to find something to love in The Chronicles. Oh, and did I mention all the cool covers?

Okay, you sonofabitch, I'm in. Where do I start?

There are now two main paths:

• Episode-by-episode. Last Light is the first episode of Season One, and is available in ebook and paperback. From there you can get all twenty-six episodes to date, with nine more to come over the next six months. Oh, and there's also a prequel novel, Walker, which is set all the way back in 1984. Each episode is priced as low as I can in each market, and a full season will set you back £9.95/$14.99 for the ebook, or £39.95/$49.95 in paperback, for around 100k words a piece.
• Omnibus Editions. I recently started putting out Omnibus editions of seasons 1-5, and I will be doing the same for seasons six and seven, once they're fully released, so if you're content to wait, you can always plump for these. They're a bit more reasonably priced at £7.99/$11.99 for the ebook, or £14.99/£19.99 for the paperback, so if you're going for the paperback versions, I'd definitely be looking there, though I will say that all 35 episode paperbacks on a shelf will look bloody great. Oh, and yet more cool covers!

So there you go, everything you need to know about The Sunset Chronicles. Now you have absolutely no excuse not to go and get started. Wait, want one more reason? Steve Stred, the Award-Winning Author of Mastodon, Father of Lies & Churn the Soil, had this to say about the first season:

This book whipped along and Stephenson writes the characters lean and true, making for some fantastically done action sequences, all the while retaining that claustrophobic feeling you need with outer space based books. I had a blast and I think you will too!

Okay, that's enough of the hard sell. What's going on in Hollow Stone Towers? Well, I'm still predominantly in job-seeking mode, since I found out I'm being made redundant, which is a bit rubbish, but I have been able to do a lot of Writing Admin, which is the bane of every author's existence, especially those who steer their own ship, like I do.

I'm currently working through the final edits of Episode Four of Season Six, and once that's done I can knuckle down to the second draft of the final season, which I'm absolutely itching to get to. As for what comes after that, well there's definitely going to be a third book in the Darkness Rises series, but then there are a few contenders for other stories that keep rattling around my head, one of which feels like it would be quite the departure from what I do right now. But none of that'll be rolling around until I finish Sunset, which should be all done by the end of January, all going well.

And that's all the news that's fit to print, for now. I know I promised a whole big thing about the future of Hollow Stone Press, and it's still coming, but it's a little hard to wrap my head entirely around with all the job stress.

So, until next time, happy reading,

Paul