The Shadow Ends: A Kylux Story

The nonsense continues. Enjoy these backstage shenanigans for Part II of The Shadow Ends, courtesy of Google Docs and excessive screenshots.

1. Gonna be honest, the descent into insanity was faster on this round.

2. There was sometimes a little tension.

This is about the 417th time we broke up during editing, fyi.

3. If you’re wondering whether the names ever messed us up...they did.

I hope you can feel the sheer mortification and panic in our responses here.  

4. We were excited to make use of the crossguards. (Chapter 42: “Abalin blocked him, more narrowly than before, and Irizar pushed until his blade slipped and landed at the crossguards of Abalin’s saber.”)

Note the time stamps.

5. There were adventures in unintentional text formatting.

6. We had some contributions from our cat walking across the keyboard.

7. Our rough drafts were...rough.

8. But we were extremely mature throughout the whole ordeal.

9. We did some intense research for worldbuilding.

Aul-Zhana:

Naelum:

(In case yall don’t watch Futurama as embarrassingly often as we do)

10. There were some cries for help.

Unanswered, btw. Z never helped me. -L

11. We’re especially proud of/horrified by this crowning achievement:

The comment limit per Google Doc is 10,000. TEN. THOUSAND. This doc was only nine chapters. Yeah.

12. Aaaand this really sums it all up.

But it was a labor of love. <3

If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to plan, write, and edit a 112k fic with a writing partner who is also your SO, wonder no more. (We’re splitting it into a Part I and a Part II because there is...a lot.) Hope you enjoy some of our BTS insanity.

1. Off to a great start.

Neither of us can really explain why this happened.

2. We agreed on most artistic decisions. We did not agree on em dashes.

3. Or commas.

4. I actually don’t remember what’s going on here.

5. There was this extremely important addition to Chapter 7.

All credit to Z for this lovely creation. On that note:

6. Some of us never quite got the hang of Star Wars geography.

7. As one would expect with Kylux, things sometimes got slightly nsfw.

8. Behold these, our mantras:

9. We picked up on some useful editing techniques along the way.

10. A quick timeline of our declining mental state:

11. And finally, to sum up, here’s what we learned through all this:

And that is a WRAP!

After nearly five years of planning, writing, and editing, The Shadow Ends is complete.

To everyone that dedicated their time to reading this, we appreciate you so much. We spent so long in coffee shops (and libraries and parks, and on planes, and a couple trains, and our couch at home) putting our energy into this story. It is amazing to be able to finally share it with the world.

We love to hear from you and will respond to every comment or message we get! There may be some more commissioned art in the future, which we're very excited about. We also have some behind-the-scenes extras that we'll be posting on Tumblr in the next few days.  Thank you again for reading, for leaving kudos, for commenting. It's been a joy sharing Hux and Abalin's journey with all of you.

Well, it's been a while. Since the last time we posted, the world started to end and our priorities had to shift a bit. Thankfully, we're safe and healthy. We hope you are too. 

And now, we return to our regularly scheduled programming. Chapter 58 has been posted with the rest soon to follow. 

We hope you'll find it was worth the wait.