A finger plunges into fresh soil. A seed falls in. There is a momentary pause before a hand wipes dirt into the hole. It pauses, lingering; a subtle shake rattling through its fingers.
He looks up. A field of earth sprawls before him. A tiny tree sticks up on the far side. A sad smile crosses his shaking lips.
He feels her there, watching him. He can hear her cruel smile pulling back across jagged teeth. She’s speaking cruel words to him. He ignores.
He stands up and turns away from the field, ignoring her entirely. She knows she is inevitable, so she is happy to grin and sneer as he tries to walk away. He knows he will never be free; his fate long set in stone.
Still he laments what once was. So far away in both space and time. His hope died with the infernal machine. It served its purpose, and now it was gone. Now, it was his turn to do the same.
He nearly cries wishing he’d met the same fate as the rest. Why was he cursed to live?
He watches machines built by smarter men than him erect what would become his home. She said so. She pointed to the first building raised along the manufactured coastline. She declared it their home. He clenched his fists at his side as each brick was laid; each timber framed.
In a matter of weeks, a replica of what he left behind would sprawl across this worthless rock. More seeds would be planted.
In a matter of years, voices would fill the streets; lights would turn on in the empty homes.
And yet he would forever be alone.
They would never know what came before. What was sacrificed.
A god, dead for their survival. A planet sundered for their future. No one would ever know.
He climbs the scaffolding and sits upon the steeple of a roof’s frame. He looks out across the sea to a setting sun. It’s too red, he thinks. Sol was a better star.
He sits. Darkness falls and the moon rises. Too oblong, Luna was a better guardian.
He sits.
The sun rises.
It sets.
The moon rises.
It sets.
He sees the passage of time, but will never feel it.
He envies the seeds, big and small. He envies their ability to feel the sunshine on their skin, to grow and live, to find meaning from nothing. To one day close their eyes, never to open them again.
To see their last sunrise and moonfall.
That, he laments, will never be him.
He feels her wicked grin behind him.
He ignores her in favor of counting the minutes, the hours, the days, the years, the decades, the centuries until the day his heart’s song returns. Until he can sing again. Until his soul is lifted from darkness. Until he is whole once more.
Eternity was so beautiful with him by his side.
Tag: books
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Well, it’s been another year of “Eternity’s Irys”! That marks 7 years since the project began as a web series. It is now a book series with the first volume ready to purchase on Amazon! The book series started somewhere around 2022 and, with the help of my partner and illustrator, Rhett, we were able to create the novel of my dreams! “Two Minutes to Midnight” went public on October 31, 2024.
So what did we do in 2025? There was no book release as previously planned, so what was accomplisehd? A lot, actually!
In no particular order, because my observation of time is scattered, here’s what we at EI accomlished in the year 2025 and where we are hopefully heading in 2026.
Second Book Cover Started and Completed
At the start of the year we began work on the cover for “Fly Away”. It started out following “Two Minutes’” design, as all books in a series should, but we quickly realized we hadn’t hit the mark. Rhett wanted to push it, and I agreed so we went in a totally different direction. I was nervous because I knew it would mean having to redo the cover for”Two Minutes” and I had no idea how that would fit into the production timeline. Rhett got to work regardless and managed to create what I consider a masterpiece. Gone were the straight lines of the frame that both congested the artwork and made the print errors often faced with Amazon more evident than they needed to be. The end result was far closer to the vibe I was hoping for from the start.
It was simplified and stark. Just how I wanted it.
The problem was, that was the vibe I wanted for “Two Minutes” as well. Unfortunately, this resulted in Rhett scrapping most of the original cover and starting virtually from scratch. I felt terrible, but the results speak for themselves.
As far as I’m concerned, we’ve reached peak cover art for “Eternity’s Irys”. I expect we’ll be following this trend for the rest of the series.
“Fly Away” Manuscript Complete!
I began and completed the manuscript for the second book this year. It was faster than before (6 years for “Two Minutes”), but it’s still in its editing phase.
As I’ve mentioned before, I cannot currently afford an editor, so all of the corrections are done between myself and my beta readers. It is an arduous process, if I’m being honest. I always give my books at least three passes. We are on the second one for “Fly Away”.
