Return of the Jokka

Running Peradventure has caused several of you to revisit the Jokka stories (and some of you to read them for the first time!), and that has led, inevitably, to questions about the missing stories… the ones that exist only as audio, or that were on retailers briefly and vanished. There are three of those, plus an unfinished fourth story, and an unfinished novella. It had always been my plan to issue a second (and probably final) collection to gather those stragglers into a format people could acquire, but I put it on a backburner for a lot of reasons, not least was that I heard consistently that the Jokka were some of people’s least favorite stories.

And then a surprising number of you came out of the woodwork to say that they’re among your favorite stories and could you please have the remainder and the new ones as well.

I find myself needing a breather from the Peltedverse; I have a habit of rushing endings, and this is an ending I definitely don’t want to rush. So a break is looking good, and “finish a handful of short stories” feels like low-hanging fruit. Especially since I apparently started a refresh of the Stone Moon novels, with modern formatting and typo fixes and art sections, that I never finished, back in 2023.

My thought—‘throw together a three-story collection and call it done’—has accordingly evolved into ‘run a kickstarter for the whole Jokka setting.’ What that would entail:

• Issue new editions of the Stone Moon trilogy and Clays, with updated formatting, typo fixes, and new art sections (in color, for people buying direct!)

• Edit the existing three stories for the collection, “Unknowable,” “Anadi Dolls” and “The Smell of Intelligence”; the latter, in particular, was cut terribly to try to fit within market lengths, and desperately needs to be expanded.

• Fund, as stretch goals, the remaining stories: the unfinished post-Stone Moon Trilogy short (unnamed); a short sweet story; and as a final stretch goal, the unfinished novella about the founding of het Serelni (that would be the thing you longtimers have heard about as ‘red honey’).

Prizes for this one would be pretty good! Especially since all these stories are in audio… it would be one of the few campaigns I could run with all three formats, paper, ebook, and audio. (No hardcovers, though, that would be too timeconsuming.) There’s also a lot of art; I even have an existing sticker for the Jokka, and bookmark designs, and could probably brainstorm more things. “Me as my Jokkasona” would be an easy, fun high level prize, too, and I think the quiz for determining your Jokka sex is still on my hard drive somewhere. Someone could probably help me set that up on a website.

Also, I admit I want to take these stories back from the zeitgeist. I wrote them in good faith, and they’ve been used recently as ways to attack me, and that annoys me. Annoying Libras is difficult, but once we get poked enough, we wake up and go nuclear. XD

So this is what’s on my mind right now, and I post it both to organize it in my head and to give you fair warning that it might be coming!