A thank you! And also, future plans!

Happy new year, dear readers! I don’t usually like to take up anybody’s precious time with anything that isn’t more story, but I just wanted to take this opportunity (new year!) to say thank you.

As of last week (on Christmas day, no less!), the Katalepsis Patreon is at exactly $1000 per month.

This is an incredible milestone and I simply cannot thank you all enough. I know I’ve said this before at other points, but I never imagined my little story about a group of disaster lesbians and their cosmic horror adventures would ever find such an audience and such support. It is you, all of you, who make this possible. You may have noticed the weekly chapters have gotten longer the last couple of months — the last sub-8k chapter was 10 weeks ago. This is directly due to having so much more time to work on each chapter because of your support. Originally I wanted to push up to getting patrons 2 chapters ahead, but that sort of got buried under the sheer volume of story I was writing. I’m still going to try to do that though! Might take a while, with each chapter being so big now. I’m not certain that every chapter will always be over 8k words, but I’ll keep trying my best!

So, although $1000 per month isn’t quite enough to scale back everything else I do to keep food on the table, it’s getting there. I’ve made even more time for writing now, so I wanted to openly share some of my plans for the next year, on how to use this time to bring you all more story.

Don’t feel you need to read all this! It might be a little bit long. If you’re checking out here, I hope you enjoy this weeks’ chapter! And thank you so very much.

I’ve mentioned some of this in replies to random comments and also several times on the Katalepsis discord server, but that’s kind of scattered, so I wanted to sum it all up here for everyone who’s interested.

First off is the side-stories; I promised those several months ago now and I haven’t forgotten them. Only a couple of weeks after I committed to them, I got the audiobook deal from Podium Audio. All of my writing time outside of weekly Katalepsis chapters has been dedicated to editing the story so far, for the audiobooks and accompanying ebooks. The first ebook/audiobook volume has been a rather difficult learning experience. I assumed I could knock it out in a month, but that was vastly overconfident. But now the first of those is done and almost dusted and about to go off to the publisher. The second volume is going much faster, and I’ve got even more time for writing, so I’m hoping to start fitting the side-stories in soon. Soon.

As for the audiobooks, as I said, the first one is off to the publisher! I’ll let you know as soon as they move forward with the next step.

But what about Katalepsis itself?

We’re on arc 15, the story has entered the summer, almost the end of Heather’s first year at university, and only a few months from Maisie’s looming deadline. Book 1 of Katalepsis looks to conclude somewhere around arc 18 or 19. I’ll be very surprised if we go all the way to 20. At the rate things are going, this will very likely be sometime this year!

Without giving away any spoilers for the climax, not everything is going to be neatly wrapped up. Heather is hardly going to be able to solve everything about her life in the space of 3-4 more arcs. And what about everybody else, too? They’ve got stories of their own. Katalepsis was always intended to be a series, after all.

Back when I started this, Book 2 was a ‘maybe’, because I had no idea what kind of interest Katalepsis would get. My intention was (and still is) to open the story out to multiple PoVs in Book 2, not just Heather, and explore all of the characters in more detail as other strange things happen in Sharrowford’s shadowy corners.

But now Katalepsis has a huge audience and lots of support. If the audience wants more of Heather and everyone else, Book 2 will happen.

And I think you do, so onward we’ll go! Probably right after the end of Book 1! (I might take a week or two break??? I don’t know just yet! I don’t like breaks!) As long as you want more of these characters and this world, I have more story to tell. For a long time to come.

Ah, but there’s more.

So I’ve discovered that 8-10k words of Katalepsis per week is probably my upper limit. It’s a complex story with a lot of moving parts and anything more than that becomes very difficult to edit while keeping all the plates spinning without smashing one, metaphorically speaking. But if the Patreon keeps growing, very soon (I hope, thank you, goodness me) I might be able to dedicate myself to writing full time.

That would be a huge deal. If that’s possible, then I want to do justice to you who all make it possible.

So here’s the deal. Even after the side-stories and the audiobooks are done, I’m not sure I can write more Katalepsis at speed without making mistakes or adding filler. So I’m going to do something else.

As we approach the end of Book 1 (and/or as I approach writing full time with no other work responsibilities), I am planning to write 3 or 4 teasers for potential non-Katalepsis projects, probably the opening 1-3 chapters of each; I will then present these teasers to you, my patrons, and whichever one you like best I will write alongside Katalepsis.

Right now I have no idea how exactly this would work! What day of the week I would publish this other project, how long the chapters would be, how new patrons would get access to it, etc, but I can figure it out along the way! Perhaps I need to rename this Patreon to “Hungry’s stories” instead of just “Katalepsis”, but we’ll see!

Those of you who are very active in the discord can probably guess that one of these potential parallel projects does indeed contain vampires.

But I’ll keep the other ones under wraps until I’m certain of them.

My apologies for such a long and winding post, but I figure as you are all funding this, you deserve to know what I’m planning next. Regardless, I hope you all have a very good 2022, and enjoy this week’s chapter. Thank you, readers, all of you, I cannot express it enough. And watch this space.