Chloe Garner's Blog

I’ve owed this post for a couple of weeks, but there’s been a lot going on.  For obvious reasons.

As of May 23rd, I am officially a full-time author.  I’m stunned by this, and am still having a hard time believing that it’s actually true, even as I *don’t* show up to my day job, day after day, and *do* sit down to pursue things that need to be done for my writing.

The weeks leading up to this were chaotic and overfull, and I fell behind on writing as I wasn’t in the mindspace and had a lot of other things that I needed to close out in time for my last day of work, so my *sincerest* apologies to those of you who read the prognostication that Carbon 8 would be available in April.  The manuscript is finished and going through the editing process now, and we’re shooting for mid-June, now, but that’s the biggest reason *why* I missed my target for that book.  I’ve had a hard time keeping up my normal wordcount pace, and I’m hoping that a lot of it is because I haven’t been able to focus as I’ve been working toward *this*.

I’m done.

I loved my job for a long time, and I loved the people that I worked with more, but I finally got to an intersection where it was time, at work, and it was time, as a writer, and they both surprised me at once.

I kinda got career ambushed.

Which is… distracting.

I’ve been told by *writers who know* that I shouldn’t plan on my productivity going up *a lot*, from here, so I’m not making massive, grand plans, but I do hope to get back to the rate that I found to be normal in previous years.

I am so grateful to have ended up here.  Even as it was always the plan, and even as I always had a two- and five-year plan that was intended to end up at full-time, I’m profoundly aware that basically two people in the history of the world have been able to support themselves and their varied dependents off of fiction, and that it’s meaningful to get to that threshold.

I love it.

I love writing stories and I love *living* stories.  I can’t think of anything I would rather be doing, and while I’m going to shift some things around to accommodate some long-neglected life priorities (I’ve basically been working every waking hour for the last twelve years), this is not a point where I intend to slow down or relax, and I don’t see such a point coming any time in the future.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for reading my work.  For loving my characters and the worlds they live in.

Thank you for the opportunity to declare a freedom day and launch off into an entirely new life: one that I couldn’t have *conceived* of, 15 years ago.

You are amazing, and I appreciate you more than words have strength to capture.

I think that life can be measured with the idea of a volume measure.  Life got really loud for about six months, and while I was working consistently, it was slower and without quite so much interaction with my outside world, here, as I normally have.  It’s not an apology and it’s not an excuse.  Just a mile-marker.

I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to come back to a lot of the series that I’ve moved on from.  There are business reasons that I go do something else, and there are creative reasons that I go do something else, but I rarely leave a series because I’m just through with it and don’t want to play with those characters and in that world anymore.

(I used to go to writing conventions and put that I write science fiction and fantasy on my name badge, and I’d have writers point out that I don’t *actually* write fantasy, just urban fantasy…  It still stuns me how many years into writing I was before I released my first fantasy-fantasy novel, but with Verida I finally put that comment to bed.  I’ve known since I set out that I wanted to write fantasy, as well; it just took a long time to get to where I was situated to do it.  Ha.)

It doesn’t mean that I don’t miss those worlds, and it doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten them, that it takes so long to get back to them, but I do worry that *next time* it won’t be so easy to make the jump back into an existing world (or galaxy) with all of the *things* going on that were going on when I left.

And then it always feels like coming home.

I had had a plan to do one-off books in some of these main series as I was working on Verida, and I found very quickly that trying to make that corner was a bad idea for me, so I put them off to when I could do a much bigger block of work.  I really do love four-book sets for setting up really big arcs and landing them before I move on to something else again, and that’s what I’m in the middle of, now.

As things sit right now, I’ve put out two new Carbon books (The Clash of the Machines and The Division of Ping Ring Belt) and I am working toward finishing out the editing on another that will release in March of 2025, then returning to writing the fourth in this release-block, which will hopefully be ready in April of 2025.

Avery is still one of my favorite characters ever.

I don’t always get to really *let on* how much of a nerd I actually I am, but I’m properly trained as a *serious* nerd, and Avery is just out running rampant with all of my favorite *bits* of what it looks like to be a feral, exceptional *nerd*.  Savannah finally gets some oxygen in this set of updates, as well, and her arc has surprised me, while Monte remains one of my favorite archetypes to write, and Carbon.

Carbon.

She holds herself so carefully, takes so much responsibility for *everything* because of how *capable* she knows she is, and yet she’s still figuring out whether she even believes that she is a human being.  I love her so dearly for how hard she fights.

The Carbon Chronicles series is intended to be a much more relaxed sequence of adventures compared to what I’ve done in Surviving Magic or any of the Verida series, and I’m quite happy with how it has turned out.  It means that I don’t have some big, lurking arc that is someday going to be complete and the world will take a curtain-bow and be done.  These could go on forever, and… I’m here for it.

My plan, sitting next to me on the wall right now, doesn’t include any more Carbon books on it after book 8 through to the end of 2029, and I know that’s disappointing to readers that this is the one series I write that they love, but there are so many other series I want to put time into, including a brand new one in 2026 or 2027, and characters that I have no intention of abandoning.

