Chapter eight is open

If you’ve been reading Pantheon on its website, you know the wall. Chapters one to seven are free, and at the end of seven the page just stops. I built it that way on purpose, because the book wasn’t out yet and there was nothing to put behind it.

Well, now there is. Pantheon is out today, on Kindle (it’s in Kindle Unlimited too) and in paperback and hardcover. So if you’ve been sitting at the end of chapter seven, chapter eight is a click away. Thank you for waiting. Honestly.

Some of you have been parked there since the middle of August. That’s eleven weeks, and I thought about you more than you’d guess. When a book is still in your hands it feels like it’s only yours. You can change anything you like and nobody’s waiting on it.

That stopped being true a while ago. I finished the draft on 21 August, and the release was meant to be 2 October. I pushed it to 1 November, and the extra month went straight into the book: more editing passes, a cover painted by Jryona, and a long tail of tiny fixes. My favourite was a flashback that needed you to know exactly when it was happening and never actually said. Small stuff, but every fix had a real person on the other end who’d be reading whatever I settled on.

I didn’t feel that while I was drafting. I felt it in September, when more than a hundred of you took an early copy through Voracious Readers Only and through Instagram. That’s 63 chapters and about 153,000 words, on my word that it was worth your time. I’m still a bit amazed by that.

Lupe Farkas was one of the first to review it. I’d spent months inside that story, and suddenly a stranger had an opinion about it. I expected that to be terrifying. Mostly it was clarifying. The book had to hold up for someone with no reason to be nice to it.

It reminded me of level design, which is my day job. You build a space for weeks with a picture in your head of how people will move through it. Then the first playtester shows up and wanders somewhere you never planned for, and from that moment the space is a little bit theirs. The fun part is working out what that unexpected walk is telling you.

Books are slower, and the playtesters pay in hours instead of minutes. But it’s the same feeling. Until September Pantheon was mine alone, written in the evenings after work. For the last two months it’s been something other people have put their time into, and I love that.

If you’re new here, Pantheon is a romantic conspiracy thriller set in Hong Kong, and it’s the first of three. Book two is already written, all 54 chapters drafted and edited, and it’s coming in 2027.

And if you stopped at the end of chapter seven: chapter eight is open. Go on.