Hello from Hollow Stone Towers.

Last week, I marked ten years since I published Blood on the Motorway, my first novel, which I released into the world with the confidence of someone who had absolutely no idea what they were doing and the blissful ignorance to not let that stop them. A decade on, I find myself still here, still writing, and only marginally less clueless. Progress.

It feels fitting, then, that this particular anniversary lands alongside a new episode of the Sunset Chronicles, a series that has been with me for the better part of that decade and which, I can tell you with some relief, is finally hurtling toward its conclusion with a full head of steam.

Which brings us to today.

Release, episode four of the fifth season picks up in the wreckage of everything that came before it, and it's not gonna ease you in gently. Wyn is alone on a ship crawling with things she'd rather not think about too hard, with only Miles for company and months of dark between her and home. Oban wakes up to find his world on fire, in the most literal sense possible. Roman and Jimmy have traded tower blocks for corridors of power and are hoping very hard that nobody looks too closely at the men with the mops. Yan and Bong walk into Sunset headquarters armed with false smiles and the growing certainty they're vastly outgunned. And in Chicago, Jules reaches out to the one person she isn't sure she can trust, and waits.

The walls are closing in from every direction. For everyone, the only way out is through.

So, what are you waiting for? Grab Release in eBook right now.

What's more, you can already preorder the final episode of season five, while you're at it!

And if you'd like to read my slightly longer, more self-indulgent reflections on ten years of doing this, including the numbers, the highlights, and the one-star Amazon review from a gentleman who took issue with my author's note, I've written about it over on the Hollow Stone Press blog:

The blog is my new home on the internet, where I write long, earnest essays about publishing, technology, and the slow collapse of western civilisation, interspersed with occasional updates about my writing that I optimistically describe as 'a writer's journal' and which mainly serve as evidence that my brain works in a very particular way. It is, in short, me on the internet, unfiltered and at length. You have been warned. If that sounds like your cup of tea, you can subscribe by email, Bluesky, or by RSS.

Thank you, as always, for reading. It means more than I usually remember to say.

Paul