The Honest Courtesan

I haven’t forgotten that I estimated Lost Angels would be released around June, but long-time readers know that I’ve never been especially good at estimating when my books would come out; The Essential Maggie McNeill came out six years after I first announced I was working on it, and even The Forms of Things Unknown was much later than originally announced.  The main reason my books tend to come out so much later than my most hopeful predictions is that I’m not working from an advance, which means I need to prioritize my bread-and-butter writing first.  But another part is that I’m a rather moody person (I know you’re shocked at this revelation) and will sometimes procrastinate some step or another for months until I get into the right frame of mind.  But this time, I have what I believe to be a better excuse:  Chester Brown has been busy with other projects, and since he does these covers for me out of friendship I don’t like to hassle him as though I were some kind of entitled ingrate.  But I recently decided to email him to ask if he was still busy, and he replied that he was, but if we waited until he wasn’t the cover would never be done.  So he included a rough sketch of his cover concept and I was pleased and excited by it; I shot back a little input, and I suspect it won’t be terribly long before he is done.  So I’m not going to make another estimate which will probably also be wrong, but I will say that I think it’s not improbable that it will be out this year.