I had initially intended for it to be released early this year (January), but I had a dumb idea that I knew would slow the process down. Instead of four full-page art pieces, I asked Rhett to work on an entirely illustrated epilog. It started out around 20 pages, but of course, I pushed for more. It is now upwards of 30 pages.
We are now looking at a mid 2026 release date, but that is depending on some rather large life changes.
Character Art!
We now have a line-art line-up of all the main characters!
Left to Right:
Saari, Sylus, Jeron, Finn, Inaya, and Castor.
Not pictured for some reason is Edie:
Fun Fact: The “humanoid” cast is evenly split between AFAB and AMAB people 🙂
Third Book
Fear not, my two fans, “The Devil Wears Violet” is underway! The first two chapters have been written and the tone has been set! I have no concept of a production timeline for it yet as I also have no idea what the art capacity will be like for Rhett besides the cover.
The IRL Situation
Personally, it’s been a year. My job was dragging me down and my entire autumn was marred by a botched move. All I had to do was move from my old apartment to the new one next door and boy did it go to hell in a handbasket. I was not okay. I was on the verge of quitting my job because after years of telling managment it was too much, nothing changed (par for the course, but I was in literal pain and never filed a complaint so that was on me).
Well, the move was finished in a few days thanks to my brother and a friend. Still, I’m not entirely finished unpacking. It’s not a big place, but I live alone and was mentally unwell. I’m steadily picking away at it. It’s a gorgeous apartment but I often find myself very concerned about how expensive it is, but that might be resolved soon.
In addition to living in a nicer place now, I moved to a new position at work. One that better meets my capabilities and allows me to pace myself much more reasonably. A lot was placed on my shoulders in my previous position, so much that no one believed me that it was TOO much until I was gone and it took three people to step into my shoes. It was validating in an almost sick way, but I try not to look back, though they still drag me down to the dungeon occasionally to help. My new teamlead is staunchly against them taking me away and it feels… really nice to have someone advocating for me for once.
Oh, and remember what I said about rent? Well, there’s a 99% chance Rhett will be moving in this year which will make this place a dual income household (and I’ll also have the luxury of a live-in illustrator >:) ). This will be huge for everyone and the project itself.
2026 Projection
So what’s the plan?
Overall? The plan is to get “Fly Away” out the door. This is the primary objective that must be completed this year no matter what.
Second, start and finish the cover for “The Devil Wears Violet”. It shouldn’t be too terrible as it borrows heavily from “Fly Away”‘s epilog.
Third, updated character art. Jeron and Sylus have changed an awful lot in the second book so some fresh portraits are likely in order.
Fourth? Maybe put more work into actually selling the books/merch? Being indie is difficult and success is probably impossible, but unless a unicorn of a publisher picks us up, that’s how it’s going to have to be. I try not to think about it too much. I’m in an okay place in life right now, so I’m not as desperate as I once was for it to succeed. I would like it to, to some degree, but I feel more confident in my desire to cultivate a small fanbase that cares for the IP than hit it big and lose control. All of which is very unlikely, but we press on regardless.
Bonus!
More remastered artwork!
Soldheiria 2!
The left image is, I believe, the first piece of artwork Rhett did for the series at the end of 2023 as a sort of test to see if our visions aligned. Which they did.
I asked Rhett to remaster it to celebrate the one year anniversary of the release of “Two Minutes to Midnight”. The second image is where we’re at today featuring Jeron’s updated “Fly Away” design!
I’m so proud of how far both they, as characters, and Rhett, as their illustrator, have come.
Speaking of the illustrator:
A Word from the Illustrator
I asked Rhett to contribute to the retrospective with their own voice and feelings so what follows is their perspective on the project:
Since before I can remember I’ve always had my hands on some method of creation: in daycare it was colored pencils and printed out Pokemon coloring sheets, high school was all original character development and story trades with new friends (this was also where I realized I could gift my art to people… nothing is comparable to seeing someone you care about light up because you drew their characters). College has been the peak of my creative career, but considering that period lasted up until May 2024, I suppose it’d be cheating to imply that it wasn’t without effort.
