You might have noticed that I was a bit late with the last chapter of Pendulum, and there is a slightly embarrassing reason for this.

I’m just finishing my fast while I’m writing this. It’s day 10, and I’ve been living off of coffee and water, and some supplements. Nothing else. While I’m physically fine, I’m a bit scatter-brained and completely forgot to post. My apologies for this. I’ll set an alarm for the chapters from now on.

Now for something different, the reason for the “announcement” in the title and the cute picture of tiny reptile hatchlings. I’m currently planning a new series. This one has no urban fantasy elements, like Aes Sidhe, and there won’t be faeries, lurikeen and the like in these books. In fact, there won’t even be humans (for a while).

The tentative title for the series will be “Paravian Saga”, and if you’re into dinosaurs, you can already guess what I’m about to say, but I’ll take a bit of time to explain the idea.

About 66 million years ago, a giant meteoroid hit Yucatan and formed what’s now called the Chicxulub crater. The impact wiped out the dinosaurs and most other animals, giving the tiny mammals living on Earth at the time a lot of space to spread and eventually evolve into bipedal, naked monkeys.

There are hypotheses pondering what would have happened had that rock not hit our planet. There are even SF books (well… one series, google “East of Eden”). But this is not the route I chose. I decided that at the time of the impact, one species of dinos had technology and could send an ark ship with their own genetic material (no cryo-crews, the logistics would have been a mess), programmed to seed a new planet once it found one. No FTL at the time, so it drifted through space for millions of years, until it eventually found a place.

The ship went into orbit and executed its protocols, restarting the civilisation from zero. The dinos hatched from their eggs on a new world, with no knowledge, no guidance, completely feral, and it would take them a long time to get back to where they are at the time the series kicks in.

In my series, we will follow a young Paravian who hatched from an unfertilised egg (this is a thing, look it up) into a society dominated by the Clutch Mothers, who lead the clans that together form their people, with the Exalted Clutch Mother and high priestess of their religion at the top. Their planet orbits one of two suns in their binary star system, and a second, orbiting the other star, is led by a different regime, by a rebellious faction of males who believe they can do just as good a job.

I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but I will zoom in on politics, culture and religion, and a past and future war with a machine civilisation inhabiting the accretion disk of a black hole in the neighbourhood. When the humans appear later, things will take on another level of complexity, when the Paravians learn to deal with these strange sapient mammals, who seem to be ruthless and exploitative. Nevertheless, the central point will be the protagonist of the story and his adventures in this strange world.

I’m looking forward to writing this series and hope it will turn out the way I imagine it.