C.J. Bernstein's Blog

The Making of The Monarch Papers – A Short Break

We’re taking a short break to take care of some pressing business but will be back for the final four fragments very soon!

The Secret Society – On The Atlantic

Woolie came back! My family was up in the country for the week, which is where I was supposed to be, but I took the train back down. I didn’t want to be that far from the office. I’m getting a lot of side-eye from just about everybody in my life but… ghosts, mystery, magic. Concessions are gonna have to be made.

I was working this morning, and heard the familiar sound of the other AG offices… which now are just kind of relaxing, calming, like white noise… And then I heard a voice.

It was Woolie, and he was talking a mile a minute, pacing the room. More “solid” that he was the last time but flickering in and out. The dream I had must not have been a dream. I must’ve given him the phrase in my sleep-deprived delirium because he was back, and he was chatty. I started writing as fast as I could, but I had to fill in when I couldn’t catch up. I hope he doesn’t mind.

“I can remember now that I had suffered a great loss that I am still unable to recall, but was decided that I would not let it pull me down. This was in my first life. My life without magic. I had found myself suffocated by the city and all that was expected of me, so I joined a ship’s crew out of New York Harbor, ferrying goods back and forth from ports along both sides of the Atlantic. It was bliss. Freedom, some semblance of adventure. New vistas, new ideas.

We’d been out on a run for a week, returning from Nova Scotia, and we happened on a battered lifeboat with only a single soul on board. A man, older than my father, near dead from cold and thirst. We brought him onboard and I, as the most junior man of the crew, was tasked with keeping him alive until we made port in six days’ time.

I kept watch on him, and after a night of filling his belly with water and cured meat he was strong enough to sit up, strong enough to speak.

He’d booked passage on a screw steamer that was coming up from San Juan when they’d run into bad weather and took on water. He said things that didn’t make sense. He said his work was almost done and he had to keep on. He’d walked a long trail and was sure he had almost reached the end of his journey. There was another world beyond this, where truth had been hidden, and he had found a secret road to walk that would lead him to the truth and allow him to leave this all behind.

He was delirious so I put him to bed for the night. But I couldn’t sleep. Something about what he’d said. The hidden truth about the world. Leaving this all behind. It had plucked a string in me, the thrum resonating in my chest, warming me. I wanted to know what he’d meant, needed to know more about this path, this truth. He was a minister and I his wide-eyed believer. I checked on him early the next morning, but he had passed sometime in the night.

In his rucksack was a waterlogged journal. In it he had written the names and locations of hundreds of places from all around the world. A list made up of sculptures, ancient ruins, works of art… Most of them had been crossed out. However, he had connected the remaining names with a thick red line that ran through the journal. On the line he’d written the words, “The Path”.

It seemed like lunacy, but I recall a feeling like a fire running through me the moment I saw those two words. The Path. There was a knock on the cabin door and I answered it, assuming it was the captain come to check on the gentleman, but there was no one on the other side. I turned back to the journal on the table.

The image of a door on its last page, where the red line ended. I felt a kinship with the man’s madness. A connection. We both saw the lie of this world, but he had sought the truth at all costs. In the months after losing all I had, I’d considered taking my own life to end my torment. To free myself. But he had persevered. Worked out the way the truth had been locked away. And now I knew with a mad, unexplainable certainty that I’d found the key, and with it, a way to leave this world behind.”

He stopped talking. I turned around to ask him a question, and he was gone. I transcribed everything I scribbled and just now looked up at the dry erase board we have in the office. He was writing on it, the words disappearing just as he wrote them, but I got them down. There was another riddle hidden in his memory…

On wheels or wings

On wires or things

That grow but aren’t alive

That travel between north and south

Or twinkle in the sky

A link in the address

Where gold bubbles flow

A mill I can reach

And minerals low

A meeting of waters

A jolt in the air

Go have a wander

There’s memories there

The Secret Society – Cellar Door

Okay. It’s been nearly three weeks since I found the storefront. I called the number on the sign every day since then. No one ever called back. And every time I wore the pin it kept wanting to take me back to the store. I couldn’t take it anymore, so…

Last night I broke in.

I waited until about 3am then walked over. The front door was dead-bolted and I once locked myself in my own bathroom so there was no way I was getting it open by picking it. And I’m an otherwise upstanding magic-hunting burglar, not a vandal, so I didn’t want to smash the front window.

