With the holidays bearing down upon us, I know everyone’s attention is getting pulled in a dozen different directions. I think this week is the last, best opportunity to deliver the annual “State of the Press” update before everyone scatters. The laws of probability suggest at least some of you are fans of Brandon Sanderson, the bespoke king of the hill in epic fantasy. I’ve always admired Sanderson’s work ethic, and in my own habits of art, I try to emulate his strategy for juggling multiple projects. Every year, Sanderson produces a “State of the Sanderson” blog detailing the current status of his in-progress projects. This week, and every year going forward, I’m going to attempt to do the same.

We haven’t quite reached Cosmere level yet at HTP, but we have enough projects in various stages of publication that I thought this would be a fun exercise in transparency.

2026 will be a big year for High Trestle Press

I incorporated High Trestle Press back in March and made this venture public in June, followed by the first edition of The Weekly Ride. In November, we published our first book, Ardent Wings on Jealous Skies. Since then, thousands of readers have downloaded, ordered, or pre-ordered a High Trestle Press book. We’ve accumulated dozens of trade reviews and over forty individual reader reviews across platforms. We’re just getting started.

The ink hits the page in 2026. We have no fewer than six major releases planned, with two more book-length projects that have a puncher’s chance to reach readers before the year is up. Additionally, we’re planning 5-7 short-form releases to complement the ongoing series and keep readers engaged during the (brief) wait between books.

Dear Readers, the State of the Press is strong.

Tales of Ciel

Ardent Wings on Jealous Skies is now available wherever books are sold, and readership continues to grow steadily week-over-week. We have hit a bit of a lull in reader reviews, so if anyone has finished the book and would be so inclined, please head over to Goodreads or any point of purchase, and leave us a star-rating or written review. We haven’t quite reached the review threshold that will unlock greater algorithmic rewards, but I’m hoping we’ll see surges of interest around the upcoming releases of Ophiuchus Flinched and The Mark of Cain.

Book 2: Ophiuchus Flinched is locked in with the printer and now available for pre-order in Amazon Ebook or in Trade Paperback wherever books are sold. Early feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with most ARC readers finding the story to be a worthy successor to Ardent Wings that expands the story and the lore of Ciel in intriguing ways. It’s a much bigger book–309 pages in paperback compared to Ardent Wings’ brisk 192. Since length was the most common complaint after Book 1, I’m hoping all you Tales of Ciel readers will be satisfied with the expanded scope.

You won’t have to wait long to wrap up the first trilogy. Book 3: The Mark of Cain is all polished up and currently sitting with the proofreader. Once I take a pass through their edits and finalize the artwork with Zefanya, this one will go up for pre-order in all the usual locations. The release date is pegged for April 21. Book 3 wraps up all the major storylines begun in Ardent Wings, while opening up a few new avenues for the story to explore in the subsequent trilogy. I had a lot of ground to cover in this one. Even after revisions, the un-corrected galley clocks in at 458 pages in Trade Paperback.

I’ve written a bit about this series’ structure as a saga of sequential trilogies. The Mark of Cain provides a satisfying conclusion to “The Zephyr Arc”, but it also opens the door to the next arc, set to begin with Book 4: Cut Him into Stars. The wait will be a bit longer between Books 3 and 4, but not too long. The book’s release is currently slated for January 2027, but if all goes well and I’m confident I can follow up with Books 5 and 6 in short order, there’s room in the schedule to move it up to November 2026.

I’m also ready to announce a few short-form projects that I plan to release between The Mark of Cain and Cut Him into Stars. These short stories and novelettes are all part of the Tales of Ciel anthology. They expand on elements of the world and a few popular side characters, but they’re entirely inessential to enjoy the series. Readers eager to spend more time in Ciel between trilogies will be able to purchase them in Amazon Ebook, and I’m planning to give at least one of them away for free through Bookfunnel and the HTP website.

Here’s a little teaser:

• “The Clouds, from Afar”: A prequel to Ardent Wings following Kellen Bowker, Kai’s uncle.
• “The Tortoise and the Mare”: A prequel to Ardent Wings following the misadventures of everyone’s favorite Leviathan pirate, Hekuba Klaeda.
• “The Hand that Feeds”: A side-story that takes place contemporaneously with the first trilogy in a distant corner of the vast skies of Ciel.
• “Anaximander of the Mud”: A direct prequel to Ardent Wings exploring the origin story of a very popular cartographer.
• “Auster Adrift”: A story that picks up directly from a pivotal scene in Ophiuchus Flinched and follows a minor character from Avernus. This story provides some connective tissue between the first and second trilogy.

TL;DR: 2026 will bring 2-3 Tales of Ciel novels and 3-5 short stories.