So don’t give up hope.  And I hope that these are the series continuation you’ve been looking for; I’ve enjoyed writing them more than I had even anticipated.

It’s probably rather obvious that I am not the world’s most avid blogger.  I haven’t counted, but it’s not unlikely that the last November post i wrote is still on the front page of my website.  All the same, I like to explain what they are for people who have never read one, and to get myself into a November headspace, even as I’m writing this one a bit later than normal.

November is the National Novel Writing Month.  It’s a global celebration of creativity and writing – usually fiction – without a sense of holding back for approval from other people.  Just write.  Make something.  Go nuts.  I love it.  It’s festive and energetic, and while writing is usually a solo-act, this tends to come with a more of a community feel, which is really amazing and different from the rest of the year.

If the whole year was like this, I would be exhausted, but as a one-time, monthlong event, it’s refreshing and it forms a reset to my writing year.  I used to take off the entire month of October so that I’d be chomping at the bit to get going on midnight of November 1 (with a giant bowlful of leftover Halloween candy), but that doesn’t suit my lifestyle or my writing style anymore, so November is, instead, a month where I try to avoid scheduling releases (more on that later) and where I just push myself for high-energy writing and creativity.

This is a funny year, for me, socially, because a lot of my writing groups have drifted apart.  None of them for bad reasons.  Just the way of life.  I’m not upset by any of them, though I miss almost all of them.  It means, though, that as I was rounding into this November season, I was planning on celebrating by myself.  I play a writing game online that has a huge celebration for November, and I enjoy that, but the community I’ve had there is part of the drift, and… it’s fine.  Writers write, even when they write solo, and i can love November even so.

I went to a creator’s conference in October, which was lovely and fun, and where I sat down with creatives from a lot of other professions and had a really good time talking to them about how they do what they do, but the highlight of the event was meeting up with a lifelong friend who is a painter.  We goofed off like we used to when we were much younger, we enjoyed getting together – less common these days – and we went home after a weekend blitz, back to normal lives.

And then my writing game threw up a challenge I’ve never met before.  A really, REALLY big one.

And I thought…

Nah.

I can’t do that.  I’m busy, my last few months of writing have been really slow, there’s no reason to expect anything to change, and I’m tired.  I need to get myself together, but I’ll do it another time.  I’ll get myself into a better situation and then I’ll reorganize my writing life to work the way I want it to.

And I was immediately struck by how little I liked that answer.

So I picked up the challenge, did some math, and texted my friend and asked her to go with me.

So I’m doing NaNo differently this year.  She’s making art and I’m making words, and we’re chatting every day about the challenges of really big goals and doing things a different way and hwo much *fun* it is to just *go for it*.  As of this writing, I’m a tiny bit behind pace, a little under halfway through, and loving the knowledge that I can still *do this*.  I don’t know if I’m going to make it, but geez it’s going to be a different month than it would have been without a big push.

So give yourself a big push.

Be bold.

Have fun.

Then we come to the other half of what November means.

Because November is the high holiday of my writing calendar, I intentionally take a good look at the previous year and at the upcoming year and I make my plans.

in recent years, those plans have been pretty close to a much longer-term plan that I’ve been working through, and while the old plan ended this year, I have a new long-term plan written out where I can see it from my writing chair, and I’ll talk a bit about that, but I really want to focus on how that plan interacts with the way 2025 looks right now.

First of all, I’m behind.  For reasons that are not writery, I’m *way* behind.  Hours have been hard to find, and the hours I do find don’t result in the productivity I’m used to.  I’m not burning out (no worries, there), but I am distracted for very legitimate reasons.  Like the hours I sleep shifted by almost three hours this year.  And stuff.

So while I’d wanted to have four (FOUR) Carbon books out before the end of the year, right now I’m not sure I’m going to release any in 2024.  The first one is written (book 5) and I’m a good piece of the way into book 6, with plans to have book 7 done before the end of the year and maybe put a good scare on book 8.

Gigantic NaNo challenge for the win, y’all.

But I don’t see a way to *not* interrupt that creative flow and get a book ready for publishing this year, so they’re going to have to go out starting in January, which is *really* frustrating, because this is the longest I’ve gone without releasing a book in… I’d have to check, but it might be four or five years.  Could be more.  I’ve had a firm schedule, and I’ve stuck to it for a long time, and I liked the way that that worked.

But.

In the fight between what you want and reality, reality always wins.  So I’m betting on the winner, here, and not letting it bother me more than it must.

The books are fun, and while I knew it was going to take me a bit to get back into that mindset, after years of writing in Verida, it’s *there* and I’m having such a good time with the sense of play that these characters have.

Looking at 2025, I’m hoping to have almost all of the Carbon work *done* by sometime in January, at which point I’m going to take a couple of weeks and get myself back into the immediate plot details of Tell, because I have been promising these books for years, now, and it’s *time*.  Four more books for Tell were originally planned at the front half of 2025, but since my fall didn’t come together, I’m hoping that they are ready to go for a late summer release.  I’ll spend my summer writing four more books for Surviving Magic, and those will start going up – if everything improbably goes to plan – over the winter holidays.

