Originally sent to subscribers on April 23, 2026.
The Refactor Inside the Refactor
Hey, antibody enemies!
I've been writing in the Motherverse for a long time. But the shape of the project, the full picture — I've kept that mostly to myself. Now it's there. So let me tell you.
Ravenous Mother is a grimdark fantasy saga with a biopunk setting. It's big. It's made of two interlocking parts: a series of standalone novellas and a pentalogy of full novels, alternating over time and weaving together into one larger story.
Humanity lives inside a titanic living being called the Mother. No one knows what lies outside. No one even asks — the question doesn't exist. Inside, a rigidly stratified society scrapes through life under the constant weight of hunger. Nobles, professionals, commoners, outcasts. These are the people I write about.
The novellas are self-contained — but they're not separate. Each one follows a character who exists in the world of the pentalogy: secondary figures, seen from the outside in the novels, but given their own full story in the novellas. Every protagonist you meet in a novella will return, one way or another, in the main series. The endings leave marks.
If you've read A Healer, you already know :-)
Here's where things stand right now — and I mean written, not promised:
The Ravenous Mother Series — 2026
These exist. All of them. I'm not announcing things I haven't written.
Which brings me to the news: Betrays is done. And now begins the editing — which for this book is less like polishing and more like surgery.
Right now I'm dealing with a time skip in one of the final acts. It looks simple: time passes, characters move forward. But a clumsy time skip breaks something quietly in the reader — they don't always know why the story feels off, they just feel it. So I'm treating it like a structural problem: pulling the sequence apart, figuring out what needs to be told versus what needs to be experienced, and rebuilding it so the jump feels earned.
It's slow work. The satisfying kind.
Betrays — Coming soon
⚠ Prototype cover — final version coming soon.
The first full novel in the Ravenous Mother series.
Is this the cover? What do you want to know about Betrays?
While I was elbow-deep in acts and timelines, I also published something I'd been meaning to write for a while: a full breakdown of what biopunk actually is — where it comes from, who's written it, and why it matters now more than ever.
If you've ever wondered why the Motherverse feels different from other fantasy, this is the context behind it.
Read: Biopunk — The Living GenreUntil next time — may your time skips land cleanly.
— J. R. Kendiro
P.S. If you've read A Healer and haven't left a review yet — even two lines on Amazon make a real difference for an indie author.
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