2024 also brought the delightfully rich world of Eternity’s Irys to my fingertips, and for me, a grateful change of pace from homework to paced, legitimate projects. Tav put out a post for a cover artist and soon we were talking: long, nervous paragraphs exchanged from two folks taking a risk with each other. It was a welcomed surprise to realize that his content was exactly the kind of reading I enjoy most, and by the end of the first pass I was hooked to these two traumatized men and their love story. In the interim we discussed illustrations to include, looping in another close friend to beta read and brainstorm, and we landed on some heavy-hitting moments that we couldn’t not put onto paper.
Ultimately, Eternity’s Irys has brought me an excuse to look forward to the long term.
This is only getting started for either of us.
This entire endeavor has brought me so much hope, let alone the opportunity to share a story that desperately needs to be told. Jeron and Sylus go through so much together… change, fear, love, discovery… and there’s so much realism in their emotional processing that it’s allowed me my own self reflection. I’m excited to learn with them. Grow, even. They already hold my pen as I draw them. Besides, they’re two gays in a cosmic struggle. Oversimplified as that is, that’s like my whole personality.
And if you want the truth, they give me a cosmic struggle. Countless times we’ve started a project involving Jeron and Sylus and one or the other will decide that that is the time to play with me. One’s eyes will be off-brand in one image, but in another project they’ll be perfect. I’ve told them if they don’t cooperate then they get to reap the consequences: terrible stick figure memes.
That said… we have yet to agree on what Sylus’ butt looks like.
~Rhett
Conclusion
It’s me again. Thank you to everyone who’s been following the project, and especially to those who have taken a risk and purchased the book. I can’t tell you how much every like, comment, share, and purchase means to us and the project as a whole. We hope to continue offering content worthy of your time and investment.
May 2026 be the year “Eternity’s Irys” truly blooms.
Until next time o/
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HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY TO A FULLY PUBLISHED “ETERNITY’S IRYS”!
Printing with Amazon has been a mixed bag. I can’t exactly not use them due to cost effectiveness, but quality can vary wildly. The most common issue was the covers appearing off kilter in some what. The spines would be at an angle, the front would be off center and this was all made so much more obvious with the presence of the frames offering straight lines with which we could easily see the discrepancies.
So a thing happened wherein Rhett and I readdressed some of the obstacles that made the covers difficult to print consistently. Mainly the frame on the spine and, to a lesser extent, the frame on the front and back. My initial approach was to remove the one from the spine so no matter how “off” the printing was, there’d be no straight lines to make it obvious. After that, Rhett entertained the idea of removing the frames entirely to avoid ALL straight edges that might make misaligned printing obvious.
In extending the wing on “Fly Away” to account for the removed frames, we kind of slipped into an aesthetic shift. The darker, gloomier approach I’d hoped for from the start began to manifest. This resulted in a what was essentially a complete overhaul of “Fly Away”‘s cover.
Improved tools and greater experience lead to the masterpiece above. I am so pleased with the result. It hits all the notes I could ever want from a cover for my book.
But it didn’t stop there!
Immediately after, Rhett took on redoing “Two Minutes to Midnight” to match this new aesthetic.
AND I AM SCREAMING!
“Two Minutes to Midnight” now embodies EVERYTHING I could have ever wanted from it. Rhett’s absolutely STUNNING work absolutely gives my stories the gorgeous covers they deserve.
Anyway, this is now the trend for all covers going forward and I’m so excited.
Other News
The epilog for “Fly Away” has been somewhat extended and is at about the half way point of line art. We still don’t have a definitive release date, but I’m certain it’ll be sometime early next year.
First pass of edits are complete and now I have to sync the manuscript with Atticus to upload to Amazon for a fresh author copy featuring the new cover!
Full Cover Comparisons
“Two Minutes to Midnight” 
“Fly Away” BONUS
One year anniversary art!
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Time for the quarterly update where I remember I have a website I can post things on!
First, the site has received a lot of content in the Lore section. The Religion section has been updated with 4 out of the 6 sects of Sion’Dri, more Character Bios have been added, and a new section, Spheres, has been added to explain different groups within the Void.
