Rewriting Emergent wasn\’t all too bad. I cut roughly 15 manuscript pages and changed/added some things in return. I left some placeholders where I need to write new scenes or transitions, then plotted an ending that works.

If you read Pendulum, you\’ll find that in that book, the ending is \’several attempts to solve the thing in the same place\’ (because the location is the point), whereas this here is a much faster ending. Not shorter, even though it might feel like it in the end. The pacing of everything in this book is much faster.

This story could work well as the opening story of a series of its own, about how things started, and then, how humanity goes through struggles to unify and work with, not against the AI, to work out the problems the dying planet causes. I\’ll keep that an option, but there are no plans to continue this story that way. I\’d like it to stand alone this way, as an introduction to the setting via a thriller story that doesn\’t read like an info dump. I found that\’s more fun than a long prologue in one of the regular Aes Sidhe novels.

Anyway, I\’ll finish the first draft of Emergent until the end of February, then begin the editing phase. I can\’t tell yet how long that will take, but I\’m now about 80% done with the draft.