But there was a set of metal cellar doors in the sidewalk out front. The kind I’ve almost fallen into a thousand times here in the city. It was locked too, padlocked actually, from the inside. But it was also rusted all to hell. And I came prepared.

I want to go on the record and say this isn’t something I’d normally do. But the combo of the pin, the wondering what’s inside, and no one CALLING ME BACK FROM THAT NUMBER, well, the gears started turning.

So I brought a hammer and chisel back from the country. I mean, we’ve all done crazy things for magic, yeah? I mean, look who I’m talking to…

It took about an hour. When no one was passing by, I, as quietly as possible, hammered the hinge pins out of one side of the cellar door. Then all I had to do was pry open a hundred years or so of rust and climb down.

The basement was empty except for a family of about three-and-a-half million rats. I mean, I only saw two, but for all I know there could have been millions.

Upstairs was nothing but dust and empty boxes. Until I found the back office. It was empty too, except for a big, beautiful old desk that I definitely didn’t consider dragging out through the basement, but the pin was pulling me in there, and after digging through every nook and cranny, I found something.

Part of a shipping receipt. Nothing major, right? It just detailed some big, heavy crate sent to Marrakech with faded instructions stating (I think) “Return has been paid for, but only upon request.”

The recipient’s address was torn off.

But the deliverer’s address? It was the storefront. Or, as it used to be called, The Ackerly Green Book Shop. And the package was sent by our mysterious friend, “A.G.”

The minute I read it, my phone buzzed. I had to sit on the floor and take a second, because if it was another stupid email telling me some site was changing their Terms and Conditions I was going to put my fist through a wall.

But it was the app.

The notification read, “I’d found the key, and with it, a way to leave this world behind.”

I left through the basement and I’ve been in the office since, waiting for Woolie.

I’ll let you know if/when something happens.

Guys…

There actually was an Ackerly Green Book Shop. And our “A.G.” worked there.

Just like our AG office is kind of… blending with the old AG office, the Instagram account is blending with the Book Shop?

May Publisher’s Diary

(Below are a collected month’s worth of posts from CJ’s private Publisher’s Diary, which is available to read live as a reward tier on Ackerly Green’s Patreon.)

May 25th, 2018 – Memorial Day Weekend

I discuss TMP, BoB, and all the surprising things happening this summer!

May 9th, 2018 – Ackerly Green Changes

All the big changes happening at AGP in the next few months, including:

New Hire Catherine

New Merchandise

Secret Society

The Editorial Process

 

 

 

The Secret Society – Date Night

Hey Mounties.

So, I’ve been working hard to better navigate my life, to try and walk the line between the mundane and the magical. Between the company, the books, and my personal life which includes friends and my family. I’m trying to be an Ebenguard, basically.

Over the past year I’ve pretty much neglected everyone and everything that didn’t have something to do with Ackerly Green. I’m sure some of you can relate, especially during the unlocking of The Book of Briars. My husband, Matthew, had to finally sit me down this week and let me know I had to work on better balancing my two worlds. He missed me, the kids missed me…  Hell, the dogs barely recognize me these days. I heard him loud and clear.

So, to try and remedy that, we had a lovely date last night in a beautiful little cafe in Soho. No book talk. No magic talk. No mounty talk. Instead, I ate too much, drank too much, got caught up on what’s going on with him and everyone we know, talked summer plans, discussed the kids and school and TV. It was nice.

The weather was beautiful so afterward we decided to walk home.

And I would love to say that I even left the Herman pin at home. Would’ve definitely earned a few husband points. But as it turns out Herman had just happened to make his way into my jacket pocket. And I started feeling the same call, the same wandering pull that I felt when the pin led me back to the warehouse. I almost jumped out of my skin.

At first I didn’t tell Matt. I just kept meandering down side streets and alleyways, but he caught on pretty quickly. (He still doesn’t fully “get” the whole “Ackerly Green” “magiq is real” “running a mysterious publishing company” business, but he’s a good sport.) He reminded me it was late and the dogs needed walking, but he was a little drunk too so humored me when our walk took us across town…

To a little store front that had been abandoned and left with a rotting for-sale sign in its window for what looked like decades. It was dark inside, and empty.

I checked my phone, just to see if I’d gotten a notification for finding wherever this was… nothing. We walked around the block, but nothing happened. Eventually Matt started watching for cabs and I knew it was time to go. I took a picture of the real estate sign, figuring I could pretend to be interested and ask to see inside the store, though who knows if the number was still in service.

