Stellar

It is done! Hidden Sunlight has been refined and given a fresh coat of quantum paint, and with this fairly time-consuming task completed -- subtle though the changes may be to some -- the author can rest easy without the nagging perfectionist impulses occupying his brain. With regard to the above quote, I'll make a decision on the sequel in the next day or two.

You might be surprised how small changes can alter the impact and tone of a scene, and the additive effect of a lot of such small things is where the difference in quality comes from. While it may not be obvious to some, from the author's standpoint, there are parts early on in Hidden Sunlight that make me cringe because of how I wrote them. Any time I went back to review the text for whatever reason I'd notice it, and immediately think 'I need to do something about this.' But really, do I need a ploy to make you get into it again?

I have a PSA for any readers who follow my science fiction series. So, as a part of the preparation for Lucid Truth, I want the first two books of the trilogy to be presented at a standard of the highest quality. My readership, on seeing such a statement, might very well pose the question: are these books not already of sufficient excellence for your liking, Stellar? Well, yes, but also ... no. Though Veil of Shadow is, generally speaking, a book that I am mostly satisfied with, the same cannot be said of the first. In a nutshell, my style had matured a lot by the time I started writing the sequel, and as a result, Veil was a much more consistently polished work. By contrast, Hidden Sunlight is particularly amateur, moreso the further back one goes, and this is something that has bothered me. To be clear, I am not talking about the plot nor the characters. The difference comes down to a swathe of little things; grammatical redundancies, spelling errors, formatting blips, and a number of very weird phrasings and badly expressed segments. I love my works and I am proud of them, but I am a perfectionist and leaving my original book in such a state has weighed on my mind for long time. In 2017, right after I completed Veil, I wanted to return to Hidden Sunlight to address the problems in the text. The thing was, in order to do so, I would have to edit the already-existing copy on GA chapter by chapter, which would send out a wave of notifications to everybody following the book. Therefore, I decided not to do it, because I didn't want to be the guy spamming his subscribers like that. My hope was that with the site upgrades, there would be, in the future, a safe way to make that happen without bothering everybody. Now, in mid 2020, I am at a place where I am strongly motivated to act on it because the trilogy ending will be coming soon(ish), and I want the first and second books to be the best versions of what they are, for new readers and old ones revisiting. Recently, I approached Myr to ask if there was a solution for what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, there isn't, but he advised me to go ahead anyhow, and simply let followers know what is going on, publicly. Therefore, here I am. Now, what exactly does this mean? Well, a couple of things. The entirety of Hidden Sunlight will be re-uploaded to GA chapter by chapter, so if you have notifications switched on for author edits, you will receive one every time I do this. I don't want to annoy my readers but there is no other way around this. I am *SORRY* for any inconvenience and irritation caused, but I assure you all I will only be doing this once -- after it's done, it will stay done, and won't need to be repeated! The book should be a cleaner and more seamless read when it is finished, and up to the standard I desire it to be. I'm just going to repeat the first point down here, so people can't say they weren't warned. Once more, for the record: IF YOU'RE SUBBED TO HIDDEN SUNLIGHT, YOU'RE GOING TO GET A LOT OF NOTIFICATIONS WHEN I UPDATE IT. I APOLOGISE IN ADVANCE FOR ANY IRRITATION THIS MAY CAUSE. Another question you might have is: how major are the changes going to be? The answer is 'not very' for the greatest part, but the effect of all of this will be cumulative, and not individually significant. In fact, the 'change-log' in a summary form would look something like this: overuse and misuse of ellipses; fixed or removed many of these instances misuse of hyphens/dashes; fixed where applicable a smattering of spelling errors, duplicate words, and grammatical mistakes that had eluded repeated revisions were fixed removal of asterisks used for emphasis and replaced with boldface and italics, a particularly grievous sin present in just a couple of the earliest chapters fixed a variety of sentence fragments scattered throughout the text, though these were concentrated earlier on; mostly representing poorly curated 'stream of consciousness' perceptions of the protagonist. chapter 12: the largest single rework. A significant chunk of it was rephrased and reworded. From the author's perspective, the stylistic choice of the language in this chapter had aged badly and needed the awkward pretentiousness cut away and Mira's elegance reinforced, without losing what made his character unique smaller but similar changes around other scenes in which Mira's perspective was used, specifically in chapters 9 and 16 changed the dead map links in chapter 17 to active ones; the images of Aurum and the Capital Arm will now be properly hosted and (hopefully) permanently accessible added mention of Prasada to the epilogue; a lore omission meant that only twelve of the thirteen colonies were described, with Prasada's fate being left out completely. Ironic, given that it is one of the few colonies that is mentioned multiple times in the sequel. To be clear, the plot of the book has not changed and the vast majority of the text will remain the same -- but as a whole, it will be better when I'm done! If you were thinking of re-reading Hidden Sunlight before the trilogy ending gets underway in earnest, I'd recommend you try it right after I'm done with this. It's also possible I may do a smaller round of editing on Veil of Shadow too, but as mentioned earlier, it barely needs it, outside of some minor housekeeping issues that might not be enough to merit the same treatment. Watch this space; I'll post something here before I go any further with that idea, if I decide to at all. So, finally, out of fairness, I will leave this post up for a little while before I start actually getting into it, and doing the above. For the moment it will stand as nothing more than a notice, but ... you have now been warned! I'll also post again in this topic when the refined version of Hidden Sunlight is fully done, so make sure to follow here if you are interested.

