Thank You Patrons (Patreon)

Today is #ThankyouPatronsDay. We are meant to post special content and thank our patrons for supporting us.

Special content? Check. Stay tuned for the end of this post.

Thanking you?

My god, how?

There isn't enough pumpkin pie in the world to thank you all for what you've done for me and my family. Being here month after month, patient when I faltered, excited when I didn't, supporting us, making life possible during one of the most difficult few years of my time here on Planet Earth. Without you, I don't know what we'd do. Without you, I couldn't have justified having a child. Without you, I couldn't have kept my house and stayed on the island after my divorce, or fixed my roof when a storm smashed it, or taken maternity leave, or, very likely, been able to keep writing full time, and keep writing the things I want to write, after I no longer had health insurance through a partner's nice corporate job. 

The version of It's a Wonderful Life where we see what my world looks like without my patrons is not wonderful at all.

Fuck Clarence. You guys are my angels. My family. 

This is such a difficult world and I am so aware of how precious your support is. A writer's life between book launches is weird and uncertain and stressful and lonely. We work heaps of hours we don't get paid for, we never know when someone will finally cough up what they owe us, and the food on our table depends on somehow staying nimble and whimsical and imaginative through all of it. And that's what you've given me, the ability to not crumple into anxiety every month because I don't know how to make the next month work. You make it possible to think of magic, because the mundane is a little easier to bear.

You don't have to support art, you don't have to do anything. In fact, it's so much easier not to do things it's kind of crazy that stuff does get done. But you do it because you believe in magic and art, because you're amazing and special and want to make a difference--and you have made every difference in my little universe. You keep my lights on, literally and figuratively. I owe you all so much, and I'll never be able to repay it, not with a million books. But I will try, because you guys have kept me out of deep water, so I gotta make us a badass boat.

So thank you, patrons, for my life, and the food in my belly and the roof over my head and my son and my partner, for the books I can write because you stick by me, for Lumen and Lord Byron who VERY ESPECIALLY love the gooshyfood and kibble you provide, for the utter blessing that you have given me. I couldn't have gotten through the last few years without you, that's the real truth. I love you all. You're the best of all possible people.

Now for the special content.

I kept trying to think of what I could do for you that would be special. Nothing really seemed right. I can't draw too well and I'm doing the Livestream tonight anyway so that's not a treat, I look a mess these days and while I can sing, it's mainly endless repetitions of Baa Baa Black Sheep at the moment (leave it to mine to pick the most goth of baby songs, also, why are there not more verses? Maybe I should make more verses.)

Then I thought about family, and friends, and circles of trust. And I realized that there should be no secrets among family. 

And I've been keeping a secret. 

See that book cover up there? With the weirdly small cat head? That mashup of Kittens and Kafka that came out at the height of the literary Pride & Prejudice and Zombies craze? That book co-written by Coleridge Cook?

Yeah. I wrote that. 

At the time I was concerned about my literary cred and didn't want my name on it. It also came out about a week before Fairyland, so I didn't want it to interfere with my FANCY LADY IMAGE. Plus they'd never hired a woman before and they made me write about kittens when I'd rather have done zombies so I didn't want to give them the satisfaction of getting credit for my gender. They were super unhappy with my masculine name choice. 

I'm proud of entire pages of it at a time. 

The thing is it was a harder freaking job than a lot of the other ones since, as you may know, The Metamorphosis is not a novel. It's a novella, about 25,000 words, and they wanted 70,000 words in this book. Which means there's more of me than Franz in that thing. I ended up interposing a lot of his other short fiction into the extended middle, which involves all the cats of Prague having once been dissatisfied insurance salesmen and bankers and other white collar what have yous, prowling around in their own private rituals toward the downfall of man, and that is easily my favorite part of the whole business. It was work for hire, at the time it was more than I'd been paid for most of my work, almost three times as much as I got for Deathless, and the secret truth is I fucking hate Kafka, so I was happy to mess with him in a way by which I think he'd be particularly mortified.

It is what it is. Does what it says on the tin.

But now you know. And obviously I care much less these days about my FANCY FEAST OR FEAST OF FANCY branding as I'm comfortable having proven my eleganza. But I've kept it secret for 8 years now, and I entrust this knowledge to you, my patrons, from whom I hold nothing back.