Okay, folks, this week—as promised—I’m going to get into the next book a little bit, since I’m working through my editor’s notes and giving final approvals on the cover design (stay tuned to the bottom of this entry for a sneak peek at the latter!)

I’ve mentioned this here before, but I had no expectations of an “after” when I finished writing my first book, The God’s Wife, almost eleven years ago. I was so focused on whether or not I could write a whole book, that the idea of writing a second book about anything, let alone a sequel, wasn’t even on my radar. But when I got the ball rolling on actually publishing GW, I found that I wanted to come back to that world and its characters again, and both of that book’s sequels—Daughter of Eagles, and Children of Actium—were the result. They were written almost simultaneously as I was exploring what the post-GW world would be like; a frankly insane thing, given how long both of those novels are. Perhaps because of that, or just having a personal aversion to book series that go on and on, I really did intend for the GW series to just be a trilogy. But sometimes the Fates intervene…

Oh, don’t get me wrong; because history keeps going, I knew it was possible to keep writing GW books basically forever, but I didn’t necessarily want to do that. And it was relatively easy for me to imagine who my next protagonist would be. There were a couple of candidates, but the most natural (and possibly most intriguing) would be Zosime, the extramarital child born to Octavius’ granddaughter, Julia the Younger (Julilla), who was historically was left to die of exposure after her mother’s banishment from Rome, but in my books (mild spoilers) was secretly saved by Aetia and brought to live in Egypt with the rest of my renegade characters. However, I didn’t know what a story involving Zosime would entail: was it story about the downfall of Caligula? That would be pretty far in the future from the end of CoA, and I really didn’t feel like writing a Caligula-centric story anyway. Since nothing was jumping to mind, I put any thought of the GW books aside and focused on other projects.

It was a year later, while I was eyeball-deep in edits for The Flight of Virtue, and furiously researching and writing The Gourd and the Stars, that I suddenly realized what a Zosime GW plot would be about. The tea in Rome when she would be about the right age to be a GW protagonist wasn’t about Caligula, it was the rise and fall of Tiberius’ right hand man, Sejanus—Zosime’s likely biological father. This was about Zosime having to save Tiberius (who few of my other GW characters actually like) by defeating the father she hadn’t known and discovering where the loyalties of this lost daughter of Rome lie. Which sounded very promising in terms of plot/drama. But as we discussed last month, my God’s Wife books are historical fantasy novels, and that meant that the previous fantastical elements would have to work with this story too, even though Zosime, as a fully Roman-descended girl, would be the protagonist furtherest removed from the Egyptian-based magic system set up in the earlier books. How I decided to deal with this was somewhat born of the groundwork I’d laid in the first three books—but I will confess that it wasn’t just that.

A nice thing about having an established writing world like the one I have in the God’s Wife books is that it is (comparatively) simple to slide back into it. Large chunks of the research are already done, and it’s easy to simply “sandbox” with the characters and settings you’ve already done the hardest work of figuring out. By the time I started fiddling with actual writing for a potential fourth God’s Wife book starring Zosime, I was very deep in final writing and editing for The Gourd and the Stars. G&S, I believe, is some of the best writing I’ve ever done, and I loved virtually every part of its process, but it is a fairly serious book with a lot of fairly serious things to say about issues like disability and religion. An unintended consequence of it being such a serious, grounded book, is that returning to the comparatively lighter, fantastical world of the God’s Wife in the background meant that I was sort of looking to blow off creative steam. And as a result, things got a little silly…

Because I realized that Sejanus wasn’t the only person Zosime had a familial narrative bone to pick with. Not only was there her father, who betrayed her mother and the people who form the family who actually raised her—there was the larger shadow of her great-grandfather, Augustus, who’d been the one to decree that she should be exposed as soon as she was born. Augustus, who’d be dead by the time of my story… but who would also be a defied god in a series where I’d already established through his uncle that this was a real thing. But I had also established that the greater gods of Egypt could only tangentially influence the “real” world, I’d have to contrive a way for Zosime and her great-grandfather to interact.

Now, an author being more serious about this might have simply had them meet in the Dream World as the other GW girls had previously done, though this would lack an escalation of the book magic that had been present in each preceding story. Luckily, as I said, I was feeling silly and decided to indulge the potentially silliest idea to cross my mind: what if Augustus could possess Girah’s body in the real world, since Girah has demonstrated that his consciousness can bridge this world and the Dream World of the gods? Oh, oh! And what if Girah was masquerading as a woman and stuffy, grumpy Augustus has to be woman for most of his redemption arc?? We can have supernatural, inter-generational buddy cop hijinks between the Divine Augustus and the great-granddaughter he tried to kill? Yes, please!

So, this started out as a joke to myself about how to torture Octavius for refusing to leave me alone (you all know by now that he and I have a playfully antagonistic relationship), but I do think it evolved into something more profound. Like the previous books, the themes of family conflict and finding one’s place in an often hostile world are present, but Daughter of Scorpions will bring the series’ soft focus on mercy and forgiveness full circle, most exemplified in Julius Caesar’s famous trait of clementia. Like with the time jumps of previous books in the series, Daughter of Scorpions picks up the historical thread about twenty years after the end of Children of Actium. Augustus has been dead for about fifteen years, and as I alluded to above, Tiberius is now emperor. But we’re joining the action after he’s largely sequestered himself on the island of Capri and left most of the actual ruling of Rome to his henchman and CoA mini-boss, Sejanus, who has been steadily accumulating Tiberius’ power in his absence. Both of them have mostly left the CoA gang to themselves in Ombos since Augustus’s death—the gang that now includes Drusilla and Gaius’s children, as well as Zosime, Sejanus’ daughter with Augustus’ granddaughter, Julilla, who Aetia secretly saved from being killed on Augustus’ orders.

But everything changes when Augustus’ widow (and Tiberius’ mother) Livia dies, and it becomes rapidly apparent that her presence had been the last restraint on Sejanus’ machinations. Fearing a coup from his own minion, Tiberius reaches out to Aetia to come save him one last time, but Sejanus tries to tie her hands by forcing her to bring Dru and Gaius’ eldest daughter with her as hostage against Ombos. However, unbeknownst to him, Zosime volunteers to go in her cousin’s place in an attempt to stop her father. But when catastrophe sends Zosime into the heart of her father’s web of deceit alone, she’ll have to summon the most unlikely god of all (Augustus) to save the Egypt that she loves and the Rome that might be her destiny. But can she forgive her great-grandfather before she falls under her charismatic father’s deadly spell?

Along the way, there’ll be a bunch of familiar faces from the previous books (maybe even a couple of godly cameos…), plus a whole host of new folks. Seneca! Messalina! Agrippina the Younger! Even Caligula (yes, couldn’t entirely get away from him)! Since I wrote all of this nonsense instead of taking a real break after G&S, I’m taking my time pulling this into publication shape, but I’m still hoping to be ready for a spring (April-ish) release. Stay tuned for more updates as I have them!🦂