State of the Metacosm 9/25: Free Story + Anthology + Everdark Updates

Hey everybody, N here.

I shockingly somehow have not run out of updates yet, so here I am again!

First a quick reminder that Space Wizard’s campaign for Lesbians in Space 2 ends on Sept 30th! If you want to read Chani’s meet-cute with her longterm partner Avandra at an attempted political assassination, getting this book is your only chance to do so!

Secondly, our itch has a short I wrote as a small prequel to Everdark, free! I want to start writing and posting more shorts here, but for now that’s where it is haha.

And here’s the big thing.

I’ve been solidly focusing on burnout recovery for these last few months, and I’m making good progress. I started writing on some tangential Metacosm stuff to test the waters. The script for our gay romance visual novel concept, Project:Freqs, is at 60k words now (for reference the average novella is somewhere around 50k).

A and I have slowly been talking about where we want to go from here, especially in relation to the Main Story we had always planned to tell as novels.

I’m not the writer I was two years or even a year ago. And I know that’s always going to be true, practice makes progress, but some things clicked over the last year that allowed me to see flaws in my work (and even more key, my process) I was previously unaware of. Also, now I have very tangible structures — a writing community I trust, multiple capable and talented betas who aren’t afraid to tell me the honest truth, ADHD meds, time — I didn’t have when we published Everdark.

It was too shaky a foundation to build on, and we realized that with Book3.

A lot of ideas were tossed around. It was an emotional journey, figuring out how not to make this mistake again.

We did eventually come to the conclusion we still want to do novels. (We were briefly considering the logistics of telling the stories some other way, like as visual novels or series of novellas) We’re setting up some additional protections for my mental health.

So with that in mind we’ve been working on the new outline — figuring out what was bogging the story down, what was left underdeveloped or unsaid — and have made good strides through the first 1/3 of the book or so. Most of the major story beats are the same, as I promised months ago, but it’s how we get there that will change. I guarantee that for those of you who read it and were less than impressed, a majority of the issues you had with it will be gone in the revision.

I’ve also started actually rewriting it. Not very much so far, just the first few scenes, but it’s progress. And the biggest thing about it is that I can talk about it and write on it without feeling like I’m going to have a panic attack. So I’m very optimistic.

Some things I can promise immediately about the new Everdark: you’ll see more of Pheonix, and a whole lot more of Ara. Our poor cutie Healer didn’t get the spotlight or development she deserved and we’re going to fix that.

Also, just fyi, when the new Everdark comes out, if you bought the old one let us know and we’ll send you over the new one!

We’d initially had a one-book-a-year release schedule, because we thought we had two and a half books basically written when we officially created Metacosm Chronicles. Now everything is up in the air, so it’ll get done when it’s done. If I get severely hyperfixated, it might be next year. But more realistically, two years.

(We’re aiming for The Book Bazaar, which is the super amazing group crowdfunding project we were initially going to be joining with the audiobook back before everything crumbled like a sand castle at high tide. We may not be in it this year but there’s a ton of really cool projects and it starts in Nov, so keep an eye on it!)

So that’s the major stuff for now. As always here’s an Art from the Metacosm to close us out: Nemesis, for our upcoming short visual novel!

A stylized illustration of a slim, androgynous being made of white static, with eight purple eyes arranged in a circle, a rictus grin, and nebula hair.