Stone #5 (tentatively titled Core of Stone) wasn’t originally supposed to exist. The original book that was intended to be #5 (titled Blood and Stone) was all written and has been for a long time. It’s just sitting there waiting for its turn at editing, and I was all ready to send it off.

And then my editor got hold of The Source.

Mostly I got the standard comments–a few places to clean things up, some ideas for how to punch bits of it up and make them more exciting, that kind of thing. But then he got to the Epilogue.

And he didn’t like it.

And he was right.

See, I dropped a fairly big bombshell at the end of The Source. A development that promised to shake up Stone’s world fairly significantly. And then proceeded to let him completely off the hook in the Epilogue.

“No, no, no,” said my editor (paraphrased). “You can’t wrap this up in an epilogue. It needs another book.”

And damned if he wasn’t right there too.

So, #5 was born. Pretty fast, too. It’s shorter than the previous books–only about 62,000 words–and it only took about three weeks to write. But it represents a fairly huge deal in Stone’s life, so I hope readers will enjoy it.