I’m excited to announce that planning is officially underway for a new book that takes place in the same universe as The Jade Necklace. It’s been on my mind for some time to flesh out a few of the events alluded to in those books, particularly involving the World Tree, or Yaxche, which translates to “tree of life”.

I won’t delve too much into it right now, especially as the details are only just being hammered out, but it’ll be set in the distant past when the gods were in their glory days and the mythical city of Tulan was at the height of its power. You’ll encounter some familiar characters—the gods, unsurprisingly, given that they were around back then, but there will be a few others with very minor roles in The Jade Necklace who’ll get to have their moment in the limelight, such as Zunun the hummingbird and Lord Yaaxu the opossum. As the title suggests, the Yaxche itself—the great ceiba tree that stood in the centre of the world and formed a bridge to the heavens—will be a big focus, and much like Itzel explored the corners of the Underworld, the main characters in this book will explore some of the thirteen levels of the Upperworld. Probably my favourite setting among them will be its lowest level, the realm of the Rain god Chaac (“Tlalocan”, as the Aztecs called it).

It’ll be a shorter story, limited to one book (and this time I’m actually sticking to that plan, or I’ll be damned to the Underworld!). If the Jade Necklace trilogy were The Lord of the Rings, then you could say that The Tree of Life will be like The Hobbit and The Silmarillion rolled into one. Like the former it tells a fairly straightforward adventure for just a handful of characters, but like the latter it also incorporates the major historic events that form the backdrop of the trilogy’s world. I’m not so keen on all the factory-made sequels and prequels (and whatever other -quels) that these days plague the entertainment industry, including books but especially films, and I’ll say definitively that Itzel’s story is at an end, but it can still be fun to explore other parts of the same world with loosely connected stories. My hope is that The Tree of Life will work as a standalone book, but it’ll be written most of all for those who are already familiar with the others.