Hi! I'm Nicole and I've been writing and publishing genre-straddling speculative fiction since around 2007. Most recently my books have been the Norton Award finalist Archivist Wasp (Small Beer Press, 2015) and its sequel Latchkey (Mythic Delirium, 2018). My next novel, Firebreak, is due out from Saga in 2020.

Writing fiction is pretty much the best job ever, but as we all know, the income is anything but steady. When you're writing small-press books that mix up genres in a way that's super fun to write but super hard to market, that instability gets worse fast. Not only that, but I've had to stick to my guns on more than one occasion -- and consequently turn down offers -- when it was *strongly suggested* to me that I add in a romance to a YA novel, or a love triangle, or whatever. But I think it's extremely important to provide representation for those readers who don't prioritize those things.

Basically, I want to be able to keep writing exactly what I want to write for as long as I can get away with it, but I also have a kid and a cat and a mortgage and no health insurance, and, well, you can see where this is going.

Lots of people have contacted me to say they'd love to see more material set in the worlds of the Wasp books, and that's fine by me because I'd very much love to write it! I initially wrote Archivist Wasp as a standalone, but it took me no time at all to realize I had lots more stories I wanted to tell about those characters. I'm currently working on lots more Wasp-related stuff, but my publication history has been so unorthodox that I'm not sure whether any of it will ever see the light of day, or when, or how.

So! What I'd like to do in this campaign is share that stuff with you as I work on it. Patrons will get access to drafts of short stories and chapters as I have them, as well as behind-the-scenes posts about process and writing inspirations, Q&As, surprises, and whatever else comes to mind! Recipes? Essays? Cat pictures? Hilariously awful snippets of the short stories I attempted to publish (and somehow got personalized rejections from pro markets on) when I was twelve? WHO KNOWS. It's a mystery to us all. A lot of it will be drafts and bits of works-in-progress, but much of it may well end up being patrons-only, unpublished elsewhere. (For instance, I've been meaning to write up -- in their entirety -- all the post-apocalyptic myths that get referenced in Archivist Wasp and Latchkey, and patrons may end up being the only people to see them. Ever.)

Content won't only be Wasp-books-related, of course, but bits of whatever I'm working on currently. Right now that could be anything from middle-grade to YA to adult, fantasy or science fiction or horror, and very possibly a mix of all of the above. (But let's face it: it's going to be lots of Wasp/ghost/Foster stuff, at least for the foreseeable future. It's just where my brain is at. You want to know more about the war the Latchkey operatives fought in? Or maybe where Wasp's world's myths come from? How about more side stories about the ghost and Foster back when they were, y'know, still alive? YOU'VE COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE.)

I'll update with something or other at least once a month. I'm launching the campaign with a brand-new story (novelette? 8000ish-word thing) draft about the ghost and Foster and the other  operatives when they were about fifteen years old and not quite dead yet. (Mostly.) That way early subscribers can get some content immediately as a thank-you for signing up! Then I'll be back at the first of the month with something new.

I don't want to overstructure this or make content inaccessible/unaffordable behind some arbitrary series of paywalls, so I'm going to keep it real flexible with a pay-what-you-want single tier. Any success my books have had has been via word-of-mouth and people generally being awesome on a grassroots level, so the last thing I want to do is repay your amazingness by sticking a high price tag on the best content. EVERYONE will get access to everything I post as well as any surprises I come up with. Any support you can give is utterly and endlessly appreciated. <3