My release schedule for 2026 is light, by comparison, (eight Veridan novellas) because I am planning on launching a brand new series of Urban Fantasy where, no kidding, I plan on having 12 books that release one a month, back to back.

And I am so psyched for you guys to meet the lead.  She’s amazing.

Keeping a focus on 2025 and looking back at 2024…  2024 has been my best year as a professional writer by a large margin.  I learned a lot of useful things and I’m applying them as consistently as I can across a lot of series.  I’m meeting new readers, and some really, spectacularly cool stuff has happened.  I find myself kind of hopelessly, recklessly optimistic for 2025, because that’s my nature.  I’m capable of adapting when things don’t work, but I have this vision of what’s possible, and it’s just gorgeous.  My intent for 2025 is to take the things that worked for 2024 and keep adapting, keep experimenting, keep expanding, but the real goal is to put more books into the hands of readers who are looking for *that book*.  Books in series that readers are constantly asking for, most notably.

I know that it’s kind of… one of those evil author things to do, to leave a world and go work in a new one, and I do a *lot* of that.  It isn’t an inability to focus.  I think I’ve demonstrated that.  It’s that there are other places I want to go, and I really hope you’re going to love them as much as I do.  When I first told readers (and writers) that I was starting a fantasy series, when I was setting out to write The Queen’s Chair, a lot of them told me ‘I didn’t know you wrote fantasy’.  Because I hadn’t written a single novel that was properly fantasy at that point.  But I’d always expected that fantasy would dominate my catalogue, because it’s where I came from as a person – as a reader, as a consumer of fiction, and even as a writer.

There are more pieces of what I want to *do* than exist in the series I’ve done.  And I want to go try my hand at those things.  I want to find the readers that that is *the* thing they’re looking for.

And I really am sorry that it means that your favorite characters are left at four or five or seven or eight books for the time being.  Hopefully if you’ve been hanging with me since before Verida, this is going to be your year, though.

I don’t forget.

I just write long series in big worlds, and sometimes it takes a five-year plan to get to everything I want to do.

(That’s a lie.  I still want to write a Sarah Todd sequel, and that isn’t even *on* the five-year plan.  New Sam and Sam is, though… out at the very end… we’ll all wish each other luck as I try to hold those in place over the next four years.)

Regardless of whether the timeline gets shifted around or pushed, 2024 has been wonderful and amazing, and I am so excited to get to revisit worlds I have dearly missed, going into 2025.

It’s not just the spirit of NaNo, but it certainly boosts everything.  I hope you run and play and are recklessly optimistic.  I certainly plan to be.

The stickers are beginning to appear, which means that it’s time to put the words out to back them up.

I avoid writing about politics, social perspectives, and other things that people find contentious and difficult because I think that my place as a writer is not to address them so much as to address things that live underneath it – human beings, why they do what they do, how they end up in the situations you find them in, and the various beliefs that I hold about such things.  It’s a dodge, but forgive me.  It’s intentional that I try to keep those things out of my blog, off of my Facebook, and away from my identity as a writer.  You get to believe what you believe, and if you like my stories, you still totally belong with me, no matter what those things are.

For real.

But the world is coming apart.  Don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but… yes, of course you have.  There is an ongoing belief that *this next thing* is going to be the one that tips us all into death and despair and permanent loss of things that we hold dear, and that if we don’t tug on our side of the rope hard enough, it isn’t a mudpit we’re all going to fall into.

And it makes everyone on the other side into an enemy.  It’s tragic and awful that it’s happening, but it’s strategic politics.  If you want the people who listen to you and to believe in you to tell everyone around them how *much* they believe in you, you make sure that your message, your positions, your *existence* is key to their ongoing happiness and survival.  It centers the whole world on them, and it doesn’t really care what it rips apart in the meantime.

And we kind of feel helpless about it, here in the ripped-up middle.  Relationships that used to be really important and contribute to our happiness and belonging in society are now nothing but conflict.  It isn’t *safe* to be around people you disagree with, because it’s inevitably going to be a fight where both sides accuse each other of terrible things and you leave not really liking each other anymore.  So you only hang out with people you agree with, your circle gets smaller, and while you might miss the people you’ve lost, it wasn’t a choice to walk away from them: it was simple and unavoidable self-preservation.

And the destruction rolls on.

Because now you don’t *know* anyone who disagrees with you, and clearly all of those people are dangerous and wrong, and – sadly – easier to overlook what *they* are afraid of losing because it simply doesn’t matter to you.  We breed our social empathy out of society, and become increasingly incapable of *anything* but fighting.

I see it.  I feel it.  And then it showed up in a story.

I did not do this on purpose.  I hadn’t even realized what it was until a pair of characters who had absolutely no existing relationship, no reason to dislike each other, and who would have naturally gotten on quite well found themselves in conversation about why their respective sides were on the verge of killing each other, and how helpless they were to do anything about it.

And I went: whoa.  Yeah.  I live there.

How do you solve it?

I had no idea.  Clearly.  I have no idea how to solve the massive social issues we’re dealing with globally, either.  I don’t even try, mostly.  I write books, I love my friends, I take care of my family, and I try to keep my perspectives from being conflict.  They remain my opinions, but they should be *ideas*, not *conflicts*.

