Status Update - My Brain is Mush.

I am somewhere between a dragon guarding a hoard and a goblin trying to alphabetise it with sticky notes, which feels like an appropriate state of being to announce this.

The Song Beyond the Ashes is currently in formatting.

That sentence is small and polite, but it contains multitudes. It contains me squinting at margins like they personally insulted my bloodline. It contains font decisions that feel strangely intimate. It contains the slightly feral urge to change one more sentence at midnight because what if that comma is lying to me.

But. Progress. Real, tangible progress.

And the really exciting bit is this. My first author copy is being printed next week. Next week. The physical version of this book, the one that has lived in my head and my notes and my muttered threats for far too long, is about to exist in the world where you can hold it in your hands and dramatically stare out a window with it like you are the main character in your own emotionally intense montage.

ARC readers are also getting their first copies next week.

Which is thrilling, terrifying, and incredibly humbling.

There is something uniquely unhinged about handing over a story you love to other people and saying, here, please be gentle, but also please be honest. ARC readers are the brave souls who step into the fog with a lantern and come back with truths. Sometimes delightful truths. Sometimes sharp ones. Always useful ones. I am wildly grateful for them.

Emotionally, I am in that strange in-between realm.

Excited, yes. The kind of excited that makes me think about holding the author copy and then immediately open my notes app to list seventeen things I might have forgotten.

Overwhelmed, also yes. Because Christmas is thundering toward us like a festive avalanche, and my actual job has decided this is the perfect time to become a full-scale boss battle. The days are loud. The evenings are short. The to-do list is breeding when I am not looking.

Finding balance has been the real side quest.

Some days I feel like I am doing it right. I carve out a small pocket of time and protect it like a sacred relic. I remember that the book deserves my best brain, not my last surviving brain cell. I manage to be a functional human.

Other days I am a chaotic bundle of caffeine and optimism holding two calendars and whispering, we can absolutely do this, while the universe laughs politely.

But even with the madness, there is a rock-solid truth underneath all of it.

We are close.

Closer than I have ever been.

This story has been shaped in sparks and late nights and stubborn hope. It has survived drafts that were messy and brave. It has survived my habit of caring too much and panicking anyway. And now it is stepping into its final armour, ready to be seen properly.

So that is where we are;

Formatting underway.

Author copy printing next week.

ARC copies heading out next week.

Christmas on the horizon.

Life busy.

Heart full.

I am excited. I am overwhelmed. I am also, apparently, doing this for real.

And if I vanish into the void for a few days, just imagine me somewhere in a candlelit cave, negotiating with a gremlin made of deadlines, while clutching a freshly printed book like it is both a victory and a small miracle.