It’s been a couple of weeks, since we were all off for the holidays.

And I actually took a little bit of a break. I worked half days through part of the holidays, which left me a little bit behind on Defiant, book 4 of Skyward. And so last week I had a writing marathon to catch myself back up. If you missed that, you might enjoy looking through some of the Facebook links that Adam is going to post with this post because they are a hoot. Basically, I did what I did with Oathbringer. I sat down and said, “I’m going to finish this book today.” And I tweeted out every half hour how I was doing, and how many scenes I had left to write, and how many words I had written. My very loving family put up with quite a bit with me just working straight for 10 hours to get through that. It’s the sort of thing I can only do at the end of a book, once I know exactly how all the pieces are falling together. It’s not something I would ever want to do at the beginning of a book. But it turned out really well, and I did finish the novel as of Wednesday of last week.

Which means I’m officially moving on to working on Stormlight 5. I actually wrote a few scenes for the prologue over the Christmas Holiday, and I am going to spend most of this month outlining. I won’t be doing a ton of new prose, most likely. Just going over the outline, making sure everything works, talking to my team about it, all of that sort of stuff. But it is exciting to write Gavilar’s prologue for that infamous scene that was the prologue of the first book that’s been repeated now four times, and this’ll be the fifth time from a different viewpoint. Hope you guys will enjoy that. That’s going to be my job for the next 18 months. In the meantime, I will actually be doing revisions in the evenings on other books. In this case, I’ll probably be launching into Wax and Wayne 4’s revisions very soon. So we’ll probably be having two progress bars for you that’ll I’ll be updating in the weekly updates. I’ll be telling you how things are going with Stormlight 5 and how the revisions on Wax and Wayne are going.

Otherwise, we are just kind of gearing up and getting back into the swing of things after the chaos of the holidays, which is extra chaotic for us because of all the things we ship out. So I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. I certainly did. I got a little bit of video game time in and then jumped back into it yesterday. I’m filming this on Thursday.

So there we are. Defiant is done, first draft, and it is time for Stormlight.