Storm’s Brewing: Our Two-Days-Out Roundup

Hi, everyone. It’s a jittery, high-energy day here! Grab your tea — we have a lot to get through, and my attention is too scattered to write a tidy, single-topic post today anyway. Two days out from What God Has Ordained going live, my brain has approximately one working browser tab, and it’s flipping between “check pre-order numbers” and “omg did I forget something.”

Instead of fighting that, I thought we’d just take some time to catch up. Here are a few things worth knowing this week, in romantasy-world and beyond.

This Week: Life at Maison Matson

So yes, I’m nervous, and I’ve already worn out everyone I know with the pregnancy analogy. Michael, meanwhile, is doing his usual thing, seeming to take it all in stride. It’s usually either deeply reassuring or mildly infuriating depending on the hour. Sometimes both.

I did find a good outlet for the nervous energy, though: yesterday morning I mapped out the entire arc of Book Two on the last two pages of our restickable easel pad — colored Sharpies, a small blizzard of pink Post-it notes, the works. It’s going up on the wall on writing days now. There’s something very grounding about turning “I can’t stop thinking about launch day” into “okay, but what happens to these two people next.” I highly recommend it as a coping mechanism for anyone else sitting (or spinning) in a pre-launch spiral.

Just two more days! 😵‍💫 If you’ve pre-ordered already, Michael and I thank you from our hearts. If you haven’t gotten around to it yet, there’s a link at the bottom, and I promise this is the last time I’ll be this obvious about it — this week, anyway.

Fourth Wing: Some Happy News, Some Not So Much

The Happy: If you follow the Empyrean series, you already know today (September 29th) is the release date for Threshing Day — Rebecca Yarros’s thirteen-story collection covering the cast’s Threshing Day across the series so far, illustrated in full color by Joe Requeza. Worth saying clearly, because the marketing has been careful about it and I want to be, too: this is not Book 4. 😔 Yarros herself has said as much, more than once.

The Not-So-Happy: The actual Fourth Wing Book 4 release date news — Yarros says she started plotting it back in February, has confirmed she’s actively writing it, and has said she’ll still be deep in the manuscript this fall. She’s also confirmed the series will run five books total. Do the math against how long Iron Flame and Onyx Storm each took, and the honest answer is: probably not before 2027, possibly later. Not the answer anyone wants, but better a guess than a rumor.

The ACOTAR Countdown Is Getting Real Too

A Court of Splintered Harmony — ACOTAR 6, first movement of what Sarah J. Maas is calling The Valkyrie Cycle — has a release date of October 27th. What we’ve been told so far: Koschei the Deathless breaks free after a thousand years. The Night Court is still picking up the pieces from the Hybern War. And what happens to Nesta and Cassian was previewed in the sample chapter at the end of “A Court of Frost and Starlight”: Nesta gets an intervention and a free round-trip ticket to the Illyrian camp — WITH CASSIAN! ⚠️

A Court of Forgotten Melody follows in January. We covered the full rundown of what’s landing this fall a little while back if you want the whole list in one place — ACOTAR included.

What Else Is Worth Your TBR Pile

I found a few new romantasy books to add to my 2026 list. Here’s what caught my eye, mostly because the pitches made me laugh out loud at my keyboard:

• Tempest by Victoria Aveyard, out since September 8th, gives us a pirate queen protagonist facing down her own on-again-off-again storm of an ex — and I was genuinely delighted by the term “Elizabeth Swann energy” used in the pitch.
• Fire Power by Mir Benitz is being described as “Fourth Wing meets Formula One,” which is the kind of high-concept pitch I wish I’d thought of first — a scrappy underdog dragon racer going up against both sexism and an ex-champion she can’t stop noticing.
• And if tarot’s your thing, Katee Robert’s The Tarot Trials (out October 20th) builds an entire deadly magic-competition system out of the cards, which feels like exactly the kind of “why didn’t anyone do this sooner” idea that’s obvious only in hindsight.

Attention Indie Authors: KDP Just Tightened the Rules

Not romance-specific, but worth flagging if you’re self-published or considering it: as of September 21st, Amazon KDP cut the number of new titles a publisher can create from ten per format per week down to just two. Amazon’s official line is that it’s “to help maintain a positive publishing experience for all authors,” but nobody in the industry is reading that as anything other than a direct response to the flood of AI-mass-published titles clogging the store. Alongside it, KDP also rolled out a formal AI-content disclosure requirement — if any text, images, or translations in your book were AI-generated, you now have to say so when you publish.

We’ve been doing that disclosure voluntarily on every post here for a while now (you’ve probably seen the little note at the bottom of our posts about how we use AI as a tool, not a ghostwriter). Nice, in a small way, to see industry practice catching up to something we already believed in.

That’s the Pre-Launch Roundup!

That’s everything I could find that I thought might be worth your time this week. If I missed something you think belongs here, share it with us all in the comments! This is always more fun when it’s a conversation rather than a soliloquy.

I did say I’d only be obvious about this once: What God Has Ordained publishes October 1st. Pre-order your copy today, or read the full pre-order announcement if you want the details first.

See you in two days! 👀

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