Which isn’t solving anything, really.

But the story demanded it, and the characters were desperate, and they had to keep talking for any of us to figure it out.

But this is where it landed.

If you want to save the world, drink tea.

It doesn’t *have* to be tea.  (In Verida, it is.)  But the exercise of sitting down with people and doing something that is culturally familiar to all parties?  That’s *magic*.

Drink a beer.  Drink coffee.  Talk sports.  Do something that unites *your people* and lets them be in a space where they all belong there.  And then refuse to let the conflict destroy that space.

It’s not easy.  It’s a fight, and it means fighting for it.  But it is rewarding.  And it’s worth it.  Love people the way that you want your dearest friends to be loved, regardless of whether they deserve it, make a space where you can enjoy people’s company and form a social bond, a social fabric, with them, and when the politics show up and start trying to slice it all back away again: remember.

Drink tea.

You can’t fight your way to social stability.  You can’t fight your way to friendship and trust.

You defy fighting by prioritizing the things that make us *us*.

And I got to the end of the book and had an idea that this was kind of an important thing.

So I made stickers.

I have lots of stickers.  The modern world has offered me an opportunity to make as many stickers as my greedy little heart desires, and we just keep on designing them, because I love them.

But the Drink Tea stickers are special.  They *mean* something.  And I’ve asked my readers, the ones that find that idea resonant, to take some of those stickers and put them out into the world.  A quiet revolution and a rebellion against the political conflict that is genuinely (genuinely!) shaped to separate us as much as possible so that it’s easier to frame every political event as an existential one.

I’m not saying they *aren’t* existential.  You get to believe what you want about that.  I’ll even talk about it with you, as a not-a-writer, private person.  I have lots of thoughts.

But what I *am* saying is that I still want to drink tea with you.  I think that you are a person worth knowing, worth enjoying, worth being around, no matter what you think, and that making those relationships the more important thing is the best and only weapon we have against the things that are trying to destroy what matters.

Drink tea.

Okay, so this story kind of has two starting points.  Bear with me.

I just finished the launch of The Merchant’s Daughter.  It took a lot longer than I was planning because my summer got trashed by legit personal stuff, and I don’t regret putting my time and energy where it was, but where I’d planned on smashing through the final (for now) book of Verida and moving on to Carbon Chronicles books in time to have them ready to launch (with a Kickstarter) in September… that didn’t happen.  Not even a little bit.

It was also the longest book I’ve ever written.  Literally twice my average length (you’d better believe I have a spreadsheet tracking this) and about twenty-five percent longer than my record-holding novel (Craft, from the Sam and Sam series, for the record), it took another week and another week and another week to get it finished, and then I was launching *it* in September, the month that I also had a writers’ conference.  As a result, as I sit here in the first week of October, I am not squarely and smugly in the middle of my science fiction/space opera phase, but rather… really struggling to get myself in gear again and go write a different genre.

It’s not that I’m grieving over Verida.  I had a season where that was real, but it seems to have passed for now.  And, frankly, the launch exhausted me.  It was spectacular, and I have zero regrets, but it was a lot of executive energy that comes at a really high premium for me.  I can write five-thousand words in an afternoon for less personal cost than it does to write an e-mail or post a couple of sentences to Facebook; it’s just the way I am, and I’m not upset or bothered by it, but it does take some planning to make sure that the fiction doesn’t get back-seated to four posts to Facebook more often than it’s worth doing.

And the launch was worth doing.

It was *so* worth doing.

I just came out of it, and the writers’ conference – and a bunch of other July-August-September stuff – with a lot less energy, and while I’m working on Carbon, and loving the story, and enjoying the characters, who I have missed, it doesn’t feel like I’ve really made the transition.

I’m still in Verida.  I’m just writing science fiction from Verida.

Now.

The second starting point to my story.

I listen to music while I write.  I cannot listen to *new* music any more than I can have the television on, because I don’t know what’s going to come next and my brain just twists away to go listen and I can’t hear the characters in my head.  At all.  But when I *know* the music, the kind of music that the nerves deep down in my spinal cord react to before I’ve even figured out the song, I can have that on, and it just sort of forms a bubble around me, and all of the other noises and the sense of *space* around me is sealed away and I can write in a sensory isolation of a sort.  My favorite way is to put on a really heavy set of wireless headphones that block out all outside noise and close off all of the sound of open space around me and I’m really *just* in my head, and I can do that for hours at a stretch and not be tired.

I’ve had playlists for various books and series.  I’ve had artists who were my flavor-of-the-season to whom I wrote two, three, even six books before my tastes migrated and I started in on something else.  But before this year, I’d never said: this is the artist that goes with these books, and I will only listen to *this music* while I am writing.

But I did.

With Twenty-One Pilots, for the most recent four books of The Queen’s Chair.

I’d written whole novels to Scaled and Icy.  I’ve written characters and settings and moods inspired by various other things they’ve done.

But for these four novels, I was only going to listen to *this* music, from the outset.

