Katalepsis Book Two is going on hiatus.

Hello everyone.

I have some bad news for the present, and some (hopefully) good news for the future.

I’m going to put this in bullet points first, to rip the bandage off as quickly as possible; after that I’ll write a much longer version, for those of you who are interested in the details.

Okay, so. Here goes. The short version.

• Katalepsis Book Two is going on an indefinite hiatus. Book Two, Arc One, Chapter 19 is now the end of the first arc. For non-patrons, the remaining two chapters will go public this week and next week, like normal.

• I will be launching a new story in approximately 6-8 weeks time.

• Necroepilogos is unaffected by this; Necroepilogos will continue to publish on the same schedule as before.

Right, well. There it is. Now for the long version.

Katalepsis Book Two is going on indefinite hiatus.

First off, I want to apologise to all my patrons and readers. I have done everything within my power to avoid this, but I have failed. I am sorry.

I also want to apologise for doing this on a Friday, less than 12 hours before my usual publishing window. I had wanted to do this in some other way, with a clear week of time, with 6+ chapters of Katalepsis still pending, to soften the news. But that has become impossible.

I’m not making this decision lightly. It’s taken me months to reach this point. This is the most difficult creative decision I’ve ever made. It’s also very frightening as an independent writer, reliant on the support and generosity of my patrons. I know that most of my audience is here for Katalepsis, I know that’s the overwhelming majority of my readership, and the majority of my income. To those of you who have supported Katalepsis, whether you’ve been here since the start or you just joined up this week, thank you, from the bottom of my heart. To those who look forward to Katalepsis every Saturday, I’m deeply sorry, and I hope that the new stories and projects I have planned for the future can fill that space. This is not the end of Katalepsis — it is a long-term hiatus, shifting it to the back burner, in order to fix some currently intractable problems.

This post is incredibly difficult to write, as you can probably imagine. I am writing it under considerable emotional strain, so I ask your forgiveness if some of my thoughts are a little jumbled or if I miss a point. Feel free to ask any questions you like down in the comments, I’ll reply as best I can.

Secondly, I want to make it clear that behind the scenes I’m fine, this isn’t about me, my health, my family, or anything else. I am not slowing down or taking a break from the story for any external reasons. I’m not planning on slowing down as a writer at all. This is purely about Katalepsis Book Two itself.

So, why am I putting the story on hiatus?

The short answer? It’s not working.

On a fundamental storytelling level, I do not believe that Katalepsis Book Two is functioning in the way it should, and the reasons for this are so complex that I cannot untangle it at the same time as writing the story week-to-week. I have been grappling with this for the last 3-4 months. At first I told myself the problems were solvable in the exact same way as I dealt in with Book One — rework the outlines, listen to the characters, surf the narrative wave, and above all, never stop. But with Book Two these techniques have failed me, first slowly, then all at once. I’ll expand on that below, for anybody interested in the mechanical details.

Why has this happened so suddenly?

Well, a couple of reasons. Firstly I’ve tried my absolute best to keep the quality of the story as high as I can in each chapter, regardless of problems beneath the surface. I didn’t want my doubts and issues with the long-term plan to show through, so I didn’t mention them, and I made damn sure they didn’t affect the characters — that’s one of my first duties as a writer. The other reason is that I kept telling myself this wouldn’t happen. I spent months insisting to myself that all this could be fixed as I went, with enough hard work, just like I did whenever I had problems in Book One. When it became evident to me that I would need to take this step eventually, I became determined to at least finish the first arc — Maisie’s Story — and somehow end it in a satisfactory way, even if it wasn’t perfect. End the narrative movement, get her home, and get the cast ready for the next instalment.

But that, unfortunately, lies at the heart of the problem.

I want to make it clear that I am proud of what exists up to this point — the first arc of Book Two, the first part of Maisie’s Story. I’m not disowning it or abandoning it. It stands on its own, I’m happy with it, and I’m delighted by all the enjoyment that readers have gotten out of it so far.

The problem is what comes next. The next couple of chapters do technically exist, but they’re terrible, they’re some of the worst material I’ve ever written, and it would be a deep injustice to the characters and the story to publish further. I’ve been in denial all last week, and then this week, telling myself that I could somehow make this work for long enough to end the arc, that I could get to the finish line running on narrative fumes, for a proper resolution; as late as yesterday morning I was still determined to make it work.

