After finishing the last book in my Dwarf Mountain series last year, I was excited to move away from the young adult genre I usually wrote and get to work on an adult fantasy novel. Don’t get me wrong, I loved writing YA fantasy, but what I wanted to do next was beyond the scope of YA.
I have been planning my new novel for nearly a year, thinking about it constantly, jotting down ideas, characters, and other aspects of world-building. I spent most of October working on the outline. While I was outlining, I got more and more excited about where this new book could go. Initially it was just going to be a stand alone novel, but after outlining, I realized there was huge potential with so much room to explore.
And so, I am pleased to announce my new novel, Beneath the Haze.
Beneath the Haze is set in a world in which people have the ability to manipulate the wind around them to move according to their desire. While air is obviously a crucial part of their world, a valley – completely encircled by tall mountains – has corrupted air. It is toxic to breathe, and is so thick that those above are unable to see through it.
Centuries previously, an entire civilization thrived in that valley, but once the Haze came, it destroyed them. Now, in an attempt to discover what caused – and is causing – the Haze, a group of scientists equipped with special masks to filter the bad air venture into the hazy valley. What they find below will challenge their very beliefs and threaten their prosperous civilization.
The first in a trilogy, Beneath the Haze is a new style of writing for me, with multiple points of view, a developed magic system, and developing technology unique to its world. I am currently over 16,000 words, and while I won’t finish it in November, I do plan on surpassing 50,000 by the end of the month. Of course, revisions will be forthcoming, but I hope to have it ready for submission by the end of 2017.
If you would like to be an alpha or beta reader for this book, please send me a message here or on twitter @kocherb.
To read a completely unrelated short story, click here or on the image below.
