The Best Laid Plans of Chimerical Jaguars
I am supposed to be launching the Kickstarter for the second Jokka collection this week. In fact… my planned date for that was… yesterday.
You will note that I have not launched the Kickstarter. That would be because the Ai-Naidar showed up, and while they didn’t do anything as uncouth as punch me in the face, they’ve laid me out anyway, like a boxer down for the match. Most of you have noticed the eruption of meta-conversations on patrelocals, and probably knew before I did what this portended. But I’ve had occasional clusters of visits from the Ai-Naidar before without needing to write another story in the canon, and honestly I thought their next story was going to be written four years ago, and it didn’t happen. I have lots of notes, but no book.
Well, now I am two chapters into a book. Not a long one, I don’t think. And not the one I planned (of course). But I don’t think I’ve had an idea eat my brain this completely in years. I am once again so full up with Stuff that I am bumping into walls. And I’m nervous about this one, which is typical of the kind of stories that have to be told and aren’t going to wait on me to get over my stage fright. If I don’t get out of its way it’s going to run me over. No wait, it’s going to run me over no matter what, so I might as well brace for impact.
So! I find I am once again forced to shuffle my plans. Here’s what I think 2025 will look like now:
- This coming week I edit the Gamelit and get it uploaded so when the preorder period ends, there will actually be something delivered to people. That means taking my brain out of Kherishdar long enough to do that, but I think that’s do-able. The gamelit will continue to serialize on my subscription platforms, and should wrap up before the retail street date.
- My next project will be Kherishdar’s Witness and the companion conversations volume, which gives me two Kherishdar books in Q2 of 2025. I’m expecting them to be about the same size (maybe 200 pages), and while I know several of you are looking at me significantly, I honestly think KH5 is so intense that it can’t handle too much page count. It’s refusing to fit into either the Aphorisms model or the Black Blossom model, which suggests that I’m taking it seriously as its own thing… so the likelihood that I’m correctly estimating its size is good. I mean that.
- That carries us into early summer, which is where I’m pushing the next Jokka collection. This book has the three completed stories that are currently available only as singletons and the potential for three new additions. Since one of those potential three is a novella, I’m setting aside the summer to assemble that collection, just in case we hit the Magnum Stretch Goal.
- And now we’re scheduling into autumn, and in autumn I’d like to either do Reese’s Forecourt collection (another short story Kickstarter), or Surela 3 (or both, which would take us into winter).
I think this is how the year is going to proceed. I think. No idea.
A couple of you have asked if I’m going to serialize KH5 the way I’ve serialized the other Kherishdar books, but I don’t think this one will benefit from the process. KH5 is a historical novel, and relies so deeply on understanding Kherishdar that having it floating around as possibly the first exposure readers might have to the setting wouldn’t serve anyone. I also want to give devoted fans of Kherishdar the chance to decide how and if they want to read it, because of how it might affect their perception of the other books in the series. It is… crazily intense.
Also several of you have asked if we’ll hear more about Qevellen after Haraa’s generation, and the answer to that is: I think so. We’ll see…!
So that’s my heads-up for the week. As always, I thank you all for your patience in watching me detonate my intended schedules in front of you after getting your hopes up for particular things. And I do plan to get to the other things!
You can still sign up to be notified of the Jokka collection launch on this page:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mcahogarth/the-smell-of-intelligence-and-other-stories
.And the gamelit preorder is here:
https://buy.bookfunnel.com/8dhj9ti4oj
