I have started rewriting Black Water. Not a polish pass, and not the same book behind a new cover. A real rewrite, down to the structure.

Here is the honest reason. The story I put in that book was bigger than the book could hold. That is not a complaint about the writing. It is a structural problem, and structural problems do not get solved with a tighter edit.

Which means the original is off the shelf. If you went looking for Black Water and could not find it, that is why. I am not going to keep taking money for a book I already know I am replacing. If you read it before it came down, you read the version that started all of this.

So Black Water is being restructured and expanded into 3 novellas. The three are Black Water: The Chains, Black Water: The Breaking, and Black Water: The Cost. Once the last one is out, they will be collected together into a single anthology. Together they become the prequel to everything that follows.

Then comes the main series. 3 full-length novels. And if you have been following along, the book I already described to you — the one where Alan spends far more time in the spiritual world, where that world stops being a place he visits and becomes a place with its own geography and history and rules — that book is the first of those 3 novels.

Nothing about it changed. It moved. Instead of standing on one book that was never built to carry it, it now sits on top of the novellas.

That makes 6 books under the Black Water name.

The novellas are not a warm-up act. Everything the novels build on gets set in place there — the world, the rules it runs by, and the weight the later books have to carry. They are where the series earns the right to go as far as it goes.

I am not going to tell you what happens in any of it. You get the shape of what is coming and nothing past that, because the story is the part you are supposed to find on your own.

The short version is this. What I started in Black Water was bigger than one book. Turning it into a prequel trilogy gives the series the foundation it needed, and gives the story I have been planning the room to be told at full size.

The first version was what I could build then. This one is what the story actually asked for.