The Divine Heretic

Seven Days of Mercy for the Apostatic Priest is careening toward its January 13 release date. Critical buzz has been very positive, but I’m more anxious about the reception of this series than any of the others. For one, it’s written in a much more literary mode than the other HTP series. I disseminated the ARC pretty widely to many different types of readers, and while non-traditional fantasy readers have all responded well, there is a class of fantasy readers who bounce off this manuscript. If you’re more accustomed to popular fiction with a transparent style, then the style of this one might feel a bit opaque. Unfortunately, that tends to be a hard sell in the indie publishing world, but I’m hoping the visceral action and exciting plot will pull readers through. Ultimately, time will tell, but I’m prepared for this one to be a little slower finding its audience than the Tales of Ciel.

You’ve already seen the art for Book 2: What Lies Between. I’m closing in on a first draft of this one, and I expect the editing process to be as smooth as it was with Book 1. For that reason, I was able to slide this one up from its original August release date to an open spot on the calendar in May. What Lies Between will now be published on May 19, 2026 .

Ruxindra’s story continues from there to Book 3: A Myrtle among Thorns. Publication is currently slated for March 2027, but pending progress on the manuscript, there is a small chance I can move it up to December 2026. If that happens, it would mean that we managed to publish eight novel-length works in 2026.

So, where does the story go from there?

The sword and sorcery genre has always thrived in the short story format. I’ve never been much of a short story writer. My ideas tend to translate best to longer formats. That said, I’ve found some inspiration working on shorter stories attached to bigger projects, The Divine Heretic being one of them. I’ve got a few shorts in development that I’ll likely thread between these first few tentpole releases in the series.

Here’s what’s currently in production:

• “Springtime in Elberina”: A bloody short about warring street gangs in the city of Elberina, due north of the Pentamarine, the primary setting of Seven days of Mercy.
• “Cleric”: A short story following a Karochan cleric on her pilgrimage. Set in the same desert region where Seven Days of Mercy takes place.
• “The Hecatur’s Maw”: A prequel to Seven Days of Mercy following Ruxindra and Gerritt on a mission for the Shibboleth.

I have many more short stories and novelettes to add to this anthology, but most of them won’t be ripe for readers until they’ve read Book 4, which includes a pivotal event that will unlock more of the world of Hebdomar. Currently, the fourth book in the series only exists in the meanest outline. I could give a tentative release date, but it would just be conjecture at this point. I can only promise that it will be released sometime in 2027, and that readers will not have to wait more than six months for a continuation after A Myrtle among Thorns.

TL;DR: 2-3 Divine Heretic novels coming in 2026, as well as 2-3 shorts.

The Compact Cycle

Sci-fi readers won’t have to wait much longer. HTP’s flagship space opera will be upon us before we know it, and I have a special holiday gift related to this project for newsletter subscribers that I’ll deliver next week. I actually spent some time with the polish draft of The Politics of Fear this week, and the work went a lot smoother than I was anticipating. There’s a very good chance that this one will be ready for the proofreader sometime in January, with a pre-order campaign to follow. The exact timing depends entirely on continued smoothness of the revisions and the artist’s timeline with the cover art. My hope is that you will be able to pre-order this one in Amazon Ebook and Hardcover by the end of January. Publication did slip from our original June date, but it’s now locked in for July 6.

Here’s the blurb:

Nothing strains the bonds of an alliance quite like peace and prosperity.

The Defensive Compact was a fine idea at its inception–a supranational governing body created by treaty between 237 interplanetary civilizations. And all it took to bring the squabbling, self-interested, xenophobic parties to terms was a shared existential threat.

That threat arrived in the form of the Dorylus Encephalon, a collective organism driven by its biological imperative to incorporate or eradicate every extrinsic genetic line it encounters. Thanks to the alliance, Compact forces managed to battle the Enceph to a stalemate. The resulting cease-fire shields Compact worlds from further Enceph incursion—as long as everyone abides by its terms.

1,000 years into the cessation of hostilities, those same Compact worlds have become hopelessly entangled in a corrupt web of economic, military, and cultural ties. The Compact Assembly is the bloated bureaucratic organ responsible for its administration. Mats Hyyland enjoys a permanent political appointment to the Assembly as Eminent Voice of the Human Diaspora—permanent being the operative word. In a vain attempt to cling to power, he achieves virtual immortality by cycling his consciousness through a series of increasingly volatile clones. When the Assembly is rocked by a high-profile political assassination, Hyyland’s investigation leads him to uncover a conspiracy that threatens the very cease-fire holding the Enceph at bay. 

