First things first: I loved the title I came up with for last chapter ,and after musing long about it, I think it could be a positive change for the visibility of the saga to be called "Pride of Parasites" instead of "Heartworm". While the books are indeed centered on Dirofil's plight, four of the six siblings take an an important role in the trilogy (Or at most tetralogy, i'll see).

And pride is not only a word that defines the capital sin, the feeling of self-aggrandizement, or the simple pleasure taken from achievements, of own or of others. A pride is also a family of lions.

Heartworm is not only a SEO nightmare (There's even a veterinary hospital called Royal Road Veterinary Hospital!) but could also make some people think about romance. And romance in here there's next to none. Sure, Dirofil loves Shadiran and Shadiran loves Dirofil. 90% of the story is still existential anguish, family drama, refining dogs and killing mutant chihuahuas (No amount of power can ever spare the crew of the little pests. Like the real thing, they are blissfully unaware of their place in the pecking order) . 9% is killing non-chihuahuas. 0,9% is Shadiran and Dirofil reminiscing the good ol' days where they loved each other without a sea in the way. 0,1% is basking in the glory of Loretta (Character to come. Most important. Load-bearing, one could say).

So, while I love the concise and quite straightforward nature of Heartworm, the Punchy alliteration and lack of ambiguity of Pride of Parasites could help get more eyeballs in the book. So, i'd like to poll your opinion, either in the comments or in the poll below. I don't want to confuse the current readers with a name change out of the blue.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

As a little aside, I have received conflicting feedback about chapter 1: some people love it, some people hate it, and it's difficult to find common ground. For some, it is too confusing. for others, this confusion is charming. I want to keep the confusion factor, it was engineered in as a feature and not a bug, but i don't want to drive readers away in droves, either.

A suggestion was to change the Epigraph of chapter 1, (The introduction to Notes for Cosmopoiesis, where the creatress states she has won The Lottery) for something less confusing. I could swap it with a note from following chapters, but that would make the storyline told in Notes for Cosmopoiesis/Tidbits of Our Creation/ Musings of a detractor slightly more... tangled, lets say? (as a little insignificant spoiler, there are several different stories going on in the epigraphs of book 1 alone, as you may have noticed by some epigraphs being Doratev's in-universe recordings.)

So, your opinion about chapter 1 is valuable too.

As an apology for this wall of text and poll, i'll upload chapter 18 ahead of schedule.

P.S. I am close to finishing the draft of book 1, that will clock in at about 80k words, if all goes well.