In December, John Joseph Adams invited me to send him a story for the 100th issue of Lightspeed in April. I remembered that it was John, then slush reader for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who would have been the first person in the world to read a Henghis Hapthorn story. He passed “Mastermindless” on to Gordon Van Gelder, who made it my first sale to F&SF.
So it seems appropriate to bring old Henghis back onto the stage. I’ve just sent John a 10,000-word novelette, “Hapthorn’s Last Case,” which picks up his story a couple of weeks after the end of the third Hapthorn novel Hespira. The long-dreaded change from science to magic now looms in the offing.
I hope John likes it.
As I was finishing the draft, it occurred to me that those 10,000 words could make the opening of a fourth Hapthorn novel. That’s one of the projects Patreon may make possible if I draw enough patrons.
I’ve arbitrarily set a total of $1,000 in monthly pledges as the level at which I could afford to stop writing so many short stories for mags and anthologies and go back to mostly writing novels. But I may lower that bar as time goes by. I’m still feeling my way into this new kind of relationship with my readers.
If you’d like to be my patron, here’s a link.