And so the day finally arrives. Feel the stilling in the air? The whispers on the breeze, like the hushed breath of the world before a thunderstorm breaks? The anticipation of a mighty titan again come upon the earth?

Starforge‘s second Alpha Read begins today. And this … This is the call.

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Okay, some less dramatic background and information. Starforge has already had one Alpha Read. Readers have gone through it, made comments, notes, suggestions, etc. Chapters have been edited, trimmed, in a few cases prepped for rewrites … But this story is the finale. It’s needs polish. And so today the Second Alpha Read begins. Emails will be sent out as soon as this post is live. For those of you not already on the Alpha Reader list, you can comment here expressing an interest in Alpha Reading and I’ll contact you to talk about it.

Really quick, a recap of what Alpha Reading is: Alpha Reading isn’t looking for typos or misplaces commas. That’s Beta work, and there’s no sense in fixing a punctuation mistake if the whole paragraph might get cut!

Alpha work is concerned with the structure of the story. Are there plot holes? Does what the characters did make sense? Was the action clear? Was the reader bored or excited? Was something confusing? Did the chapter work as a whole or was something off about it?

As stated, structural stuff. Making sure the character doesn’t say they have six shots left and then fire seven, or that items don’t accidentally magically teleport without some reason. And, of course, what thoughts the reader has at the end of each chapter.

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That’s pretty much it. The second Alpha for Starforge starts today! There are currently a good 40,000+ words worth of chapters up and ready for readers to tackle, and I’ll have more up by the end of the day as I do the last passes from Alpha 1 and upload the revised Alpha 2 chapters.

Now, some metrics for those of you looking at this.

Starforge in its Alpha 2 form should be just about 500,000 words. For those curious, that’s about 40,000 words longer than Jungle, which means in print it would be around 1800 or so pages depending on the font size. Yes, this is a monster. It wraps up the whole trilogy. Thirty-seven chapters, plus a prologue, epilogue, and interludes.

It is, simply put, a boss of a book. Do not expect to finish this in a weekend unless you really plan on doing nothing else, sleep included. This will take at least a few reading sessions.

Additionally, as noted this is the end of the trilogy. The last book. That said, if you’ve not read Colony or Jungle before, I’d actually be interested in seeing what your thoughts were as you Starforge, and if enough was delivered in the story for the stakes and characters to be clear without having read the two prior books.

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All right, so that’s it! Emails will be shooting out starting now! The second Starforge Alpha has begun, and those who accept will be getting your chapter list invite this evening!

For Pisces!