Hello readers,

Things are progressing, but it’s always the last 5% that’s hardest…

Story Update

I’ve made my way through the copyediting and proofreading comments! It’s exiting to be so close to releasing The Radiants, but the problem with reading through it again is that I find other small details/scenes I need to fix/improve. I have ~30 things I’d like to address before finalising the template etc. But it’s very close now, and I’m hoping next month it’ll be as perfect as I can get it. “Perfection is the enemy of progress” is very true, so I’ll try and not find any more problems during this penultimate read.

Because there’s still more to do before I can really focus on marketing, I’ve decided to push the release back to Q4 this year. I’ll be pushing to have a publishable version by the end of Q3, but I’d like to give this the best chance of success by dedicating time to building a marketing strategy, which will include a push to increase my newsletter subscriptions so more people will know once it’s released.

I’m now sharing this update (well at least a link to it) through my socials. It’s been nice putting this out there, and it’s been getting some engagement which is nice. My goal is still to be consistent, and I’m happy how it’s all progressing.

Plan

I’ll fix the issues I’ve found over the next few weeks. I’m hoping to resolve them by mid-August before focusing on building the newsletter. This will include a reader magnet, which may be a preview of the novel. I’ll let you know when it’s available.

Cool Science

There’s another eclipse on August 12, which will include a short period (~2 min) of totality. It’s interesting seeing the travel of the eclipse across Earth, as it’s such a precise shadow. It always appears to be such a colossal scale, but in the grand scheme of things it’s just a little dot travelling across a curved surface. I have an eclipse tracker on my website that updates when Earth will have its next total eclipse based on NASA’s calculations. The tool also tracks Mars and Jupiter, which are predicted based on mathematical calculations. There’s also no easy way to prove me wrong so you’ll just have to take my word for it. It is interesting how much more frequent eclipses are elsewhere, but that’s a story for another day…

Only love,

Lucifer Read