The cab ride was quiet. I’d kind of screwed up the whole “having balance” thing. Couldn’t do it for three hours.

The thing is… my life has been unbalanced since 1998. That’s the truth. To have nearly a decade of my life just taken away… I don’t know what’s happening with these pins, or Woolie, or the office, but it’s all about memory and if somehow, someway, this could give me back what I lost… that would be balance. That would maybe fix the thing that’s felt broken in me for twenty years.

I know it’s a long shot, but if this is all about reclaiming memory maybe I’ll find that missing part of me at the end of it all?

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking. As a matter of fact that’s what I was thinking when I pulled up the photo of the real estate sign on my phone. In the upper corner of the photo, through the front window’s glass, I saw a shadow being cast on the wall of the store. The shadow of something that wasn’t there.

The memory of a shadow…

The Making of The Monarch Papers – Episode Twelve

In this episode, CJ and Simon discussed Fragment 12: Aorthora, the last fragment of Phase Three. Simon recalled how this was a big fragment for the story, and he created an audio component to help enrich that. At one point, they wanted to do something with fake security footage, instead, but this proved to be too difficult.

At the end of the previous fragment, Aether’s body was disconnected from his mind, and he informed the Mountaineers that Kemetic Solutions had sent out a virus to try to destroy his mind, because they were worried about The Mountaineers trying to break into their offices. The Mountaineers had to find a way to reunite his mind with his body, or he would die. This was a big ticking clock for them, which created quite a bit of drama. Whistler wanted to tear apart KS, and Martin Rank explained that all The Mountaineers wanted to do was rescue Aether, and that they were mainly a humanitarian organization (he of course didn’t want to reveal the truth about magiq). Whistler thought she knew where Aether was, and then Teddy Fallon had her monitor the security system, letting her figure out the circumstances surrounding Portencia’s imprisonment. The Mountaineers were stressed out, because they didn’t know if they could trust Whistler, or get Aether back to his body in time. CJ explained that as a writer, he’s super-proud of this section, because readers cared so intensely for so many different characters, simultaneously. CJ and Simon then discussed how even if this drama was composed of tropes, that is nothing to be ashamed of, because that was the way to give readers what they wanted. Tropes are tropes for a reason!

CJ continued to say that a number of subtle lore dumps appeared in this fragment, which readers didn’t even notice (and CJ still isn’t going to say what they are), because of the sheer amount of stuff that was going on. Most distracting was the fact that the readers knew that previous generations of Mountaineers had never gotten further than this, before they were wiped by the storm.

Back to the story, Mountaineers became aware of the fact, via Whistler, that Portencia was being tortured by KS for 14 hours at a time, to try to open a door to a place where there is more magiq. Marty then took from this that the level of urgency had risen, and that it was time to reveal the truth about magiq to Whistler. A lot of Mountaineers were reticent to do this, but CJ had to force their narrative hand, because there was no other way to get Marty into KS without the story devolving into nonsense.

Augustus_Octavian then asked what would have happened if Mountaineers hadn’t wanted to break into KS. CJ answered that they didn’t, because it was so narratively necessary that no other solution would have worked. Despite this, the actions of The Mountaineers still significantly affected how it happened.

Whistler, with the vision implanted in her mind by Portencia, then realized there was a way to drop internal security inside KS for ten minutes, so Marty could sneak in with Aether’s mind on his phone, and reunite him with his body, before anyone could realize what had happened. To do that, the Mounties had to create a spell (for the first time), so that the security officers at KS wouldn’t see Marty&Co. on the screen. He was also otherwise magically shrouded from sight.

The Mountaineers still didn’t know who Climber was, and they were in for a big surprise, when they found out that it was AlisonB, the Mountaineer who had been so helpful in earlier phases, and who up until then, they had assumed was a real Mountaineer.

As a side note, back in Phase One, Reader pickpocketed someone’s phone, so they could communicate with us. In this fragment, Whistler says she was able to get a phone, but it was disconnected, and she switched to email. This was a subtle hint that the methodology of The Devoted was coming back.

Aether streamed the audio of the break-in from Marty’s phone, while the Mountaineers performed the two spells they had created. CJ and Simon reflected that the idea of a magiqal firewall, which surrounded Aether’s body, was great, and inspired by certain 80s movies.