So JJ made me a playlist.  Started with all of the albums, took off a couple songs that really make me sad or upset, then added in a bunch of stuff that’s… rather harder to get.  I think everything on this playlist is legal, but I’d have to go through the whole thing carefully to be sure.  It’s fully ten hours long – I just checked – and I would start it on my phone at song one and pick up where I left off, writing session after writing session, looping from the end to the beginning over and over again.  If my phone shut down or my app reset, I’d start from song one again and just… let it loop.

I would sit down with my computer, turn on my music, conjure Tyler Joseph’s voice in my head: C’mon.  Let’s go.  Let’s do this.

And I would be off.  It was a contract with myself.

And it worked.  I pushed and pulled myself through those books in the midst of some of the hardest life stuff I’ve done, and they’re *good*.

Now.  Join the two stories.

I’m lingering about, still in Verida mode.  I asked my reader group on Facebook what I ought to do to celebrate finishing a massive season of Verida, and I got a lot of great answers.  Create a grand Veridan feast and eat it.  Have a fancy-dress zoom party.  Take classes in piracy.

I bought a knife.  It’s spectacular, a dagger as long as my forearm and as wide as my wrist at the hilt, with a corded handle and Damascus steel.  It’s very on-brand for the series and I adore it.

I thought that maybe I’d try to get pictures on horseback at some point, but that wasn’t a this-season thing to try to go do, and maybe it’s passed, now, I don’t know.

But I’ve lingered on and lingered on and finally launched The Merchant’s Daughter on September 28th.  And I have tickets to see Twenty-One Pilots in Columbus, Ohio on October 4th.

Because it’s only common knowledge among a specific subset of TOP fans, Columbus is their hometown, and they kind of have a really passionate relationship with it.  It was going to be full to the brimming with fans wearing colors.  These are the people who know all the words, and I have worn red and yellow gaffer tape on my clothes to concerts there, myself.  It’s spectacularly invested, intensely enthusiastic, and one of the few places in my life where I go in expecting to be ‘one of’.  When I go to their concerts, I get to be a part of the ocean, but when I go to a show in Columbus, the ocean is electric.

And it was.

It was a great show.

A truly great show.

But something really special happened.

They put up a slide before the show started announcing that they were recording a live album that night.  They said that they had forty microphones placed throughout the audience and asked us to give it our all.

Needless to say, that happened.

But it’s more than that.

My voice is going to be on that album.

Tyler Joseph has been a part of my art for the better part of a decade.  Now, though, I am a (very, very) small part of his.

This.

This is how you end an era.

This is how *I* end an era.

Welcome to Verida.  The air is good, the eyes are up, there’s fresh bread on every street corner, and the things that happen here *matter*.

I’m not done, here.  But it’s time for a new chapter.  Even though I don’t do those.  The stories all come back together in the end, anyway.

Onward into Carbon.  Fiction I haven’t begun to imagine awaits.

You’re missing it! Right now!

It is September 23, 2024, and I am RIGHT NOW running a launch party for The Merchant’s Daughter on my Facebook group, where I am giving away swag packs of stickers and bookmarks, posting video clips from two interviews about Verida, pictures of Verida gear I personally possess, polls, games, and possibly other things.

Join now HERE.

If you’ve missed it (The Merchant’s Daughter launches Saturday, Sept 28), make sure you get signed up to join us for the next shenanigans. It is a good place.

On average, a novel takes me somewhere around 45 days to complete.

The Merchant’s Daughter took over 80.

I had a lot of other things going on that slowed me down from what I might have otherwise been able to accomplish, but the biggest factor at play here is that The Merchant’s Daughter is the longest book I’ve ever written.  By a good bit.  It’s an enormous book, and JJ is threatening to take the price up on the final paperback because he’s not sure that we would have a positive profit on it at the same price as the other books.  (Fun fact: Amazon can and will charge authors if their books do not cover the cost of production when they’re sold.)  We’ll see how it goes.

At any rate, the plan to have The Merchant’s Daughter out in July was pushed when I was still getting The Queen’s Gamble ready in June, but I’d hoped to have The Merchant’s Daughter ready by August so that I could release new Carbon content September-October-November-December.

No.

I’m magic, but I’m not that magic, and with The Merchant’s Daughter now planned for September (final date coming soon with preorder), Carbon is almost certainly going to spill into 2025, which may push some of my 2025 releases back into 2026.

When a book takes longer than I plan, for whatever reason, there are two choices for the remaining publication schedule: I can pull books off of it or I can push everything out.  Right now, my plan is to push everything out as I need to, to ensure that everything I’ve promised does indeed make it to publication, and on something resembling my original plan.  It’s not my favorite, having things come out later than I’d hoped, but I’d rather have everything come out a bit late than to have some of it on time and some of it get scrapped, because sometimes ‘scrapped for now’ turns into ‘scrapped indefinitely’ as I struggle to get it to fit back into a publishing schedule that is now looking five years ahead.

So.  For those of you looking forward to the next books of Tell, the Detective, they’re coming.  Probably not in January (I genuinely thought I could do it, but it was always a perfect-sailing plan, and this year has not been a perfect-sailing year), but I think by March or April is looking very likely.  And there will be four.  Unless there are five or three or very unexpected reasons, but mostly I’m pretty confident on four.

