The Night Office Kickstarter is live

Wherein the author gets everyone caught up and teases some of the things that are coming.

I launched the Night Office Kickstarter late last week. The materials to shoot the video have been sitting on my desk for several weeks as I’ve been playing that game of “Well, I don’t have six hours to do this thing that will take an unknown length of time, so I’d best not start.” It’s a terrible game—or, at the very least—a game I play badly, and I finally shoved that thought aside and got down to business. Whereupon I realized that tentacle fingers are terrible for manipulating objects like cassette tapes and small buttons.

So I shot something else. You can see it on the Kickstarter video. Click through and watch it. It’s probably the dumbest thing I made last week, and it makes me laugh every time.

(Noting here that by “dumbest” I mean: a creative left-turn that forces me to engage fully with an idea that I might otherwise overlook. These are, quite often, the decisions that lead to a more memorable result.)

Elsewhere, I have realized that I’ve produced seven books already this year. There are still three to go, which makes this the most productive year I’ve had in, uh, ever? Ever. This was not the plan, but hey, when you’re in charge, plans can change.

The Sumner Story, by the way, was a side-project for the Sumner Historical Society. Amy Ryan was a daughter of one of the founding families of the town where the bookstore is located, and her book is an anecdotal history of the town through 1900 or so. We had sold down to the last copy of the previous edition of the book, and while in conversation with the Historical Society, we realized that we had, you know, a guy on staff who could recreate this thing and make a new edition. So, yeah, that was February.

March was Paul’s collection. He has a novel coming out this fall from Underland Press. I should go write the flap copy after I get done with this newsletter. Elad came to me via Underland Arcana, and doing his debut collection seemed like a natural fit. The World Outside came out last week, and we’re delighted at the reception it’s been getting out there in the world.

Death Aesthetic will be Josh Rountree’s third collection. His first was with Wheatland Press, back in the day, and I remember when Darin Bradley was working on that cover (Oh, we were so young!). His second came out from Fairwood Press, and it included a story that we had just bought for Arcana. When you’ve been swimming in the indie pond for a long time, you bump into the same fish quite often.

Anyway, Josh’s collection will be out this fall as well.

In addition, we’ll have a collection of marvelously experimental fiction from Rachel Rodman called Mutants & Hybrids. I’m very excited about this one. I can’t wait for us to make the noises together about some of these stories. You can, of course, find all of these books at the Underland store (now on Shopify!).

So, yeah, I guess that got built this year as well. There is now a Firebird Creative shop, where you can find all of my projects. One shop to rule them all, as it were.

And yes, the seventh book in that picture above is a production copy of DOOM, the special edition of The Doom That Came to the Coffee Shop, the first Night Office book. The aforementioned Kickstarter, which you should absolutely go and support, will be to produce fancy editions of The Doom That Came to the Coffee Shop and In the Mansion of Madness (“DOOM” and “MADNESS” respectively). These are pretty editions, because I’ve been wanting to get into producing higher quality books for awhile, and the means to do so without having to invest a bunch of money up-front has become a reality. These SEs will all feature minimalist yellow dust jackets, fancy casebound laminate art, tentacled end papers, and—knock on wood—more content within the books.

This the Stretch Goal part of the Kickstarter. Did I mention you should back the project? I’ll probably say it a few more times, because, yes, one must get over one’s natural reticence to shout these things from the rooftops.

Anyway, should we reach these modest stretch goals, DOOM will feature a new exit strategy, which will lead to about twenty more bad choices you can make in pursuit of getting out of the coffee shop. It will also feature more bureaucratic back story about the Night Office, including the introduction of the Formative Activity Completion Token (FACTs, which get noted in your LIES—your Life Integrity Experience Schematic—and are useful during your annual performance assessment as a Night Office field operative, of course).

The special edition version of MADNESS will offer some new paths for those who have the FACT from DOOM. These paths will help you make better decisions as you work your way through the haunted mansion, as well as provide more back story about your relationship with Archer and the Old Man.

Early next year, I’m planning on producing similiar special editions for Beyond the Walls of Sanity and The Cold Empty, both of which will have additional content that will, again, expand on the back story of the Night Office, and prepare you for . . .

Well, you’ll have to wait and see. But all of this is in service of a realization that I—the author—and you—the reader—experienced during The Cold Empty, wherein it may have been revealed that much of what you think you know about the Night Office might be a lie. And once I get all the lies straightened out, then we’ll embark on the next batch of books, which will be structured slightly differently and which are tentatively being grouped as THE QUEEN IN RED sequence. Stay tuned!