March 2023 - CHRONICLES OF THE LAZARENE
INTRODUCING: CHRONICLES OF THE LAZARENE
Look. I know I do a lot of stuff. Whether it's Star Wars or some random creator-owned comic or some weird consulting gig, I feel like I'm always unveiling some new thing. It has to be exhausting, and I appreciate you very much for sticking around. That said, today's !!!awesome new project!!! is particularly special to me, and I'm giving it my all. I hope you'll read on and be as excited as I am when you hear about what I've been working on... but all I can do is put it out there. Regardless, thank you for being here, thank you for reading, and away we go!
Unless this is your first encounter with these updates (if so... welcome!) you'll know I have a new novel coming out on June 6 called THE ENDLESS VESSEL. It's my fourth, a big one for me in part because it follows up my #1 New York Times bestseller LIGHT OF THE JEDI. I love it, and I think you will too.
I'm trying to do everything I can to bring people to the story - you can pre-order the novel and learn more about it and the pre-order bonus here. But the biggest thing I did... was write a second book. Yes, I'm a maniac who doesn't sleep etc. etc. This new, secret story is called CHRONICLES OF THE LAZARENE, and it looks like this:
This book is directly related to THE ENDLESS VESSEL - the two work as a set. Either works on its own, but when read together, they refer to each other and build out the story in a very cool way. Specifically, VESSEL has a very special ship as a plot element: the Lazarene, which travels all over the world having adventures for two and a half centuries. (That's not all the book's about - it's also got a British expat living in Hong Kong named Lily Barnes who goes on a search for a piece of impossible technology, an immortal love story, a pretty wild monster and the greatest treasure in humanity's history.)
CHRONICLES works as a "ship's log" for the Lazarene, or an explorer's journal a la Charles Darwin's Voyages of the H.M.S. Beagle. It's got incredible pen-and-ink illustrations in a period style by my good friends Giuseppe Camuncoli and Leonardo Marcello Grassi, a wonderful hand-drawn map by Marco Bernardini, and more. It feels like a period artifact - a magical story (literally and figuratively) that tackles interesting questions about identity and connection.
But how do you actually get it? Well, you can buy VESSEL in all formats when it lands on June 6, or pre-order it now. But for CHRONICLES, I'm trying another path, going direct-to-readers (you!) in an effort to build interest for VESSEL. Next Tuesday, March 21, at 11 AM EST, I'm launching a Kickstarter for the book!
The Kickstarter is built to make the experience of journeying to the world of the books as fun and engaging as possible. I've always loved when authors give me more. A surprise short story... an in-world artifact you can mail away for... anything that lets me live in the story for a little while longer. Being able to do that for THE ENDLESS VESSEL (which I believe is the best thing I've ever written) has been incredibly fun. I got to commission a cartographer, for god's sake! The dream of middle school fantasy dork Charles poring over the Belgariad has been achieved at last!
There are a lot of bells and whistles built into the Kickstarter, not least that THIRD book you can see in the image above. (What the hell?? Stay tuned!) Some very limited-in-number rewards, personalization, and much more. Audio, digital, and many of the reward tiers include both books - the idea is to give backers the chance to get the full story as a set. It's been a ton of work to build out, beyond just writing a whole secret second book, and I hope you'll consider diving in when it goes live. Like I said, this one's a biggie for me.
AND...
Actually, no, that's it for this one. I want to keep the focus on the new books this time around. You'll hear more next week, and then I'll send out another newsletter in early April just before Star Wars Celebration with all the exciting stuff happening there. (It's a lot!)
See you in the Kickstarter trenches, friends - it's going to be a wild 37 days.
--Charles