Beyond that, there’s Surviving Magic, the next (final?) four books, which are still planned for the back half of the year and if I’m very dedicated and next year goes just a bit better than this year, I might be able to accomplish without pushing them.  I think that September of next year is still a close guess.  I’m planning eight releases next year, plus the Carbon titles that leak out of 2024.

After that, things get a bit crazy and we’re far enough out that I try to leave myself space and permission to shift things around as the artistic decisions reveal their wisdom, but the next five years are truly nuts right now.  And I don’t really see a road where they *aren’t* nuts, because that’s just where I live.  The minute there’s a bit more space in my schedule, I add more content.  It’s a good thing.

I had a few weeks, as the end of The Merchant’s Daughter started to get closer, where I was feeling a lot of very real grief, because I’ve been writing in Verida for about three years solid, now, and the idea of not getting to live here in the future is… stark.  It is in very many ways the end of an era.  There are a lot of things that have come together, professionally, for me since I first published The Queen’s Chair, and I’m not the same writer or the same publisher that I was when I hit the end of that book.  My outlook for the future is vastly different, as are my plans and ambitions.  Not all of that is directly tied to Verida – there are other series that have ‘come of age’ at the same time, and which are contributing a lot to my future plans even now – but this is a place where I lived through a lot of that growth and change, and it feels like a writing home.  I’m heading off into the unknown from here – including a brand new series coming in 2026 – and I’m very excited about it, but there’s a sense of loss to it.

I’m gutted at leaving these characters behind, even just for the time being.

Then I wrote my schedule, and found that there was space in it to finally get the Cazian and Remming novellas put out, and that I’m likely going to return to Verida sometime in 2028 or maybe even late 2027, which is not that far away.

This is designed to be a good stop-over place for the series and the world, but there’s more to come, even just from the things that I know about, and as always I am eager to keep on in this world.  This is not the end and this is not goodbye.  This is just the moment for coming back to other worlds and other characters, because I’ve missed them, too.

Plus, a whole new beginning, one that I can’t wait for.

I’m excited.  There’s so much fun stuff coming.  I just… I’m late.  My apologies, but I hope in the end it’s worth it!

I want to do audio.

I talk to so many people who, when I tell them I’m a writer, their knee-jerk response is: I don’t have time to read, but I love listening to books in audio.  And I think that’s totally realistic and reasonable and a really good way to use time that might otherwise be wasted.  Fiction is good for the soul, and sitting down and reading a book is not always a realistic life event.

(Now, I cannot hear what people are saying to me unless I’m lip-reading, I’m so visually driven, something I figured out in my twenties, so while I really *appreciate* good audio performances, I have a hard time keeping up with the story.  It is not my medium.  This does not mean that I undervalue it as the best medium for other people.  Just want to make it clear from the front that I am not a large-scale consumer of audio, because it doesn’t suit the way my brain is wired.)

It isn’t just that it makes my work accessible to people who are genuinely interested and lack the opportunity to consume it.  It’s also the collaborative piece.

I am not a joiner.

I never have been.

I kind of do my own thing, and if there are people around who are doing the same thing, that’s really awesome, but I generally don’t alter my path very much to go find them.  It’s a balancing act, like everything in life, indulging that natural inclination to avoid anything that everyone else enjoys and breaking it to make sure that I have people in my life who I enjoy living my life with them.  I know better than to try to do true collaborative writing (as shiny as that always feels to me every time I think about it) because the idea of letting someone else control pieces of my stories is just… unthinkable, truly.  (I did do a shared-world series with Rob Peecher under my Jessie Noble pen name, true westerns, and that was AMAZING, but what made that work was that I was building my own characters and my own plots under a structure of setting and crossover characters that he had defined, going into it.  I wrote every bit of my stories, and he wrote every bit of his.  This worked.)  I have this fantasy of doing screen adaptations of… basically all of my work, and every time I really get realistic about it, I laugh, because that is so *opposite* of anything about how I like to work.  If I were to sell rights, I would have to sell them and walk away, I think, because I AM NOT A JOINER.

Audio has this secret, mystic loophole to it in that I’ve written the whole story.  It exists and it’s done and I’m happy.  And then this *other* creative professional comes and interprets the whole thing in an entirely new medium.  And getting to listen to that is like discovering an entirely new IDEA of my work.  I got to build that in collaboration with another professional who made something *more* out of it.

It’s incredible.

I want to talk to another creative professional about the decisions I made with language and character, the backstories that are woven into speech patterns and intonation that don’t quite make it onto the page, or that only live there in subtle subtext.  Do you know how many dialects there are running around in the Veridan series?  I do.  And a narrator *cares*.  It’s SO MUCH FUN.

And I want to make these.  For me.  For my audience.  Because it’s art and I love it.

But they’re very expensive.  Because there’s another human being out there who is going to have to put a lot of hours of their life into the creation of this product, and then some more, different human beings who are going to go do a bunch of technical work, supporting them and making them into the FINAL product.  The price that I’ve paid for audio is a little higher than average, but not much, and I think it was the right price for the specific situation and skillset I was employing.

