A Sky Without Stars is almost here. It has been a long journey, both for the book and for the larger story.
The final novel in the Frank & Celestina trilogy began at a Dutch air force base in January 2023, a month before Mont Noir was published. My son had an introduction day there, the base was hours from home, and I spent the day in the canteen with my laptop.
I started the morning on a fantasy saga that may or may not appear one day. The setting worked against me. Uniformed pilots on lunch breaks, the sound of engines, the atmosphere. Dragons and castles refused to cooperate.
I opened a new Scrivener file and typed. It had no title. For months the project was called “that WW2 thing,” but there was a plan. An early reader of Mont Noir had asked how the story would end. What would happen to Frank, Celestina, and Lodewijk. The question surprised me because I had not planned a third book. I had not planned to write sequels at all. Still, she had a point.
If there was going to be an ending, I needed to write it.
That air base pushed the story into focus. In this book Celestina becomes a pilot. Not air force, which was not possible for women in the 1940s, but a pilot all the same. Frank remains cautious and slow to decide. His plan to leave the Netherlands came too late and he found himself trapped in an occupied country. Lodewijk works for the Nazis. He despises it, but it keeps him alive.
The outline and first chapters were written on 6 January 2023 in Soesterberg. The first draft was finished a month later, on 7 February. It was rough and unreadable, but it was the skeleton of what became A Sky Without Stars.
We are now finalising publication. On 10 October 2025 the ebook will be available worldwide. Amazon is taking its time to approve the listing, but you can pre-order at a discount on Smashwords. Depending on timing, you may even be able to download it already.
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