“Places” is waiting on me to create some kind of map and “Languages” is waiting for me to figure out the two main Voidal languages and that is probably going to take some time.
More images have been added to the gallery and another “Comic” has been added to that section.
Second, the first draft of “Flyaway” is now complete! Once the cover is finished, the next step will be to work with Rhett on illustrating the epilog.
Flyaway Cover Progress!
It’s coming along amazingly!
The manuscript for “Flyaway” is markedly shorter than that of “Two Minutes to Midnight”, however, we will be more than making up for it with the graphic-novel style epilog.
Third, the Amazon retail edition of “Two Minutes to Midnight” has received some updates. Upon a recent read, I found some formatting and grammatical issues all of which have been fixed. Additionally, Rhett and I realized we did not publish “Two Minutes” with the correct cover. This has also been rectified. I was also uncertain if the QR code at the beginning was in violation of Amazon’s ToU so it has since been removed. The one at the end still works and is not in violation of any terms.
Fourth, we’re still looking into a new printer for bulk copies. I may give Amazon another try, but when 16 out of 20 copies come out like trash, it’s hard to trust them again, but the price point for bulk remains superior to alternatives. This obviously comes at the cost of quality.
Fifth, some stickers have been added to the Etsy page for merch. They are all made by myself with Rhett’s art and my Cricut.
That’s about it for now. It may not seem like much, but it is all HUGE in the progress of working on the story. “Flyaway” took a remarkable seven months to complete which is incredible to me considering “Two Minutes” took six YEARS.
As of right now, we are aiming for an early 2026 release. Please stay tuned as we continue making this series the best it can be!
🦑💜🦇
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As you may have seen on social media, the official cover for “Eternity’s Irys: Two Minutes to Midnight” is now complete.
But how did we get here? A lot of work and effort between myself and (mostly) my illustrator, Rhett (@firelocket).
But what does the progress look like? How far have we come? That’s what I want to archive with this post.
Let’s start from the very beginning.
1: The Proto-Cover (2018)
Behold! The proto cover I made at the very beginning of the project. Why is the tentacle green? What is the brown thing? (It’s an antler) What am I even looking at? All excellent questions that have since been rendered moot with the current iteration. However, this comes from a time when I wasn’t being fully honest with myself. Still love that background image though! Used to have it plastered everywhere on the original site.
Honestly, I cringe at this version. It comes from a very misguided point of view and the design is just… awful.
2: A Second Attempt (2019-2020)
Another monstrosity by me! Hand drew all that stuff besides the stock silhouette. It still has a soft spot in my heart.
3: The AI (2022)
So, this image was made with midjourney. To me, I saw it as the closest I’d ever come to a relevant cover. Obviously you can see a lot wrong with it, but further toying only made it worse so I clung to this pretty tightly for the longest time. It was the first time I could visualize the concept of a cover for the book I’d worked so long and hard on.
Text was added by myself.
4: The AI: Round 2 (2023)
My brother made this image with some AI program. It’s better than the one I made, but it’s still problematic due to its origin. Still, it became the baseline for the direction I wanted to take a real cover if ever I got the chance to make one.
It was also the first cover to ever be printed.
Text was added in post.
5: The Official First Draft
The first sketch by an actual illustrator! I was skeptical of the gold and purple motif even though it’s canon to the book, but we ended up sticking with it.
After we went over a bunch of book covers and how I felt about them as well as referencing that last AI image, this is where we ended up. This is true beginning of our journey.
As you can see, there’s also a little illustration that didn’t make it to the end. We decided to take additional artwork into the book.
6: Behold: A Frame!
Some more refinement and a more established direction. I’d fallen in love with Rhett’s impromptu spine design and, while it’s unconventional and might not be the best direction, I pushed it.
We were going to put the subtitle on the hour glass, but man did that not end up going well in the end. I like how we resolved it in the final draft.
You can also still see a scroll on the bottom. That’s where my name was going to go, but we ultimately scrapped the scroll idea entirely.
7: Shading!
We spent way too long trying to realize my idea of making the mask look crystalline. The burnishing effect on the screws and frame were actually a happy accident.