During the mission, Marty&Co. Found out that the whole mission was a trap, and tons of lore and character reveals happened: Whistler turned out to be Sacha, the head of the Devoted, Marty was a human well, Kendrick never had the last fragment of Portencia’s mind (Fallon did), and all of this was to bring Martin to KS, because a human well is so valuable. Fallon also knows that Martin has a charm on him, which made it so Martin had to come to him. Fallon previously sacrificed his own son to the Wanderer Project. Martin then surprised Fallon with the reveal that Aether had never left his earpiece, and had dropped the KS firewall, uploading gigabytes to an outside server. CJ said that if he had known that Marty was going to be such a big character, doing things like this, he would have given him a better last name. However, he says he can’t feel too responsible for what happens to these characters who suddenly become so popular, because so much of their development comes from the readers.

Fallon then escaped, as the storm descended, and Portencia used her powers to open the door to the future. Portencia and Climber climbed through the portal, and the whole facility was destroyed. The Mountaineers then found out that KS has been trying to close doors, not open them, to bar the Council of the 18 Gates from helping them. While the Council was protecting them, it emerged that the Book of Briars had been totally decimated, because the Council was no longer protecting it. Lastly, Fallon revealed that Itsuki had been an informer.

After this, CJ and Simon talked about why they made the decision to kill Itsuki. Endri was too loved, Eaves was also needed, and Bash was also loved, though they didn’t interact much with The Mountaineers. In the end, Itsuki was chosen, for another reason. Originally, the Campfire Chronicles were going to be turned into a book, consisting of readers’ stories. But because people were so into the main story, and school was in session, the initiative never took off. So, the Mountaineers weren’t being punished…per se. All the same, it made Itsuki’s story more tragic and interesting. He knew he was dying of brain cancer, and wanted to collect the readers’ stories, to give to his daughter. Since he died, Campfire Chronicles has really taken off, so it completely worked!

At the end of this fragment, Deirdre dreamed that she was Anne of Brittany, and with the help of Sullivan’s journals, realized the importance of the pin and scarf left to her by her father, coming to know that they were the original artifacts of the Wool and Silver. This made every door in the brownstone start knocking.

Questions and Answers:

 

Viviane

Q: I have a third assessment question. What was the process like for creating that crazy global constellation puzzle? Did you create the constellation shapes around that assessment design, or did the constellations come first, and you found a way to fit them into city landmarks? How much was the Myth of Elainnor influenced by all of this?

A: The myth came first. The plot of Phase Four was peppered at the end of Phase Three, and that’s part of why it felt so cohesive. We always knew Phase Four would be about time. CJ was very proud of this. Simon handled most of the constellation stuff. The shapes were roughly designed ahead of time, and interesting cities were chosen. Then, interesting locations were found within each city, and drawn on a map, and sent to CJ, so the constellations could be created. They sought to make each location have timeless historical significance. This left open the potential to insert them into our lore. Each city was hinted at by the previous one (there was a street in Mexico City called Paris, for example), but readers never figured this out. With all of this, they were able to upload their results to Fletcher Dawson’s website, earning them the third assessment.

 

Robert

Q: I seem to remember we never got the last piece of Portencia’s drawing. Was that intentional? We were collecting them, and then Teddy revealed that he had the last piece of the drawing in his head. Then, KS was destroyed, and we never got to see the last piece fill in. Was there significance in that last piece?

A: No. The drawing contained a mantra given to her by her father to keep her powers in check. We knew that since the last piece was in Fallon’s head, she would never get that final piece. This gave her the impetus to unleash her full powers, since she no longer had the mantra.

 

Augustus_Octavian

Q: This fragment saw a big influx of new readers, from what seems to have been a successful run of ads. Did you have to do anything to handle the increased number of readers on the forum, in terms of things like numbers of posts, or in things like organization and spellcasting? It was a pretty big risk to leave us to our own devices. Do you believe that this worked well?

A: Absolutely. We ended up leaving you to your own devices more and more, because of how well it was going. CJ even stopped checking the all the time, so he could experience his own narrative as a reader. Having new people didn’t matter, that much, partially because only a few of them were able to catch up on the story quickly enough.