Which means that it becomes a challenge to market it in such a way that it’s financially justifiable to create more.

Audio consumers have grown accustomed to their audio being cheaper than it was, fifteen years ago.

(Do I blame them?  No.  Genuinely.  They make their decisions and I make mine, and those don’t need to be seen as conflicting.  Amazon does not pay enough per sale to allow me to find an audience for it, there, so I don’t publish to Amazon at this time.  That end of the audio market is simply not my market.  We’re cool, guys.)

ENTER.  Kickstarter.

I had a vision that I would use a Kickstarter to fund the creation of one (or maybe both) of the remaining Carbon Chronicles titles, but as it turns out, the Kickstarter ecosystem isn’t a big fan of audio.

And here, we take a very big right turn.

Whiplash, I know.  Hold tight.

What I found, there, as I was doing my due diligence on how to run a Kickstarter and meet the community expectations was… a different world.

And it’s pretty cool, y’all.

Standard, basic offerings there for books include foil-embossed covers, reversible dust-jackets, sprayed images on the book edges, vellum inserts (I’m not even certain what this *is* yet), and custom interior art.  THEN they get crazy.  They start adding in things like white text on black pages (!), metal etched bookmarks, metal corners, LEATHER covers, all Kickstarter exclusive.  Stuff you can’t get anywhere else, ever again.  IT’S GORGEOUS.

And I haven’t even talked about the ‘name a character who’s going to die spectacularly’ or the ‘zoom call with author to talk about life the universe and everything’ offerings going on, here.  Seriously.

I thought that Kickstarter was about funding the upfront costs of creating independent products, and it still IS, but it’s so much more than that, in the book corner of this world.  It’s about making art out of the book itself, editions that are really special, just unto themselves.

And oh my gosh I want them.

I want all of them.

Later this year (I had started making real plans to do this yet this month, March 2024, and then realized that was shiny-object syndrome) I still plan on launching a Kickstarter with the hopes of funding out the rest of my Carbon Chronicles audio titles.  I want those to exist.  But I’m not going to be featuring my audio.  I’m going to be featuring exclusive hardbacks, Kickstarter exclusive bonus short stories, and we’ll kind of see where it goes from there.

I think I want to stay small, simple, and experimental with this first one, just test out whether I *like* doing things this way, but it’s a very exciting new aspect of interacting with readers.

So.  What I’m going to ask YOU to do is this: go check it out.  Understand that this is NOT an Amazon platform.  Everything is not seamlessly integrated into your phone, your computer, and your television to bring you every product you want with a zero-second delay and at the push of one button.  It’s not the cheapest price you can get anywhere on a commodity product that’s competing to sell a thousand units a day.  This is a chance to get something hand-designed by the creator at sometimes exorbitant cost that’s going to show up in three to six months, but that’s going to be one of a hundred of THAT THING that will ever exist.

It’s DIFFERENT.  But it’s beautiful and exciting, and I know you want a leather-bound, foil-embossed boxed-set edition of The Queen’s Chair.  (Boxed sets are currently not an option, but we’re waiting with baited breath for them to show up, and you *know* I’m jumping on that one as soon as it comes.)

Check it out, report back.

What do you think?

So the world of audio has had some rather large disturbances of late, like in the last month, and if you go back a bit further, you find even more.  A lot of the newest drama has been tied to companies attempting to legally procure AI rights to the content they host, because everyone wants to have clean content that they can use for their AI services in the future, but most creatives aren’t ready to part with these rights for nothing.

In the field of audiobooks, the authors who are attempting to get their work hosted, they don’t even *have* the rights to hand over to their distributors.  Those rights belong to the voice performer unless they specifically included AI rights in their contract, and most audio was produced in an era when AI wasn’t even on the radar.  A recent contract update with one of the major distributors of audio work may or may not have claimed a whole boatload of rights (there were mixed opinions of what the words in the contract actually meant, but the plain English read of it was pretty shocking), but it means that a lot of creatives are looking for paths to market that don’t involve corporations that are in the market for as many rights as they can lay hold of.

Enter direct sales.

The math of direct sales is rather inescapable, and authors have been drifting this way in small numbers for a long time.  Ebooks are one thing, but the power of the math behind audio is staggering.

When I distribute an audiobook through Apple, Amazon, Kobo, Chirp, or any other service (none of which are the distributor referenced above), I make between 25% and 40% of the list price of the book.  When you (lovely, lovely reader and consumer of science fiction and fantasy worlds that you are) buy from me on my own website, or a similar author-owned property, I make something approaching 95% of the list price.  So while a lot of the discoverability of books comes from these great retailers who stock *huge* numbers of titles (and yay for that!), when I pay to produce an audiobook using a voice talent who is putting in very significant hours to generate that work, the rate at which I make that money back is much, much higher on sales that I host myself.  Which means more audiobooks.

On my ads, on my website, on my Facebook, even in my daily life, I get requests all the time to provide books in audio.  I know that these are more convenient for a lot of people, and I completely understand the situation.  I don’t do well with audio because how my brain works – words just don’t go in as well when I’m listening compared to what I’m looking at – but I can completely understand how the inverse would be true for some people.  I also understand the premium of the *hours* spent on fiction, and if you have the opportunity to use other time – like driving or working out or housework – that improves or at least doesn’t diminish the effectiveness of that time to consume fiction, it gets a lot easer to make those commitments.