Also worth noting is the smoke now has a definitive form. This is very very important.
8: The Final Form!
TADA!
Still needs a blurb, but here it is! The final cover for “Eternity’s Irys: Two Minutes to Midnight”. This is what you’ll find on shelves, should it ever get to them.
I won’t lie, at first I found myself detaching from it. It was so hard for me to accept that this was it. This was the one thing I never thought I’d ever have no matter how much I wrote, no matter how much I edited, I would never have a cover. Especially not one actually created exactly how I wanted it to be.
I remember going on Fiverr. I remember shopping bulk production sites. I remember googling assets and considering doing it all myself to avoid publishing anything with AI. I was about to accept that AI cover, even though I didn’t want to, but in a last ditch attempt to do something I actually wanted to, I made a Facebook post. Rhett reached out and the rest is now history.
The more I look at it, the more I show it to others, the more I love it. The more I can come to accept that this is, in fact, my cover. What a wild concept I thought I could only dream of.
It is currently in the hands of my publisher (brother) and I should have a dummy copy in a few weeks. I can’t wait to hold it all over again.
Other Things of Note
Beta readers are about half way through and are making some fantastic critiques! We’re aiming for their pass to be completed by the end of the month. I’m implementing their suggestions as they pass them along. It’s been an excellent experience and another thing I never thought I’d have. I’m so grateful to them, I was dead set on being the only eyes to look at it before it hit the wild because I was too afraid of it being torn to pieces like a previous version had been. That would have ended me.
But that’s not how it’s gone. Not at all. And I’m crazy grateful for that.
October deadline seems to be holding strong. Once the beta read is done, I’ll finish polishing, see if they’d be willing to check it again. All that would remain is the internal illustrations and then… Well, maybe one more dummy print before it goes live.
We really are getting there!
After all these years…
Crazy…
🦑💜🦇
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After five years of drafting this thing and over twenty years of writing in general, I ended 2023 with a copy of my book.
Written in Google Docs with the aforementioned Royal Kludge keyboard, formatted in Atticus, “edited” with ProWritingAid, and print-formatted by my brother Paul, my unofficial “publisher”.
He had four of these pre-production copies printed and they are BEAUTIFUL!
I knew he’d been working on it as it was somewhat of a collaboration, but I was under the impression it’d be a while before I’d ever get to see it. Well, on the night of December 30th, sitting in his car the cold, dark, wet of Pittsburgh, he handed me a copy. Just out of the blue.
It took me a minute to process what it was I now held.
My book.
Eternity’s Irys.
I was holding it.
I never gave any thought to how this moment would play out as I had it locked away as a work of fiction in and of itself.
I broke down and cried. Sobbed, even. Ugly, happy, proud tears.
I’ve been in a state of awe ever since. The copy pictured, 1 of 4, is my editing copy as in the excitement a page got a bit torn. Three more still sit on the shelf beside my desk. One will go home with my brother. The other two will remain with me. I would offer them to some special people, but I’ve found some crazy typos just in the first chapter!
On that note, editing in the book has been AMAZING. I was struggling so hard with doing yet another pass on my screen, but putting pen to actual paper, BOUND paper, not just printed out on a laserjet, adds a level of realism to the process I’ve never felt before.
The copies themselves are hardcover with a dustcover, lined with purple paper, printed on satin pages, and includes a beautiful little purple bookmark. They’re perfect.
I intend to design a limited “Release Edition” once it’s all ironed out. As of right now, I’m editing the physical copy and the cover artist has a June 2024 deadline which we will be strongly targeting in the coming months. I have to work on obtaining rights for the embellishment image I’ve been using. As of right now it’s for personal use only and these are only personal copies. I’d like to clear it for printing. Finally, I’ll have to obtain IBNs for it and get it officially listed as a real book for real people to buy.
A mid-2024 release is VERY possible. Scarilly possible.
I am both nervous and excited, but mostly determined.
Happy New Years to everyone and I hope its everything we all need and deserve!
2024 is going to be a BIG year for Eternity’s Irys!
Stay tuned!🦑💜🦇
Eternity's Irys 