Updates on the Morfyk Trilogy

Writing a novel is hard.

Like, getting a second Ph.D kind of hard.

Writing three novels at the same time is a fool's errand. So, you can label me a fool.

I started in May 2022 and now it's June 5, 2025. I sent the three copies, as good as I could get them, to a renowned copyeditor who is rightly notorious for being very straightforward. I'm expecting a lot of red lines and a self-contained master-class in the craft of writing, which is tremendous. But it might set me back from my planned self-publishing of the trilogy, I imagine. At first, I intended to publish the whole thing in April 2025 (LOL!). Then I got more realistic and pushed it to December 2025 (ha!). I think, after waiting eagerly for the editor's revisions, my date will be pushed to February 2025 if I'm lucky.

It's a long journey, but what did I expect?

When I started in 2022, I wrote a 150,000+ word tome. I sent it to my first development editor and he was just relieved he even finished the thing. After consulting with him, it made sense to break it up into three different books. This was a Herculean effort. I took the main draft and split it up into essentially a prequel, which later became Book 1. Most of the main draft turned into Book 2. But some of it laid the seed for Book 3.

As one beta reader detected, my writing progressively got better and better as Book 1 went along. I was both flattered and mortified. So then, I had to smooth out all the rough patches and inconsistencies in tone and language so that I could refine the overall style to make it less choppy. This task paled in comparison to some of the other things I had to do. They included:

1. Exposition! This is a big one for me. This is kind of my Achilles Heel. Since the nature of the books are science fiction and I'm a pretty technical person, I have a tendency of explaining – if not through me, then through a character. However, can I be honest? Sometimes, I think it's difficult, especially in science fiction, to use characters or an action to explain something that could otherwise be described in one sentence. However, I get accused every once in a while for a pretty chunky info dump.
2. Clarity. This goes hand-in-hand with the exposition struggles. My developmental editor and a few beta readers have commented that my books are "ambitious". I chuckled because that is such a nice way to say – you're trying to do too much, or explain too much. The aspect I've been working on is to be true to the technological nature of the world while backing off on some "harder" details. But sometimes it's not the technology. Sometimes it's also the winding, interlaced conspiracies that weave the plots.
3. Replotting the chronology of events in Book 1. I tried to be clever and play with time, but it ended up being confusing.
4. Rework POV, since the books have chapters narrated from a different character each time. This meant, trying to keep the voice of each character unique and identifiable as being really "Gameeleon" or "Adamis" speaking.
5. Tense. The books are written in present third person and I would often try to experiment with "thinking" in present first person view, without the "he thought" tag. I still find this a little tricky as I see it implemented in different ways in a number of books. But overall, keeping consistent with tense was something I had to edit away.

Now, onto fun things.

I spent an enormous amount of time struggling with book cover designs. Dare I say, this is really hard. Book covers, as my developmental editor informed me, are a "vibe". It has to grab your attention in a single image and convey a feeling that makes you want to pick it up, turn it over, and learn a little more. To that end, I wanted to share all the artist illustrations I commissioned over the past three years. I don't plan to use any of them for the book covers, but do plan to use them in some way or another on my website.

Here is an artist who I hired to draw some concept designs of the Morfyk from Kfrancis.art.

Next, I commissioned an artist from Damian Modena off Fiver to draw an illustration of the Nihilect (crab beast) and a Morfyk hand throwing the Onnic (a teleportation cube and Killbox).

Then, I tried out another art style in an 80's cyberpunk aesthetic also from an artist off Fiver named Syn Danendrea. At the time, I was calling the trilogy, the "Auratope Trilogy". I thought the book covers looked fine enough, but it still wasn't it. It got me thinking about something more minimal.

So then I came across another illustrator from Fiver, Yosafat C, who illustrated more of what I was looking for. I thought his sketches hard a dark, brooding quality about them that was more in line with my vision.

Then, I decided to try out something more fantastical and full-art. I commissioned some awesome art from Ini.K at https://cara.app/ini-k for all three books.

But ultimately, I decided on something that went back to Yosafat's designs. With some help of a professional book designer, we are marrying up the minimalism of Yosafat's designs in a two-tone (red/black, purple/black, green/black) concept that has a simple yet vintage-scifi looking feel. More on a cover reveal when the time comes.

And if you've made it this far, thank you! Here's a small gift - the first three chapters of the Entanglement.