Before I talk about this complete (but scrapped) novel, I want to give my thanks to  blizzarderful for being the most kind, most patient artist I've ever commissioned.

How breezily she tolerated the amount of changes to the WIP for this cover, I'm nothing but grateful for that.

The scene is of Sini in the Subway of The Library: the capital of the Archives, a race of White Wolves. He's with Witty Inkol the Archive wolf and Yava Lapis the Kitsurin kitsune, and behind them lurks sinisterly Khristoff Cluffaw. Yava and Khristoff are respectively Secanune and Unirin of the Kitsurin Pact, an alliance between kitsune and kirin that calls the Kitsurin Forest home.

It's been a couple of years since I commissioned this piece. A lot of bittersweet memories surround the novel that it was intended for.

On my Patreon you can view the full rough draft of 200-something pages. I spent years working on the book, and I had this idea that persistence would mold it into a piece of work of the quality I dreamed of.

So I finished it – felt a great weight leave my shoulders – got to editing. Once I got to editing chapter three, I think it clicked in me that to create a novel written the right way from the beginning would be quicker than to shape this novel into what it never was.

I started writing it when I was still enrolled in high school creative writing. The foundation of the world resembles that. The cartoon logic, I've kind of outgrown. When people pointed out that some people wore clothing and some didn't, and that I had stupidly ignored logic for aesthetic – that I had not seriously contemplated the core nature of the world – it hurt because it was true.

I had that ram mentality. Kept ramming at this for years, but my horns weren't quite honed for the task. I reflect on that and wish I could tell my former self that the persistence to build a world upon an inch-thick needle is neither commendable nor intelligible.

Which brings us to where I'm at now.

This is a world that I'm rebuilding, that is undergoing many changes. With the little bits of free time I can get, I've been researching and rethinking mounts, travel, government, magic, logic. That sort of thing.

Heck, after what I've been through, I'll likely overcompensate in my research this time around. I'm already reading a goddamn book on horses and their relation to war. Hope it pays off.

Oh yeah, so IN the novel I have planned, many characters from The Scaleback Spellbook will be returning. Sini? Yep. Yava, yep, Khristoff, yep, Witty, probably.