Hyyland’s race to prevent that dire outcome sets him at odds with his fellow corrupt politicians, amoral corporate plutocrats, a parasitic priesthood, flamboyant pirates, self-righteous academics, an oversexed cartel queenpin, a dying bounty hunter, and a kleptosexual prostitute with a remarkable anatomic quirk.

Politics, in other words.

This sucker is a tome, clocking in at 210,000 words in manuscript form, with multiple storylines and a dozen different POV characters to follow. Lest you be intimidated by its girth, early readers universally loved it, and most provided feedback that it moves at a breakneck pace despite its length.

The Compact Cycle starts with a cohesive trilogy comprised of The Politics of Fear, The Kakistocracy of Flagging Need, and Misprision. These three books tell a complete story, but that doesn’t mean Misprision will be the end of the cycle. My model here comes from fantasy writer Joe Abercrombie, who launched his popular First Law series with a cohesive trilogy followed by a few standalone novels and a second, cohesive trilogy.

The first Compact Cycle trilogy is already mapped out in a detailed beat sheet, with a few scattered scenes written across the breadth of the story. Early in the drafting process, I picked up one entire subplot and moved it from Book 1 to Book 2, where it’s more properly situated. That means I’ve got a substantial skeleton to work around as I continue drafting The Kakistocracy of Flagging Need. This will be my main writing project to kick off 2026.

These books are all major undertakings, so I don’t want to overpromise. You can expect Book 2 before July 2027, but likely not in 2026. Misprision will follow in late 2027 or early 2028. After that, I’m going to work on a few standalone novels in this setting, many following characters established in the first trilogy. As you can likely glean from the blurb, The Compact Cycle has a lot going on, and some of those oversexed cartel queenpins and anatomically industrious prostitutes have their own stories to tell.

TL;DR: 1 Compact Cycle novel coming in 2026.

Shattered

This is the series I’ve written about the least since launching HTP. Ironically, it’s also the oldest and the most thoroughly fleshed out. I’m a bit protective of this series, since I suspect it will have the broadest market potential. Shattered Book 1: The Girl Who Woke the Moon was the manuscript that landed me my first agent on one of my many quixotic attempts at traditional publication. I started this project back in 2014, soon after finishing the Clarion workshop. It went through many iterations before reaching its final form in 2019. As a result, it’s pretty much ready to go. It’s fully edited and only needs a final proofread before I send it out to the printer and prepare the pre-order campaign.

So, why am I sitting on it? 

Launching HTP has been a learning process for me. I wanted to make sure I well understood the ins and outs of the publishing business before unleashing this one on the world. After moving through one Ciel trilogy, the first book in the The Divine Heretic Series, and a full-throated Hardcover release for The Politics of Fear, I’ll feel more ready to do this one justice. I think it merits that much care. A rising tide lifts all ships, and if Shattered soars, it will bring new readers into the fold for all of our other series.

Here’s the blurb for Book 1:

Stillborn on a moonless night, Oraluna gets a second chance at life when her mother, Gita, promises her to the moon goddess, Haiyan. Haiyan answers Gita’s prayers, but her intervention comes at a price.

Ora is born into a broken world watched over by a shattered god. The monks of the Order of Haiyan have made it their life’s work to uncover the path back to unification, but none of their efforts bore fruit until Ora arrived. The order covets her jealously, seeking to confine her to a life of contemplation and spiritual activism. They fail to account for her mother, whose own descent into debauchery threatens to mire Ora in worldly attachments, dragging her off the Unified Path.

Of course, no one ever bothers to ask Ora what she wants. She’s a goddess in a young girl’s body. Or the other way around. It isn’t entirely clear. More than anything, she’s a girl in conflict with herself, caught between a loving mother and a respected mentor—between her goddess-nature as an incarnation of Haiyan, and her Ora-nature as a lonely girl just trying to grow up.

You have a responsibility, the monks insist. Only you can fix the Shattered World.

Is that all? It’s a lot of pressure for one moony eyed girl.

Shattered is a True Series. Seven books telling one long story broken up into seven structured chunks. I was originally planning to release The Girl Who Woke the Moon in November, but after finally settling on an artist and revisiting the manuscript for the first time in months, I feel comfortable bumping this one up. You can now expect to read Book 1 on September 8, with pre-orders opening in late Q1 next year.

This series will likely follow a similar timeline to The Compact Cycle, with Book 2 landing around summer 2027 and Book 3 following in 2028.

TL;DR: The first Shattered novel is coming September 2026.

High Trestle Press is just getting started

2026 will be a big year for us. In addition to all the new releases, we’ll be making our first appearance at several genre and library conventions as well as hosting an official launch party in Ames to coincide with the release of The Politics of Fear. And, of course, we’ll keep publishing The Weekly Ride every Monday for as long as y’all want to hang. If you haven’t signed up yet, just fill out the form on our homepage.