As many of you may know from my Twitter updates, I've decided that The Dark Ice Chronicles will no longer be a trilogy of novels, nor will they have that title. Instead, I've decided to condense the trilogy, already fairly overblown and stretched out in hindsight, into a single novel which will form a sort of bridge between the new versions of Red Rain books 3 and 4, White Shadows and Black Mirror. In essence, this new manuscript, The Glitch Mob, will be Red Rain 3.5, basically.
The challenge, though, is getting The Glitch Mob off the ground. I started re-editing that manuscript in June for Pride Month, especially appropriate since I decided to make it so Harris McCallum would be the primary POV character, and his coming-out story arc from The Scalers would now be a moot point because in this new version of the story, he's already out and proud - and so are most in his circle of friends. (It's a new character, Kai Shelby, who combines Harris' old coming-out arc with the original Jason Cross' Dark Ice self-discovery and oddly cute chemistry with Harris.)
I love Harris McCallum. I really, really do. But perhaps because he's a different, more self-realized version of myself - a ball of sunshine and Fire as opposed to my moonlight and Ice, kinda like Tom Holland and Andrew Garfield's respective screen Spideys (and, appropriately, Holland is now Harris' face claim) - he's proven surprisingly hard to write for me. Another sad factor about my Glitch Mob work is that as overlong as the original trilogy is, I find myself having to kill a ton of darling scenes and lines to make the whole single-book thing work. So while my original plan was to finish The Glitch Mob by the end of June to cap off my Pride Month celebrations, that didn't come anywhere close to fruition. Hell, it's been three months and (especially since I've also been working on re-edits for the first three Red Rain books, including having Harris make his Red Rain debut in White Shadows instead of Black Mirror, as well as the first draft of Peppermint) I haven't even finished condensing the events of The Magi yet.
I think it might help now, though, that I've got a sweet cover art design to help motivate me. Sam Ayers, the awesome artist behind the covers for the Red Rain series, returns with a beautifully colorful cover for The Glitch Mob!
To explain the symbolism involved in this cover: the orange flames on one side of the planet represent Harris and his Dark Fire powers. The blue light is for his girlfriend and first love Evan Michaelsen (another major change from the original trilogy - Harris and Evan are the main canon couple now!), a Light Ice - exactly his opposite power-wise. Replacing the Red Rain wing overlays under the title are a couple of flaming swords, Harris' signature weapon, reflecting his origins as a modern-AU version of Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon. (I swear, it's coincidence that yesterday we got to see a Game of Thrones episode with a flaming sword making a prominent guest appearance.) And because Harris is the living embodiment of where I hope to have my bi-pride levels someday, the splashes of color on the title come in bi-pride colors - with a hint of blood in there too, because let's face it, it's no book of mine if it doesn't involve some kind of blood. (Not to sound too much like Z Brewer, lol.)
I'm still not 100% certain The Glitch Mob will get to appear on Wattpad, but I'm not ruling it out. In the meantime, to give you an idea of my plans for this saga, here are all the covers (once again, many thanks to Sam Ayers!) in what will be my suggested reading order for these books.
This is absolutely going to be a wild ride for me to write, and for you to read, my friends.
Till next time, Pinecones...
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