Audiobook/ebook release date, a very serious thank you, and whispers from a dead world.

(A word of warning: this post is over 1k words long! The tl;dr version is: audiobook is out on 4th October, thank you all for your support from the bottom of my heart, and I'm going to running another serial alongside Katalepsis!)

Without further ado:

I am delighted to announce that the first Katalepsis audiobook and ebook, comprising arcs 1-4, now have an actual release date; they’ll be out on October 4th! The provisional release date got knocked back a couple of times, but this one is confirmed. There’s no pre-orders up yet, but I’ll let everybody know as soon as they’re available.

The cover art seen above was designed and created by the brilliant and wonderful Noctilia. She’s done an absolutely amazing job, and I love it so very much.

To give you a bit more information: I haven’t actually heard any of the narration from the audiobook yet. I won’t be able to until it’s released, it’s completely out of my hands, so I’m just as curious as anybody else! It’s been handled by Podium Publishing, the same people behind almost every web serial audiobook adaptation, and they managed to get Marisa Calin as the narrator, which I think I mentioned last time I brought up the audiobook. The ebook though, that’s just me self-publishing on Amazon; I’ve not given up editorial control or anything (though I did have an editor to help cleaning things up, but she’s a fan of the story, not from Podium or anything! Thank you again, Audrey!)

Some of you may spot an unfamiliar name at the top of the cover: Hazel Young. That’s just my ‘official’ pen name. Hazel Young, HY, Hungry, get it? I’ve actually gone ahead and changed the URL of my patron to patreon.com/hazelyoung, to avoid confusion and tidy things up a bit.

A thank you

I’ll try to keep this simple. Last weekend, my patreon ticked over $1,500/month. (That’s in dollars, because I made my patreon page long before local currencies were implemented, and I keep it presented this way partly for simplicity, despite the stuff happening under the hood.)

I set that goal over three years ago and I seriously never expected to reach it. That number seemed like a wild, impossible figure at the time. When I started Katalepsis, I had no idea if it was remotely viable, if I could do something like this full-time, or if I would end up writing the story in a much less detailed and expansive manner, confined to what little time I could find. I was always committed to finishing the story, whatever it took, but I had no idea if it would just be for myself, or for an audience.

I simply cannot thank you all enough for your support. That is a life-transforming amount of money for me.

I’m never sure how much of this kind of thing it’s okay to mention. I never want to guilt anybody into supporting my fiction, obviously. I only want to express my gratitude. I feel compelled to make it clear: your support has literally bought me time, time which I use for writing, every single day. It has bought me the time to get that second chapter out for patrons. It has bought me desperately needed new glasses (kind of important for writing!) It’s not yet my sole responsibility in life, but it is far and away the main one. The change has been gradual, so you haven’t seen the full results yet, but this amount of money has allowed me more security and stability than I have ever experienced before. More to the point, it has allowed me to plough more and more time into writing, the very reason I am here and the reason I exist, the thing I exist to do.

Thank you, more than can I possibly say

Here is what I plan to do with that time.

Katalepsis Book One continues apace, and will likely be wrapping up around arc 20 or 21, at current. I don’t know when that will be, exactly! At this level of support, I can almost guarantee that I won’t have to slow down or spend too much time on other work. Heather’s trajectory is clear, my outline is detailed, and all the events thus far rush toward their inevitable conclusion.

But then! At this level of support and interest, Volume Two, Book Two, whatever I end up calling it, is certainly assured. In the gap between Book One and Two, I am currently planning to write all of those long-promised side-stories, as a kind of transition between phases in the shared life of our protagonists. But in the meantime … 

Revenant whispers

Some of you may recall that back in January I floated the idea of running a second story, alongside Katalepsis. Chapters for Katalepsis are currently about 8k words per week, which seems to be a good sweet spot for both editing and readability. So I may as well attempt to use that extra energy for something, right?

That idea has borne fruit. After some preliminary tests with blurbs and concepts, I ended up shelving the idea of putting it to a general vote, because one story stood out strongest, a concept I’ve been growing for a long time. Some of you who frequent the discord are already well aware of this, but I wish to present for all, a very long blurb for a story called:

Necroepilogos

(This is a much longer blurb than I would ever use normally, to be clear! This is like a sort of extended blurb, to give you a taste of the upcoming flavour!)

I’m not sure exactly when I’m going to launch Necroepilogos. I’m currently trying to get cover art, but when I have that, it’s good to go. It will run alongside Katalepsis, though with much shorter chapters, perhaps 2.5k words each, maybe twice a week at first. I’ll have to see how that works out; but with all this extra support, I don’t see why I can’t do it! I’ll launch it for patrons first, then to everybody else. Katalepsis will always be my top priority, of course, and if push comes to shove it will get the lion’s share of my time.

Thank you, again. This has been a long post, but I had to say it. You have all made this possible, and I am committed to doing my absolute best to bring you more story.