Thanks for reading! I'm very glad you are enjoying it!

Thank you for such a wonderful compliment! I promise I will try my best to give a worthy ending to the trilogy.

Currently, this thread is purely informational; to state the book's title, and that I am beginning work on it. It will be some time before you see the first chapter posted, but I wanted readers to know that it is happening and is out of the theoretical phase and into the planning phase. Simply put, I am now doing something about it actively, and make no mistake, this will be a major exercise for me as there is a lot that I need to conceptualise and organise for this final part of the saga. In the broadest possible manner and without any kind of spoiler, you can expect to see these things feature in the book: a war in space between humanity's fleet and the xenomorph armada a conflict on Earth, as civil society fractures the Mishith of Dagen's Grace rediscovering the origins of their heritage, knowledge of the Sundering, and the ancient past a confrontation with the Herald of Truth the journey of Shay Andersen and those with him, in order to do what must be done the human oligarch Tytos Hartley, what he has been planning, and his quest for power what motivates the Master, the alien intelligence behind the xenomorph threat I am looking forward to sharing this work with you all, and completing what I started many years ago.

Here we come to it, at last. This is the Official Discussion Thread for Lucid Truth, the sequel to Veil of Shadow and Hidden Sunlight, and the series ending to the Aspects of Dawn trilogy.

It's been three months since the poll went up, so I am using the current results as a decision, as it constitutes a majority opinion of those readers that wanted to express one. For further information on what this will entail, please check the new forum post about the upcoming book.

Well, what I write next was put to the popular vote when Spirit of Fire was completed, and the poll can be found here. If you haven't voted in it, you still can! The results of that poll will be made final some time during March, in the next couple of weeks.

Is that so? I believe when you commented on Chapter 17 on your previous account, you described 'part two' (being Veil of Shadow) as 'a bit of a snooze fest', which was hardly a glowing compliment. I took a break from this series to write Spirit of Fire, which has been my main focus until its completion in December 2019. Now that the fantasy novel is finished, there are two options for what I will do next, and the thread about this can be found here.

@Graeme Uh. Yes. I do actually know this already. My humour is apparently indistinguishable from a serious question, but thank you anyhow. @Carlos Hazday I don't know! Maybe a website needs to be made?

This sounds entirely reasonable as a guideline for politics, though I want to ask if canvassing heavily for a third party candidate is allowed. Specifically, one who advocates a 'Torch Everything' philosophy for both domestic and foreign affairs, is looking to dramatically increase funding to all dragon-welfare-related initiatives, and employs the time-honoured and technically effective strategy of eating his opponents live on television during debates. Just asking, for a friend. A completely human friend. Burn Them ALL! 2020.

Oh. Well, Araziah's ascendance into godhood was planned as the end of this book. There will be a sequel that will finish the story -- it was intended to be in two parts. If this isn't to your liking, I'm sorry, but it what it is.