Heck, I’ve listened to Carbon Chronicles just because Wesley is a great performer and I find myself laughing at my own work.  Which normally I’m much too stodgy to do.

There are lots of great reasons to enjoy and appreciate audio, but it is *expensive*, and buying direct means that more money (a lot more money) goes to the creatives behind the enterprise and justifies a lot more of that content.

So.  I’ve already written here about the reasons behind my (current) decision not to be on Audible, but I’m going to have some work in front of me getting my audio content back onto some of the smaller distribution channels (including libraries… I’m sorry; these are just hard to get into) as I’m exiting my current central distributor.  We ought to be back up on the major outlets (Apple, Kobo, Google Play) pretty quickly, but the others might take some work.

In the meantime, for your consideration, I offer you my very own shop, shop.chloegarner.com, where you can download a free 1-hour sample of the beginning of Flight of the Kingfisher, and where Flight of the Kingfisher and Journey to Verona are both available for sale.

They are hosted by Bookfunnel, which means that you are not relying on my technical capability to get you your books and manage any issues you have with it.  Bookfunnel has their own app, their own support staff, and a great reputation in the author community for customer service to readers.  It means a new app, and I know that that’s not nothing, but I do think that this is one of the directions that indie publishing is going to go, in the future, as we look for paths to control both our own IP and our own profits.

I am hoping that it will be worth the investment to you, both because this series is great fun and Wesley’s performance is *fantastic*, but also because it makes all of the future audiobooks you’re interested in that much more seamless to procure.

Happy reading, happy listening, and as always THANK YOU for being here.  Readers like you absolutely mean the world to me.

“How do readers find you?”

It’s a question with two very different meanings, but writers talk about it a lot.  The first is about discovery.  How do they discover the first of your books, as a writer?  Is it through person-to-person conversation about the books that readers are enjoying?  Is it through a more central point of referrals, like bloggers or reviewers?  Is it through active advertising?  Which platforms?

It’s one of the most consistent conversations that writers have, but I’m concerned with the other context for the question, today.

The second meaning is about connection.  A reader has enjoyed a book, a series, an entire catalogue, and they want to connect with the author, either to be better aware of what’s going on and what’s coming up next, or because they just want to engage with an author as a human being.  How does a reader reach out to you, as an author, in order to gain information or relationship?

I have a lot of paths, in truth, and they address different desires, as well as different degrees of connection.

The cheapest, easiest way to find out when I have new material out for sale is to follow me on Amazon.  Amazon sends you an e-mail every time I have a new book out.  Cool.  It’s a button on the Amazon website, and it’s really easy to un-check if you change your mind.  Plus, you only get e-mail from Amazon about my new books.  Narrow, specific, news.

You can follow me on Bookbub and hear when I have a new release out *or* when I have a short-term sale going on that is associated with a Bookbub promotion.  Slightly more information, slightly more obscure.  You have to have an account on the site.

You can follow me on Goodreads.  I honestly don’t know what happens, when you do that, but I know you can.  I think you get feed notifications when I post a blog to my website.  I don’t even know if they tell you if I have a new book out.  I’m not sure this is a high-quality path to ‘finding’ me, but it’s there.

I have a contact-me link here on my website.  You can fill out a box and it will send me an e-mail, which I will read.  My respond rate is better than 90%.  (I went through a season where a few got past me, but I do try for 100%.)  That’s very direct, but I don’t tend to keep up an e-mail correspondence with readers like that.

Then we get to the big two.

You can sign up for my newsletter.  I’ll let you know when I have new books out, I’ll let you know when I have sales or price changes coming, and I’ll let you know when I’ve got special stuff going on, like giveaways, new series-branded merchandise, (someday) Kickstarters and the like.  Lots of information, but I’m not the type of author who is going to give you anecdotes out of my own life as part of my newsletter.  There are no cat pictures, no recipes.  Very, very little narrative at all.

You can sign up here: https://sendfox.com/lp/m2r2d1

What you’ll get is a series of e-mails describing the series I’ve got out (with some fun GIFs in them), and then my new updates as I send them out.

It’s good.

But when people ask ‘how do readers find you’, my *best* answer is not the newsletter (as much as that goes against writer conventional wisdom).

It’s my Facebook group.

If you want to be somewhere that I act like a human being, that’s it.  I have conversations.  Mostly about writing and books, but they’re actual human-sounding conversations, and I *love* them.  I go through seasons with more energy and seasons with less, but this is my place, and if that’s what you’re looking for, please *please* come hang out.  There are some seriously cool people there, and it’s fun and… alive.

So consider this your official invitation.

Come see me.

Here.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/435117423514398

Plus, (for those of you reading this in the very near future) I’m giving away Verida merch to celebrate the return to The Queen’s Chair series, and the only place to sign up is there on the group.  Drawing will be the week of the launch of book 5 of The Queen’s Chair (Feb 2024).

Cool.  See you there.