 

Links:

Fragment Twelve (wiki): http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Fragment_Twelve

Fragment Twelve (forum): http://forum.basecamp33.com/c/tmp-fragments/fragment-twelve

Phase Three: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Phase_Three

Aorthora: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Aorthora

Aether:http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Aether

Deidre: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Deirdre_Green

Kemetic Solutions: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Kemetic_Solutions

Teddy Fallon: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Theodore_Fallon

Whistler: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Whistler

Portencia: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Portencia

Climber: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Climber

The Making of The Monarch Papers – Episode Eleven

In this episode, CJ and Simon discuss Fragment 11: Durkonos. They discussed The Last Oracular Eye, Consolatory Teatime for Misplaced Memory, and The Low Report, and Deirdre among other things.

In this phase, the Mountaineers continued to face off against Teddy Fallon, the head of Kemetic Solutions, and assembled a drawing from a little girl named Portencia. At the end of Fragment 10, Aether escaped his body, and was now inside the internet, trying to communicate with The Mountaineers. Mountaineers also discovered the website of a real mental health institution, called Go-Getters, where they found Augernon.

CJ then stopped and told a strange side story, involving his assistant Devin and Go-Getters. When Devin caught up on the TMP story, and discovered that Go-Getters was involved, he was confused, and asked CJ if they had discussed it before. As it turned out, Devin’s Mom had worked at Go-Getters before he was born, and CJ had just happened to pick it out of thousands of similar institutions, just because he had previously said that Augernon was from Maryland.

In any case, Aether was trying to lead the Mountaineers there, and Martin Rank discovered that it was because of Augernon. At the same time, Aether unlocked a website called The Lost Aetheneum, which was connected to The Low. Readers received a username and password that gave them access to parts of the site. It was impossible to give them access to the whole site, because then virtually endless webpages would have to be written. They were then given a spell called Consolatory Teatime for Misplaced Memory, which they would have to use on Augernon. Marty went to meet Augernon and, using the spell, got lots of new information. Readers learned that The Silver had been wiping out The Mountaineers and Monarch’s Mountain every time the Book of Briars attempted to return to the world. The Mountaineers have been trapped in this cycle for many years.

This fragment brought over 1500 posts on the forum, and so it was important to be more careful than ever with the establishment of the lore. The Low Report podcast was released in the midst of this, as a means of giving the last clue to readers. CJ and Simon created a number of different characters, with different accents, for the podcast. CJ noted that it was a low-stakes way of enriching the world. As Simon said, the description of a world should start with the writer and end with the reader. It’s a two-way relationship, and this was another step in that. The listener had to build the visual side of the podcast in their own minds. Simon talked about how sound is a fantastic medium for this. CJ talked about how he had a record of the sounds of Disney’s Haunted Mansion when he was a kid, and how this created a similar effect.

In this fragment, the readers learned more about the internal workings of Kemetic Solutions, both from Fallon’s journals, and from Whistler (Sacha). Whistler would always come across as a puppet of Fallon’s, brining sympathy. Also, logistically, the readers had to be given an inside source, so they would have all the relevant blueprints, etc. necessary to carry out a heist, if they decided to (which they did, thankfully).

Readers also learned about Sweeper and Wanderer. Wanderer was Fallon’s son, who had the power to trade items with other time periods. This was necessary to set up the fact that Deirdre’s father had been sent to the 1800s, and was still alive. Kendrick was also introduced. Kendrick was an employee of Kemetic Solutions, who was in the room when experiments were carried out in ‘the chair.’ If Teddy Fallon had killed Aether’s body, which was one possible scenario, Aether would have inhabited Kendrick’s body. It was important, in the end, to give readers the victory of saving Aether, since they were about to lose the Book of Briars.

This was also the fragment in which the Council of the 18 Gates was revealed to readers for the first time. They discovered the Last Oracular Eye, in closed form. When the sun set over Central Park, the eye would open, and offer you a choice of two of the following choices: hope, illumination, and despair. Then, it would tell you your future in terms of those two choices. Aether brought it to the Mountaineers, and readers chose hope and illumination. CJ found a video of a fiery eye on a loop, which was used for this. CJ also set up a chat channel with the eye, and for some reason, it didn’t load properly, so that the readers couldn’t message it. Instead, CJ had to communicate with them directly. The eye revealed for the first time that magiq was fading from the world. It also revealed the nature of The Council’s protection. They also learned that no group of Mountaineers had ever been closer than this group. They learned that the storm was coming, and that it had come for the previous group of Mountaineers at the end of Fragment 12.

Lastly, Deirdre travelled to Israel and Montreal, met Colby, learned the truth about her father and mother, and received one final test from her father. Also, the doors came knocking for her, setting up the imminent appearance of Neithernor.

