On being late

The book was due on the first of August. It is now the fifth of September.

That is the whole of the news, and I would rather put it at the top than bury it under a paragraph of throat-clearing. The Holiday Let Murder did not come out when I said it would. It is a little over a month late. The reasons are entirely mine and entirely dull: the work that pays for the writing asked for rather more than its usual share this summer, and several other obligations arrived at once and declined to be rescheduled. None of it is interesting. All of it was, unfortunately, sufficient.

What I did not do, and ought to have done, was say so. I went quiet instead, on the theory that I would close the gap before it needed announcing, and then the gap did not close, and the silence had quietly become a second thing to apologise for. So: I am sorry. A month of nothing is a poor way to treat people who were, as far as they knew, waiting.

The part I am sorriest about is the preorders. When a book misses its date, Amazon cancels the preorders standing against it. This is not a discretionary matter, and there was nothing to be done about it from my end, which is a sentence I would find more comforting if the mistake behind it had been anyone else’s. So if you preordered The Holiday Let Murder: your order was cancelled, you were not charged, and the book will not arrive on your reader of its own accord. You will have to go and buy it again. I know precisely how irritating that is, and it is irritating because of me.

The book itself is done. It has been through the whole of the process it was supposed to go through, at the pace it was supposed to go at, which is the one part of this I am not apologising for. It is up on Amazon now, in the usual stores, and the link is on its page here if you would rather not go hunting.

I have been writing for long enough to know that the correct response to this is not a paragraph of promises, so I will not make any beyond the obvious one, which is that the next date I announce will be a date I have already earned rather than one I am hoping to grow into. Book three exists in the state books exist in before they are books. When it has a date, the date will be real.

To anyone who preordered, and then found the order cancelled, and then heard nothing from me for a month: thank you for the vote of confidence, and I am sorry to have spent it so badly. The book is worth the second trip to the shop. That much I will stand behind.

— V.