Somehow my Patreon is ONE (1) supporter away from 100! Thank you so much to my supporters old and new! When I set this up back in…2017? 2018? with the aim of filling it up with a ton of extras for a couple of books that hardly anyone had heard of, I thought I might get five supporters, ten max? So this is amazing and helps me justify spending the time to write patreon-only exclusive tie-ins, which I’ve been doing on there for quite a while now. That’s where you’ll find the myths mentioned in the Archivist Wasp books written up in their entirety, as well as the draft-in-progress of the third Archivist Wasp book, an extremely long tie-in novella about 06 & 22 at age 12, deleted scenes from all my books, etc etc etc.

In case you didn’t know, the whole thing is no tiers, pay-what-you-want for access to everything, because it’s a big goal of mine to make as much of my stuff as accessible as possible.

my MG debut JILLIAN VS PARASITE PLANET is out today from Tachyon!! It’s a very science-forward survival story in spaaaace, which I have seen described in various places as The Martian for kids, which makes it sound very shiny.

If you like that cover, wait til you see the interior illustrations! Those and the cover are all by Scott Brown. But I mean seriously:

I wrote this one for my kid back when he was the same age as the protagonist, and filled it up with science and weirdness and creepiness and hopefully also some humor. It’s got a girl protagonist, though, because we need about a zillion more of those in SF and adventure stories for kids, and she’s got anxiety because I got really frustrated with how that tends to get depicted in fiction.

I’ve always wanted an excuse to invent a mind-control parasite from scratch, and my mom always told me I should really try my hand at writing a kids’ book, and those two things collided in my head for…whatever reason…and refused to be separated. (If you’re even remotely interested in the topic of real-world mind-control parasites, start here and then read The Wasp that Brainwashed the Caterpillar by Matt Simon, The Plight of the Living Dead also by Matt Simon, Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer, and This Is Your Brain on Parasites by Kathleen McAuliffe. For an all-ages intro, check out Animal Zombies! by Chana Stiefel.

One of my favorite parts of writing Jillian was the space probe/multitool/cartoon addict SABRINA (Semi-Autonomous Bio-Reconnoitering Intelligent Nanobot Array). SABRINA’s shapeshifting abilities were probably pretty solidly subconsciously inspired by Jake the dog from Adventure Time, but I couldn’t have written it without having been a longtime fan of Janelle Shane’s blog AI Weirdness or her book You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. Highly recommend both!

Here are some blurbs I just shamelessly lifted off of Tachyon’s site (sorry I know it looks squashed, click on it to embiggen):

And to those of you who’ve read my books Archivist Wasp, Latchkey, and Firebreak, and are wondering whether this one is also connected to the general overarching story that each of those is part of, the answer is: what do you think 😀

(you absolutely do not have to have read my other stuff for this, it’s arguably lots more of a standalone than Firebreak is, but. Just. There is continuity. And watching readers discover it has been an utter delight.)

Anyway, if any of this is of interest to you, please consider giving Jillian a read! I’ve never even attempted a kids’ book before so I’m really curious to know what you think of it. And as always, I realize books are expensive and everything sucks right now, but your local indie bookstore needs your support more than ever, so if you’re going to get one of my books I’d love you to go there for it–or get your library to pick it up for you!

So there’s been some interest in me writing up a post about the continuity of Archivist Wasp, Latchkey, Firebreak, Jillian vs. Parasite Planet, and more. This is that. SPOILERS FOR BASICALLY EVERYTHING I HAVE PUBLISHED SINCE 2015 ABOUND BELOW. I guess even telling you that the books are connected counts as spoilers, but Firebreak has been out for a couple of months now (somehow??) and enough reviewers have mentioned the interconnectedness of this book to the last two that it’s probably okay.

The formatting of some below screenshots and captions got messed up so I’m sorry if any of it is hard to read–it looked good in the draft I swear. I’ve gone back in and made the captions green to try and differentiate them from the massive wall of text. I’ll see if I can make any further fixes!

