Yes, I have unfortunately sent out more of these than proper issues, but this will hopefully clarify why the pipe has been a bit clogged. Firstly I was rediagnosed as Schizotypical bipolar type, and this reassessment came from an extended manic episode that has been driving me a little crazy. I’ve been trying to get help with it, but the mental health industry and insurance are both a headache to navigate right now, and sluggish to boot.

Besides that, I have —with the gift of hindsight— realized I have been wasting time. I have been trying to find homes for the fiction at publishers other than myself. A problem with that is many of the places I’ve looked at have very low ceilings on short fiction length (I’m talking sub five thousand words), and it’s difficult to get anyone to sign onto a longer commitment, be it a longer standalone piece or a serialization of a longer story across multiple installments, until you have a nice little CV built up. I have spent an unfortunate amount of time trying to hack away at stories that are longer but already a bit lean in terms of “excess” story detail, or quibbling over what bits of descriptive text to jettison to get under rigid limits. I like feedback that reduces bloat, but some stories simply need time to breathe. If I had to guess at a cause for these low ceilings, I think the popularity of the zine format with indie publishers has also exposed some shortcomings. If you want x amount of stories, and more, in a slim package, every submission is competing for rather small amounts of page space. Some places have more generous website only submissions that give writers more room to breathe, but in reality the editorial duty of the physical material demands enough attention that the ceiling is not necessarily much higher, unless you have something that will hook someone at a publisher personally. It’s not that anyone is doing anything wrong, exactly, but the material I have is not fit for this moment in publishing. I have gotten positive feedback on submissions, but it’s never quite the right fit for a publication or ends up being too long even after taking suggestions. I’ve also been looking almost exclusively at publishers who put out some amount of non-paywalled or very cheap to access content. As someone without much money, I’d like to make things I could afford to read.

That said, I did decide to put together a Ko-fi before I hit some quota of productivity. I’ll put the link at the end. I think the possibility of getting the occasional tip will be a better motivation than trying to reach some metric of worthiness first.

What this realization means for subscribers is that I’m making fiction for the newsletter first rather than perpetually tweaking it to fit different demands and standards, then waiting potentially months to see if it gets accepted in the first place, and finally having to sit on it longer still, waiting for it to be published by other outlets first if it is accepted. This will hopefully unclog things. I sent out the taster for Meta-morphoses a good while back. That particular story is made to be released in large portions at a time, and was a showcase for more bespoke stylistic choices. In your inboxes soon will be the first part of a more easy to read serial that I was going to release on the Thanksgiving weekend, but decided it might have been a bit of a bummer, and am now de-truncating it after taking an axe to it to see if I could attract a publisher anyway, which means another pass from my test readers. There should be a more timely installment during this holiday season also. The non-fiction is in a different place where I am aware those issues could use healthy pruning, so they’re undergoing the opposite process before being sent out. I’m also trying to do better at sourcing more concretely available information, which is a time sink, but a good one. The new fiction will have some similarities to Revolting Youth, but I want to be clear, it’s not a rewrite.

The intention for Meta-morphoses is that the stories are iterations on each other. Revolting Youth and Madman Butterfly are both dealing, in part, with the vampiric relationship of older generations being obsessed with appearing youthful while fearing and resenting the actually young, but with different styles and purposes. While Revolting Youth is ultimately about discretion, Madman Butterfly is about what happens when force is seemingly the only option left. As such, both start during the youth of main characters who have already been dealt bad hands and been through tribulations. Other iterations will have more variable starts and their own themes, but they will all share DNA. That is intentional, and there is fiction in the works that is more independent.

The result of all this is that this coming year should see more regular releases because when something is finished, it will be finished. I won’t be waiting on anyone else besides the aforementioned test readers and what outside editors I can get to look at it as peers rather than product. I don’t have too definite a calendar because of life circumstances, but I’m aiming for, you know, more frequency than quarterly.

All the best,

Cass Andra

P.S. The Ko-fi is a tip jar. It’s not a subscription and won’t have anything exclusive at this time.