What's Next For Ætherglow?

Hello dear readers and voters. It has been more then three years since we embarked on this collective journey together, back when Ætherglow was just a side project to help develop the setting of my (still in progress) novel Sappho of Luna, back when Ætherglow was published in fedi posts with unreliable poll data plagued by federation issues. It’s been more than two years since we launched translunar.academy and moved the project to custom software written by my wife Sparrow, hosted on a transfem-owned server under a transfem-owned registrar. And today we have finally made it to the end of Aydan’s first year at Translunar Academy.

In Retrospect

It has been an amazing project which I absolutely love writing, hearing your feedback on, and talking with fans about to build the setting more and more. The Ætherverse isn’t just my setting--everyone who has so much as voted in a poll has touched this vibrant world. As its author, I’m quite proud of Ætherglow, it’s become the flagship story of my bibliography. Navigating the challenges of writing an ongoing serial in real time without even knowing what would happen next has been an interesting exercise as a writer too, I highly recommend it. Letting go of my agency as a storyteller and letting the audience play the role of Aydan has also been an interesting and rewarding experience--it feels a lot like running D&D.

I have often worried about things like whether the pacing--very difficult to control in a serial format--would be tolerable to people reading through from the beginning, whether the events I built up to and foreshadowed would be too obvious, whether people are enjoying it at all when I’m not hearing any feedback, normal writer things. But through all of it people have continually showed up to vote every day or every two days ever since we started, and I’m grateful for your support!

I’m especially proud of the series because Autistics and trans folks have told me it means a lot to them, and even helped them discover things about themselves. This is truly the greatest thing I could ever hope to accomplish as an author. I tell these stories for you, for my people, so that maybe we can all believe that no matter how hard things get for us, people like us will always be a part of the future--an inseparable, necessary part of the world.

Thank you all for being a part of this <3

What’s Next:

What we have so far surely constitutes a novel-length work--I haven’t done a total word count but we did write 438 posts, some of which are probably several pages long in a print format.

I’ve been planning for some time to do an EPUB release of Ætherglow, split up into several volumes as that’s what readers indicated a preference toward. Hopefully a few short volumes will be less intimidating to new readers than the 438 post menace that scares many away from getting into it. I’ll be working on that this summer, and continuing to work on Sappho of Luna and other works, maybe even finish more short stories, the hardest thing of all for a terminal novelist like me. I’m also continuing work on the Ætherverse TTRPG, which I haven’t really talked about but have been developing. I want to write the next book of Antifascist Fantasy too. But in the middle of all of this, I’m trying to survive in the fascist USA and escape to France hopefully by next fall, if I don’t keep experiencing delays after delays and the door to escape doesn’t slam shut on me too fast. Otherwise I’d be writing more.

Ætherglow 2?

As for the future of Ætherglow itself: in typical Ætherglow fashion, that’s up to you. I’ve brought the story to a conclusive place to end the first year, but left many doors open for continuation. If you want to continue to year 2, we can do that! If it takes six more years we can get Aydan all the way to certification together. Or if you think it’s conclusive as it is we can stop and move onto other things. I just want to know if I’ll keep having an audience if I keep writing it.

So I’m going to take a break to work on all that and give some time for y’all to decide--both on the final Ætherglow year 1 poll which I’ve set for three months, and on the poll on this blog post.

I also have an idea to do something like “Ætherglow the Movie,” as a sort of side story longer than a typical Ætherglow chapter with a shorter, self-contained plot which is designed to be approachable with no knowledge of the main series and also completely optional for following the main plot. Something like an OVA if this was an anime. I won’t tell you anything else about it except that I’m going to get more weird and experimental with it. So either way I think I will run that next, after taking probably at least a month off, the summer is just so brutal and I can hardly think during the day. And after we finish that, we’ll know if Ætherglow continues on, and go from there.

What Can You Do?

The Ætherverse Wiki is up and open to editors if you want to help with this ongoing reader-led project. We even defeated the spambots it seems! I’m sure Admin EVA would be happy to have more help with the wiki.

You can also connect with the Ætherverse community on our discord space or the bridged Matrix space (#TLA:cybre.space), if you’ve read the entire series without knowing these exist. But no pressure, lurkers are always welcome here too!

Hope you survive summer, or have a great winter, depending on your hemisphere.

~winter-type-04 Winter