First off, to clear up any confusion, you absolutely positively do not need to have read the Wasp books in order to read Firebreak. Anything listed below is just extra layers for deeper meaning to the five of you who’ll actually read all the books and stories that feeds into this monstrosity. I wrote Firebreak as a standalone, and I sold it as a standalone. Specifically I sold it to a publisher that rejected Latchkey on the basis of it being a sequel and would never in a million years have published Firebreak if knowledge of those other books was necessary going into this one. One of the most pleasant surprises over the first two months of its launch is how many of the reviewers who have most vocally loved it also state outright in their review that they’d never read anything else of mine before. So it’s been really nice to see that Firebreak is enjoyable on its own merits. It was a Big Challenge to write a book that was simultaneously extremely deeply interconnected with my past books while also standing 100% on its own.

So why do it? Couple reasons.

I wrote Archivist Wasp as a standalone. No, really. I swear. It’s been hilariously suggested to me–multiple times–that writing Latchkey was “a money grab,” which is adorable. If I was going to write a “money grab,” a sequel to an obscure tiny weird book that hardly anyone had heard of would not be how I’d go about it. (Besides, I loathe when people accuse authors of “money grabs.” You do understand it’s their job, right? And alas we do not have UBI. If they do not “grab” “money” they cannot keep writing books. Is this not clear? It’s hard enough to place value on our own work sometimes without dealing with this. But I digress.)

The real reason why it did not stay a standalone is simple. As soon as I’d turned Wasp in to the publisher, like the instant it was officially out of my hands, I started getting just straight-up ambushed by scenes and bits of dialogue from what I thought was a missed opportunity to add to that book. Soon I realized that what I was looking at was a different book. Same characters. Different book. Okay then. So Latchkey was drafted before AW was released.

Quick aside about a question I get asked a lot, namely: why do those two books have different publishers? Basically what happened was: because of the above, only AW was under contract with its publisher. I did work with them for a while on a potential sequel, but we never managed to get the manuscript to a place where we both wanted it, and there were things I really didn’t want to compromise on, so we amicably parted ways on it and I tore the whole thing apart in order to write it exactly as I wanted, no compromises. I had a hell of a time trying to find a publisher to pick up book 2 of what I by that point realized was a trilogy (yes, I hope to have book 3 answer some of the questions books 1 and 2 raised! I promise! More on that below) but eventually it got picked up by Mike and Anita Allen at Mythic Delirium, who actually published the very first Wasp-adjacent short story long loooong ago (more on that below too).

As for book 3, tentatively titled Catchkeep, that’s a work-in-progress on my Patreon. Will it be traditionally publishable ever? I mean, probably not. But since when has that stopped me? Maybe if I can publish enough books that I get a sizeable enough readership to make that look attractive to a publisher. It’s a long game, I know. But interconnecting four books (and counting) and a handful of short stories and novellas is a long game too. I’m used to it. My dream is to have the trilogy bound as a single volume. I can already see the cover art. Trust me, it’s cool.

Besides, I am a huge dork for Interconnected Continuity Shit, and I love puzzles. And these characters would not leave me alone. Like, at all. Archivist Wasp has three distinct settings, all of which are much bigger in my head than on the page–I tend to strongly prefer understated worldbuilding, both as a writer and a reader, so I tend to curate what details make it into the book in a way that (hopefully) feels organic to the story and not infodumpy, because I aim for immersive worldbuilding and not jarring people out of the text by interrupting a scene for paragraphs or pages of exposition, which is tricky because as you can probably tell by now from this post my brain operates on a steady diet of tangents and asides–so there was a lot more there in all three of those settings that I could, and realized I really wanted to, explore.

So that explains why Latchkey exists. Firebreak is a bit different. Basically one of the absolutely valid and totally non-petty reasons (cough) why Firebreak even exists is that when Archivist Wasp came out, someone stated in their review that it was obvious that I’d put no thought whatsoever into this war that this ghost was referencing. And I was like, reeeally. Is it. Because (in my books and in others) what a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that what may look like “lazy worldbuilding” is actually the author exhibiting massive restraint and laying out an extremely careful breadcrumb trail of worldbuilding tidbits rather than bludgeoning you with a bunch of tell-don’t-show. Which, if your preference is exposition, that’s obviously fine! But you should know what you’re looking at when you encounter the alternative. There’s nothing lazy about it.