Questions and Answers:

 

Robert

Q: How concerned were you with the chance that we might actually contact the real Teddy Fallon, or get ourselves committed to Go-Getters?

A: Very worried! Someone actually called Teddy Fallon and Go-Getters. This was because new people wanted to find a way to make their mark. This is when CJ created The Cabinet and started contacting readers when he wanted to stop them from doing something.

 

Vivanne

Q: Were you hoping for a different response to Teddy Fallon and Kemetic Solutions? I ask because it seems that some of Teddy’s logs were meant to garner sympathy for him.

A: Originally, The Devoted was meant to be just another secret organization. However, because they kept hurrying The Mountaineers, and came off as cold and clinical, the Mountaineers considered them an enemy. The same thing happened with Teddy. Teddy was a very conflicted character. However, all interesting villains have a degree of humanity. There was even a topic on the forum where people debated whether or not he was a good person, which was really exciting.

 

So, at the end of the fragment, they found Durkonos, and Aether released the Low Report through Youtube, tagging the megahertz and gigahertz onto a page that lead to an email from one of Martin’s old friends. This lead Martin to explain how he has let down many people in his life, included Brandon Lachmann. This was around the time it was decided that Martin would narrate the novelized TMP.

 

Links:

Fragment Ten (wiki): http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Fragment_Eleven

Fragment Ten (forum): http://forum.basecamp33.com/c/tmp-fragments/fragment-eleven

Phase Three: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Phase_Three

Durkonos: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Durkonos

Aether:http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Aether

Consolatory Teatime for Misplaced Memory: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Consolatory_Teatime_for_Misplaced_Memory

Deidre: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Deirdre_Green

Kemetic Solutions: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Kemetic_Solutions

Teddy Fallon: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Theodore_Fallon

The Low: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/The_Low

Whistler: http://magiq.wikia.com/wiki/Whistler

We’ve Done Something

I got an alert in the middle of the night from the camera I set up in the office that motion or sound had triggered it. I’m not sure what we did, but we did something.

 

Ackerly Green Changes

Sorry for the lack of updates recently.

First, I haven’t seen or heard from Woolie since the last time I posted about him. It’s been pretty quiet here overall. There’s the normal ghostly office sounds every now and then but not as frequently. Honestly, I’m not sure if they’re fading or I’ve just gotten used to them.

I want something to happen. Anything. But if it did, I don’t know when I’d find the time to investigate it. As some of you may know, Devin is leaving for Japan for a year (a long story, not involving mysterious books) and we’ve been on the hunt to find a new assistant to help me with everything AGP. We interviewed a dozen or so people, all qualified in different ways, charming, smart, and experienced… but we chose a bright young Flinterforge named Catherine. It REALLY helped that she led with the fact that she was already aware of The Mountaineers, the Lost Collection, and that she believed it all. This was huge. Some people we interviewed thought this was all some elaborate marketing ploy and treated it all with a “knowing” wink. I wanted to take them into the office so they could be haunted into believing but Devin thought we should probably refrain. (The interview process was a bit of a grind for this introverted Ebbie and I was losing my mind by the end.)

We’re one clue away from solving the riddle Woolie found inside his memory and I’m as lost as you all are. Not sure where to go from here. I really wanted this to be a thing. The thing. I’m realizing how badly I want back in to the world of magic, and why shouldn’t I, but it’s not your responsibility to help me deal with my own issues. And I have a few.

Anyway. The brush in “A brush with the law” does seem relevant. I think figuring out what brush means in this context could help us finally crack this. And by us I mean you.

Martin and I are batting the last drafts of The Monarch Papers back and forth, sourcing a new cover for Forest of Darkening Glass, and sitting around twiddling our over-twiddled thumbs waiting to hear word from The Book of Briars.

That book we’re releasing in four months.

I do like publishing, don’t get me wrong. And I have a sense of responsibility to this company, to everything Deirdre entrusted in me. But sometimes I just want to run around and search for magic.

And nap.

April Publisher’s Diary

(Below are a collected month’s worth of posts from CJ’s private Publisher’s Diary, which is available to read live as a reward tier on Ackerly Green’s Patreon.)

April 4th, 2018: BIG BIG NEWS

Just…yeah. Big news.

April 17th, 2018: Lots of New Stuff!

New Books!

New Assistants!

New Merch!

April 25th, 2018: Interview Day!

Interview Day and The Search for a The New Devin