But this isn’t something I can solve with a week off. I’m not burnt out by short term problems. Book Two — or at least, the rest of it from this point onward — needs to go back to the drawing board, hard, for months at least, probably longer.

So, what’s going under the surface? What is actually wrong here?

The problem with Book Two is not the characters or the setting or anything like that. Maisie is fantastic. I love her as much as I love Heather. I have enjoyed writing her voice and her POV so much more than I ever expected. The plot of the book so far is also not a problem, I’m really satisfied with the story I’ve been telling, I’m happy with the themes, especially some of the core stuff with Maisie herself.

The problem is … well, if I was capable of fully explaining it, I wouldn’t be in this mess, so you’ll have to bear with me. I do hope this makes sense.

The problem is structural.

Katalepsis Book One was a single long narrative, Heather’s story, with a specific narrative engine — saving Maisie. During the course of that story we ended up with a bunch of loose ends — future plot hooks. Behind the scenes I expanded on these plot hooks, tidied them away for later, and used them to form the basis for the plots of Book Two, with plans for multiple POVs, exploring separate plots of their own.

However, while actually writing Maisie’s story, the ‘first arc’, something didn’t feel right. It took me a long time to understand the problem. These individual longer arcs from different POVs, as I envisioned them, they do not function as serial fiction. They function as novels, each with their own narrative engine. And novels require an entirely different structural approach to what I’m doing here!

Some of you may have noticed this, at the structural level of the storytelling. This arc kept getting longer and longer, but without the narrative weight of say, Book One’s massive concluding arc. There was a long period of slow, chewy, bad pacing — leading to a worthy climax, sure! But still, I couldn’t figure out why everything was not fitting together in the way I wanted. I never experienced this with Book One, or with anything else I've written, and my inability to diagnose the problem was half the issue.

I believe the arc has reached a good stopping point with chapter 19 — a cliffhanger, certainly, but one that feels right internally, for Maisie’s development. That’s luck more than anything. The collapse of the next two chapters was not planned, I really was telling myself I could keep going, right until yesterday morning. But, if I step back and approach this as a serial, as it should be, then chapter 19 is a natural stopping point, an arc break, in the right place. For the sake of the characters and a potential future return to the story, stopping here with a clean break is a better option than pushing things onward and making a stop-start mess of it.

I think I mentioned back when I finished Book One that Book Two is an experiment, and it might not work. I don’t think it has worked. I think it’s time I accept that, learn from it, and move on.

This is not the end of Katalepsis. My intent is to put it onto the back burner and figure out what to do. If the story demands to be a series of short novels, rather than a serial, then that is what I’ll do. I could never abandon this setting or these characters. There are so many more stories to tell about them. (Tenny needs to go to university, after all!) Hence, hiatus, however long it takes, rather than cancellation.

That kind of structural planning work takes time, and I can’t do it while also writing the same story. I guess it’s like driving a car while also working on the engine. It would crash, and Katalepsis deserves better than that.

Katalepsis will return, in some form. For now, the girls are going to retreat into Number 12 Barnslow Drive, for a well deserved rest.

This is entirely my own fault. To be very self-critical for a moment, I probably should have done this as soon as I finished Book One. I’d spent so much time making so many promises about a second book, a follow up book, to so many readers, with such faith in my own skills, that I never imagined it could fail in this specific way. I had (and have!) reams of plans, character studies, whole novels worth of stuff outlined. But this particular fail-state never even entered my mind. I didn’t know it was possible. I don't think it is possible for anything other than an attempted sequel to a massive serial, so it's not exactly a common problem with a known solution.

I should have taken longer between Books One and Two, to understand what I was doing. My reach exceeded my grasp.

To be really sober about it, I should have just written another story! Other web serial authors do this all the time — finish a story and write a new one. It’s normal. I should have had the courage to do that right away.

Well, better late than never. That’s what I’m going to do now.

A small side-note — what will happen to the current Katalepsis patrons?

