(Updated 1/16/2023)
hangs head I wrote some things out of order.
Quite frankly, I should have waited to release A Fox in the Henhouse until The Lion and the Lizard (TLATL) was released and had been out for a while. (As I write, the latter is getting close to being done, so…hang in there.)
The Reason is an odd story that either should be read first of all, or after The Lion of God (TLG). I didn’t think it made sense to release it first — I mean, what’s the context? Why are these people important? And it’s kind of a cop-out to release it as a prequel, because it’s like, “holy shit, dude didn’t even know what he was doing when he wrote that character.” Hey! Pantser.
But Wolff’s character evolved as I got farther into TLG, and the more I struggled with trying to explain his PTSD, and why he had a Navy Cross he really didn’t want and claimed not to deserve, the more I was convinced how he ended up with both needed to be a separate story.
Finally, at the end of A Dragon in the Foie Gras (ADITFG), there’s going to be a revelation. And that revelation is why this series suddenly went from a trilogy to a quadrilogy (maybe more, he adds at the end of 2021) with some short stories scattered here and there. It’s also why I stopped alternating work on ADITFG and The Lion and the Lizard, and buckled back down to finish TLATL. I have to finish the novel before I give you ADITFG, or the short story won’t make sense (and will give away stuff I’m writing about in TLATL). (Well, that’s done, at least. –ed.)
So yes, there IS a suggested chronological reading order for this mess, and it’s shown in the Works menu under Timelines, but I’ll reproduce it here for clarity:
-
- The Reason
- The Lion of God
- The Lion and The Lizard
- A Huntress on the Rocks
- A Fox in the Henhouse
- A Cleric in the Kitchen*
- A Dragon in the Foie Gras
- The Lion in Paradise
- The Cross-Time Kamaitachi
- The Tale of the Crane Princess
- The Lion and the Darkness*
- All Precious Stones and Peoples*
(Books marked with * are either in progress or haven’t been started yet.)
And I promise, my name is NOT George RR Martin, and I am GOING to finish all of this within the next couple of years. If there is an eighth book, it will be a short or a novella and will simply exist to wrap up loose ends. I hope. (See? Things change all the time around here. — ed.)
Of course, all bets are off if my Seasons characters start rampaging through my dreams again. Thankfully, those don’t take all that long to write…
(Update, 20 Mar 2021: I just finished both The Lion and The Lizard and A Dragon in the Foie Gras, so they will both be going to Amazon “soon”.)
(Update, 16 May 2021: The Lion in Paradise is in progress, up to around 22,000 words, and if I can just kick this writer’s block I have at the moment, it may come out yet this year.)
(Update, 20 Dec 2021: I added the new Delaney novella, A Huntress on the Rocks, in its correct chronological order. This one sprang up like a late-season hurricane and powered across the Atlantic, into the Gulf, and all the way up into Indiana in only 15 days…and was not planned to be written in any way. It just…happened. But it’s a needed puzzle piece for the as-yet unwritten All Precious Stones and Peoples.)
(Update, 16 Jan 2023: I have added the two Timelines Universe Novels, The Cross-Time Kamaitachi and The Tale of the Crane Princess, where they fit. However, they’re in a completely different timeline, so they can be read separately. But in linear time, that’s where they go. The Cross-Time Kamaitachi actually fits roughly in between the two halves of The Lion in Paradise, which is hard to indicate in that list.)