March 8th, 2021
Seeing as it's already March, I'm a little late, but here goes. I suppose the big news round these parts is that I finished the first draft of book five, Downfall, two days ago now. Like all the other books before five, I finished the fourth book in the series, Deicide, years ago. When the time comes (which isn’t too far away, actually), I just need to go through and do a last round of my own editing before I send it off to the professionals.
What’s that you say? You mean the D-Evolution series is finished? Well… yeah. I guess it is done, sort of. It was an interesting feeling to type those three seemingly benign letters, END. I started the D-Evolution series of novels in 2007, so to see fourteen years of work come to its conclusion was bittersweet. There’s still a lot left to do, but the story is down in its entirety, and I think it’s a pretty good one. We’ll see what the beta reader team says about books four and five when the time comes, but that’s a year away for Deicide and two years for Downfall, give or take.
So, what’s next, you ask? Well, my first round of copy editing for books one, two, and three had a miserable accident, and the deal fell on its face, to put it mildly. I was supposed to have book one returned to me in November 2020, with books two and three completed somewhere around the beginning of 2021, but the editor on the job suffered an injury. He tried to stick it out, but in the end, he couldn’t handle it. So my publisher passed the job to another editor. For the sake of continuity, they thought it best to start the process from the beginning. Now I’m looking at receiving book three somewhere around the middle of June this year, barring any unforeseen weirdness.
I expect to get Deceit back from the copy editor no later than March 19th, and then it’s reviewing changes, along with discussions back and forth about strict grammar vs. style, and trying my damnedest to keep my voice, as they say, as present in the writing as it can be. After I’m done completing the edits for Deceit, I should have a better understanding of how long it’ll take the team to button up the pre-publication work on all three books and set a launch date. Stay tuned…
—Sean