Hello everybody! _{(Hello Dr. Nick) (I really need to stop making that joke)} N here.

So, you may have noticed a few changes around here. If you don’t follow me on social media, you might not be aware of the situation, so I’m going to briefly go over it here.

The short of it is: I hit burnout – or, rather, burnout hit me.

(At least with Truck-kun I’d have been isekai’d into a harem video game.)

It started at the end of 2024, if I’m being honest. Crowdfunding was a new realm for us, and while it opened up some amazing opportunities and was a lot of fun, it was also incredibly stressful. Especially since I followed it up immediately with Pintopia.

While juggling back to back crowdfunders, we were also trying to prep Book3 for betas, for release late in 2025.

Book3 was where it all started to go wrong.

I couldn’t make myself read it, and blamed that on an increase in symptoms related to my neurodivergency and chronic illness. But then betas came back confused. They questioned if this was even a story that needed to be told.

And worse, I’d been writing like a madthing since the beginning of the year – the script for our visual novel (which is now somewhere around 60k words, last I checked) and some fanfic as a way to destress (which, between two fics, is something like 50k). I’ve written 150k since January. So it wasn’t that I didn’t want to write.

I signed up for another crowdfunding event in Nov 2025 with the intention of keeping momentum, but by that time it had become obvious that Book3 was not going to be ready this year. To give us more time to work on Book3, we decided to do an audiobook for Everdark. I thought that would fix things and was pretty excited about it.

But then I was worried Everdark wouldn’t read well out loud, since frankly it got a lot of the same reviews we got from Book3. Meandering, too many plot points. I started to question everything – my writing, my ability to storycraft, Metacosm as a whole.

Ugh. This is hard to type.

As I struggled to move forward, the plan became to revise Everdark and do the audiobook. But when I started digging into it, it did what I call ‘hagfish.’ Where the story and the words themselves become so slippery I can’t hold onto them. The more I dug, the more I wanted to change. The more I questioned everything.

It was exhausting. I was drowning in anxiety. The tight schedule hung over my head and, despite that or because of it, I couldn’t make myself write a single word. I couldn’t resolve anything. What was I going to be forced to keep? What was I allowed to change? Where is this story even going? What was the point of any of this?

I tried to push through. To force motivation, because that’s what you do when it’s a business.

But it turns out I’m not built different.

I just – snapped.

I realized what was happening in mid-June after breaking down completely.

After admitting it to A and a trusted friend, I knew I needed to get some things off my plate immediately. So I withdrew from the crowdfunding in Nov and shed any other deadlines and obligations I could manage to.

You may notice that Everdark has been taken down from all retailers (or, most, we’re working on stragglers) – that is because I do still want to address its story.

We changed TFB to Book Zero and left it up for sale: it is essentially a prequel to the main story. I have no plans to change it in any way right now.

Slowly, over the last month, I’ve been recovering.

I’m able to at least talk about Metacosm in general again now without anxiety, though I still can’t think about Book3 or Everdark or the main story at all.

In that time, though, we’ve managed to make some tentative goals:

• Work on laying down, in a more concrete manner, the Main Story we want to tell. This includes the primary story points we hit in Everdark and Book3, and threads we laid down in TFB. My instinct is that the Story of Everdark will not change overly much once we start getting into the nitty-gritty of it. It’s just how we get there that will.
• Work on what format we want to tell this story in. I have found that longform novels are extremely stressful for me, so if we’re going to keep with that format, we will need to make some significant changes to protect my mental health.
• Work on a way to tell the parts of Metacosm that will never see daylight in a novel.
• Reduce deadlines: things get done when we are satisfied with them.
• Figure out how to finance an editor who can help us keep track of the threads, and deep-dive critically analyze story elements.
• Shift our roles; changing workflow to accommodate that and protect my mental health while still producing the best end product we can.

I won’t get into the finer details just now, because nothing’s been fully finalized yet, but we’re hard at work on our end getting things lined out, and I’ve started on something that will hopefully be much less stressful and a lot more fun. I’m pretty excited about it, anyway, which says a lot given how the first seven months of 2025 have gone.

More information will be upcoming as things are decided, though I can’t promise when. We’ll definitely have sneak peeks soon, though I’m not sure how often I’m going to do these State of the Metacosm posts. I think that depends on how often I actually have something substantial to say, haha.

We will still tell the story of Redd, and Ara, and Pheonix, and all our beloved babies. We still very much love Metacosm; there’s just some restructuring to do.

So hold please. We’ll be back with you soon.

Art from the Metacosm!

A WIP of an illustration of Redd I’m working on! Even back when I was a photographer, I’ve always loved colored lighting, so I’m working on ways to bring that into my art.