So we settled on publishing every six months (or, because of the difficulty of publishing around Christmas, the second book seven months after the first, the third five months after that). But once I and my agent started discussing the series with publishers, it started to become clear that it might be a real advantage to publish more quickly, especially since these books were aimed in part at younger readers, who might be that little bit less willing to wait for a next instalment. Up until that point I’d been thinking about publishing the books one a year, maybe giving myself a leisurely head start on whatever the next project would be. The drafting is generally the phase I find most difficult, but once it was planned it only took about eight months to produce a rough draft of Half a King. The writing of Half a King went a good deal faster than I’d expected, though – I wanted there to be a real page-turning, thriller-like forward momentum to this series, and there was a real sense of freedom and excitement to working in a new world and in a different style to what I’d tried before – experimenting with boiling everything down to its essentials and keeping the pace as fast as possible. With the Shattered Sea books I was aiming at around half that length, but I expected them to take a fair bit longer than half the time to write, as I had a new world and characters to develop. My First Law books had averaged around 200,000 words and taken between 14 and 24 months each to write. My plan for the three Shattered Sea books was to write much shorter, tighter, more focused stories than I’d done in the past. He’s joined us to share his experience of writing this incredible series and releasing the books in quick, reader-pleasing succession. It’s publication day for Joe’s brilliant final instalment of the Shattered Sea trilogy, HALF A WAR.

Joe abercrombie shattered sea