It’s celebration time. We at Cinevore are two-thirds of the way through our sci-fi trilogy of novels for Aethon Books!

If you’ve been following our Patreon, you may even remember reading early drafts of the Parallax trilogy (at the time existing as two books called “Exiled” by Matt Conant, and “Hemlocke” by Lauren Cipollo).

In earlier updates, I’d discussed finding and signing with a publisher, and the timeline for us delivering Parallax Book 1.

For Book 2, we spent May, June and July frantically writing and re-writing and honing and revising and editing. We finally delivered a Submission Copy to Aethon just before San Diego Comic Con.

Two months later… we hadn’t gotten any notes. This seemed odd, since our editor had only taken a few weeks to read and offer revisions on Book 1. Also, it was the same editor.

By late October we finally got an email. Our editor had to pull away from the project for time and personal reasons. Aethon was as stunned and disappointed as we were. All of us got the news at the exact same time, and none of us had any prior indication this was the case.

Within a month, Aethon diligently found us a new editor, though, and revisions commenced to incorporate the (admittedly rather minimal) feedback we received. Mostly the notes came down to things like punching up action sequences to make them feel “more dire.” This is always a fun challenge, especially when your characters are already shaking and bleeding through most of the book.

If there’s one thing we love, it’s giving our characters angst! (If you’re currently reading the Dark & Zarus chapters we’re posting, you already know this.)

At any rate, our final edits are officially finished as of tonight, and the Final Draft of Book 2 is being submitted tomorrow.

The original timeline called for us to complete the trilogy in March 2023. However, with the 2-3 months we lost while awaiting our editor on Book 2, we might wind up pushed back a month or two. Honestly, it will depend how long it takes us to get an outline together. And most of THAT time will be determining how to tie up all the new loose ends we created from Books 1 and 2, which is always a fun puzzle.

There’s also some paid writing work acting as a distraction this month, but more on that soon too.

For now… we just finished a book. We should allow ourselves a day to relax.

Maybe…

Probably not.