Patreon actually makes this quite easy. If you are currently subscribed to Katalepsis — or to both Katalepsis and Necroepilogos — then you will be automatically subscribed to the new story when it launches. The old Katalepsis-only tier will be retired, possibly to return in the future. There will be a new tier for the new story, but if you’re currently subscribed, you won’t have to change anything!

What about the remaining public chapters?

As I mentioned in the bullet points at the top, the remaining two public chapters will go up later today, then next week, like normal.

What about Necroepilogos?

Necroepilogos is fine! That must seem like a bit of an anticlimax after all the above, but I just want to reassure everybody.

Necroepilogos is in a fine state, there’s nothing wrong with it structurally, and I have no doubts about it. Necroepilogos has always been a sort of side-project; it occupies much less of my raw drafting and editing time. It’s reached about the halfway mark of my plans, I think, and I full intend on seeing it to the end. Necroepilogos will continue for the foreseeable future, with the exact same schedule as always!

What's the new story?

I’m not quite ready to unveil the new story yet. I wanted to have an official title, live website, proper blurb, and first chapter all finalised for when I was going to make this post, but the problems with Katalepsis caught up with me faster than I expected. Right now I have only the most teasing of teasers.

It is, very broadly, a magical girl story — but that doesn’t mean what you might think it means. Magical girls and those who want to slay them, eldritch horror and dystopian nightmares, cybernetics and body horror, this one is quite a heady cocktail of stuff, and I’m really looking forward to it.

I’ve had it in development since long before the end of Katalepsis Book One, since around the time I started Necroepilogos. It’s not one of the stories on my secret story list, it’s something different and new. I’ve already begun the process of intense planning, outlining, and pulling all the characters into shape, ready for the start. At the moment I’m planning for it to run on the same schedule that Katalepsis did. Over the coming weeks I’ll share more of it, as the various pieces fall into place. I don’t yet have a specific launch date, because I want to give the story all the time it needs to be perfectly ready, but I am tentatively aiming for November 1st at the latest. It would feel very personally fitting and appropriate to be posting on Halloween night.

Is this new story going to be exactly like Katalepsis? Well, no, of course not. But it will be following some of the same core thematic obsessions — bodily transformation, found family, and dangerous women, just to name a few. It will be closer in tone to Katalepsis than Necroepilogos, but I also very much hope that it will be its own thing.

Will it be full of lesbians? I considered not even including this sentence, it feels so redundant. Of course it will!

If you’re here for Katalepsis, I suspect (and hope!) that you will enjoy it.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading all this.

I gotta be honest, I’m really scared, doing this. This feels like the biggest creative and authorial risk I’ve ever taken, and I’m deeply uncomfortable with it, even though I know it’s the right thing to do. I know that must sound absurd — web serial authors do this all the time, right? All I’m doing is starting a new story, after a bit of a misstep experiment. What’s the big deal?

As a writer, before I started Katalepsis, I got very used to failure — incomplete projects, narratives I couldn’t make work, unfinished novels. Katalepsis (and then Necroepilogos) proved to me that I can do this, I’ve got what it takes, which amazed me, and still does. I can barely believe I’ve come this far.

But what I was trying to do with Katalepsis Book Two is a narrative feat beyond my current skills.

This feels worse than failure, it feels like I’m betraying my readers. But to push on through with the story when I know I’ll mishandle it would be a worse betrayal. I know that my credibility as a writer relies on my consistency, on following through with the narrative promises I make. And having to stop a story is the worst broken promise. I won a lot of trust with Katalepsis and I value that more than any material success; I can only promise that I will do my best not to squander it with my future projects.

I won’t begrudge anybody who wants to cancel their patreon pledge, whether you want to dip out for a month or so until the new story starts, or if you were only here for Katalepsis and Katalepsis alone. Regardless of the future, thank you all so much for your support; I can’t even put into words how it’s transformed what I can do with writing. None of this would exist without all of you. This is what I do, and I will keep doing it.

Whatever happens, I’ll be here, and I’ll be writing. And I hope you’ll stick around for what I’m gonna do next. I’ll seeya then.

Or actually I’ll see you before then, with a blurb, a teaser, and maybe an early chapter or two. I’ll keep doing my best!