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Adversary is now at the end of the Beta reading stage. It still needs to go through the final revisions, copyedit, proofreading, and formatting stages before it’s ready for publication. Unfortunately, it’s a lot harder than usual to estimate timescales for those stages.

That isn’t just because Adversary has turned out to be even longer than Borderline, fighting it out neck and neck with Sol 2781 for the title of my longest book. After a year where we’ve effectively moved three times, I’m dealing with one lot of medical stuff that I didn’t expect to happen until August, another lot of medical stuff that was totally unexpected, and a lot of complications from the great boiler disaster.

I am continuing to progress Adversary as quickly as possible, but there are inevitably some days where I feel like I’ve been hit by an especially aggressive express lift. Please bear with me when I’m slow to reply to messages, and keep checking the Coming Next page for updates on Adversary’s progress through the final stages to publication.

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While I’d love to get Adversary out in time for Christmas, the real-life complications of the last few months have slowed my writing progress. The good news is that we are now in our new home, which is in a gloriously peaceful place. Finally free from neighbourhood pneumatic drills and hammering, my writing progress should return to normal.

Given the impossibility of hitting Christmas release deadlines, I’ll be putting a short story set in the Hive Future on my website for the New Year, and then releasing Adversary in February 2023.

Adversary (Hive Mind 5) Exp Release date February 2023

Being a telepath means being a warrior.

Eighteen-year-old Amber is the youngest of the five telepaths who protect the hundred million citizens of one of the great hive cities of twenty-sixth century Earth. As her city celebrates the start of a New Year, one of the other telepaths must stop work to have lifesaving surgery.

Amber is already worried how she and her unit will cope with the increased workload, but then she finds herself facing twin enemies as well. Inside her city, Keith takes advantage of his increasingly powerful position as one of only four working telepaths. Outside her city, Hive Genex sends the devious Adversary Aura to lead their defence against charges of attempting to kidnap Amber.

Cover depicts Adversary Aura of Hive Genex.

Cover Design by The Cover Collection © Janet Edwards 2020

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As a child, I believed books were written from the beginning to the end. In fact, books can progress in many ways. Forwards, backwards, with periodic standstills, and it’s reported that Harper Lee once threw the manuscript of To Kill A Mockingbird out of the window into the snow.

Adversary originally hit a morass of problems as it neared the halfway point. I took a break to let my thought clarify, and that break turned out to be far longer than intended. Due to long Covid and bereavement, the creative side of my brain couldn’t handle sorting out the issues of Adversary, so I had to let it write the Drago Tell Dramis 2781 series instead.

After the release of Sol 2781 in July, I picked up the partly written Adversary. I’ve now done the initial surgery to solve a plot overload problem, followed by an extensive reworking of the plotlines. The book is now in a healthy state, and progressing in a generally forwards direction, with Amber and her team facing mounting problems from both inside and outside the Hive.

I will be giving another progress report on Adversary in the middle of October. At that point, both the amount of work needed to complete the book, and the likely complications of real life, should be a lot clearer.