It is with great pleasure I announce my new novella, Perfect Shadow, featuring Durzo Blint. Here’s the blurb:

The Foul, Unnatural Murder of Gaelan Starfire & the Birth of Durzo Blint

“I got a bit of prophecy,” the old assassin said. “Not enough to be useful, you know. Just glimpses. My wife dead, things like that to keep me up late at night. I had this vision that I was going to be killed by forty men, all at once. But now that you’re here, I see they’re just you. Durzo Blint.”

Durzo Blint? Gaelan had never even heard the name.

***
Gaelan Starfire is a farmer now, happy to be a husband and a father; a careful, quiet, simple man. He’s also an immortal, peerless in the arts of war. Over the centuries, he’s worn many faces to hide his gift, but he is a man ill-fit for obscurity, and all too often he’s become a hero, his very names passing into legend: Acaelus Thorne, Yric the Black, Hrothan Steelbender, Tal Drakkan, Rebus Nimble.

But when Gaelan must take a job hunting down the world’s finest assassins for the beautiful courtesan-and-crimelord Gwinvere Kirena, what he finds may destroy everything he’s ever believed in.

—

I’ve had a lot of fans ask for more about Durzo Blint, and much as I love Durzo and as intimately as I know his story, I’ve always resisted. The story’s dark and gritty–and I’m in the middle of a completely different trilogy right now! My brain is full!

But finally I could hold out no longer. Perfect Shadow is the story of how an idealistic hero became Durzo Blint. I had intended to dash off a short story quickly and move on, but I became deeply enrapt with the story, revisiting Durzo and Momma K and the ka’kari and even more minor characters like Scarred Wrable. Not surprisingly, my quick “short story” swelled to a long short story, then a novelette, and finally it bumped right against that novella demarcation–with enough plot and subplot that I seriously considered making the whole thing a novel.

Instead, I’ve kept it a novella, because I want every word to tell. I want to reward re-reading, and I think this story does that. Perfect Shadow does, I think, all I hoped for it to do: 1) gives fans another dose of a great character, 2) allowed me to experiment and stretch myself as a storyteller, 3) gives a ton of Easter eggs for the attentive fans who’ve read and re-read the Night Angel books, and 4) advances the main stories that I didn’t wrap up at the end of the Night Angel trilogy and to which I shall return after the Lightbringer Trilogy. If you can’t tell, I’m really proud of how it turned out.

I’m also excited about how we’re releasing this book. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be able to give more details, but here’s what I can tell you now: Orbit will be releasing Perfect Shadow for all major ebook platforms in June for a mere $2.99.

And for all collectors, I’m very pleased to announce that Perfect Shadow will also be coming in a limited print run special edition from Subterranean Press, signed and numbered by me. Subterranean Press is taking pre-orders now!

*UPDATE: a note of explanation*

I see that there’s been some confusion, some excitement, and even a bit of outrage, strangely enough, about the above. Publishing in ebook only is unusual, so I wanted to explain how I decided to do that. Some people seem to think I’m holding the story hostage or something, and my intent is exactly the opposite.

I knew the story I wanted to tell in Perfect Shadow, and I wrote it exactly as long as it needed to be to tell the story as well as I could, and that is 17,000 words–which is too long to publish in the magazines that do SFF short stories (usually, they top out at 7,500), and it’s too short to be published as a novel. If I had wanted to cash in and exploit you, I would have filled the story with fluff and published it as a novel. But I believe I should always publish only the best I am capable of, so my choices were to cut half the story and publish it as a short story or to wait a number of years, write some more novellas, and publish it in a collection.

I chose a third option: to publish the story electronically. I know from looking at the numbers that a large number of my fans do have e-readers, so this was by far the best way to get out my story to the largest number of fans inexpensively, without making artistic sacrifices that I wasn’t willing to make, or ripping you off.

If I can, I will make the story available other ways in the future, too. And I will announce those when and if they happen. I love the story, and I want to share it with you. So please don’t impute bad motives where none exist–we’re all doing our best in a rapidly changing market!

* UPDATE 2: ‘limited’ vs ‘lettered’ & what are the limits of ‘limited’, anyway?