So I got annoyed. And when I get annoyed I tend to write books. Honestly it was a great excuse to do what I wanted to do anyway, which was to write a whole (probably-unpublishable) technically-prequel-but-genuinely-standalone book about the ghost and Foster and more of what they went through in the preapocalyptic world. It’s been a genuine and utter delight to see readers encounter Firebreak first and then go back to my earlier books and have this holy shit! moment when they realize that the books are connected. Or vice-versa. It’s very satifsying.

But while yes, spite can carry you pretty far, the real heart of Firebreak is that I wanted to tell more of the ghost’s story from back before he was, y’know, a ghost. The question I then faced was: okay, how exactly do I do that? As much as I wanted to write him as a POV character, it didn’t feel right. (For this book anyway. More on that below too!) So I kicked around some ideas as to who my POV character was actually going to be, and how I was going to tell the ghost’s story in this kind of oblique sidewise manner while not leaning too hard on readers’ previous knowledge of him as a character in other books.

Basically: way way back in the day, I watched Serenity before I’d even heard of Firefly, and I remember being so very confused, feeling like I was absolutely missing something, like: eek, clearly I am supposed to be caring about what happens to these characters a whole lot more than I do, what’s that about? So that’s what I was explicitly trying to avoid here. The Serenity-before-Firefly effect. I hope I was successful!

So eventually I came up with Mal, and her story, and how 22 fit into it. There were a lot of themes I wanted to squeeze in there, but I also wanted it to be the story of this nobody who never really had any interest in being a somebody but was shoved into that position by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her platonic infatuation with 22 is there for a few reasons.

One, I really wanted to write a platonic crush. It took me a really long time to realize that I’m aromantic asexual, which is funny given that, looking back, I’ve had plenty of crushes but zero of them were romantic/sexual. Just this sense of I’m really into this person but because society has provided no template for this level of interest in the absence of romantic or sexual intent, I am extremely confused and can talk to none of my friends about it because when I try they misinterpret it egregiously through no fault of their own due to the abovementioned lack of social template. Sometimes I convinced myself that it was romantic/sexual, just because I had this idea that that was what I was supposed to do. I don’t wish that on anyone. So I really wanted to capture my own particular aroace experience in a book. I can’t dropkick it back in time to hit 14-year-old-me upside the head with it, but I can maybe put it forward for anyone else who needs to see a book that centers those admittedly-hyperspecific-and-as-such-underrepresented kinds of feels.

Another is that if there’s a character in the Wasp books that has a fanbase, it’s the ghost. So this is a little surprise present to those who’ve enjoyed him.

The third is that he is a character who has lived in my head since I was about 12. I have no idea where he came from, but he doesn’t want to leave. I don’t even really feel like I can take credit for him at this point, he’s that ingrained. (Seriously. Praise makes me very uncomfortable but I unreservedly adore when readers love this one particular character. It hits my praise receptors at this weird remove that makes zero sense but here we are.) Anyway, he’s going nowhere. So continuing to write him stories was kind of inevitable.

As the book became angrier and more complex, my impostor syndrome started getting in my face, like no way was doing this story justice remotely within my ability. This was a process that took three solid years of me talking myself out of writing it and just generally getting in my own way until I just eventually went you know what, fuck it and drafted a 110,000 word book inside 5 weeks. The finished book has nothing from that draft removed (beyond the ending few paragraphs, which were Just Too Dark, Nicole), just stuff added in because my editor Navah Wolfe is amazing. I’d been fretting that the book was too long and any editor would make me chop 20,000 words, but quite to the contrary Navah let me off-leash to add that many. I got to extend out some of the Mal/22 scenes especially, which was the exact thing I wanted to do all along. Plus the ending is less Dark now. You have Navah to thank for that.

What was really hard to do in extending Archivist Wasp, a standalone book that drafted at 56,000 words, into this whole one-woman dollar-store MCU situation, is the fact that I wrote AW to be this surreal dreamlike Journey Into the Underworld, full stop. I didn’t foresee having to explain some of this stuff. I took one (1) paragraph of notes on AW before writing it. I took about twenty pages of notes on Latchkey just to get my shit together, some of which got transferred into my Firebreak notes file so I had at least some chance of keeping the continuity, y’know, continuous.

There’s already one minor continuity error I’ve found, about which I can do precisely nothing until I achieve my dream of finishing the third Wasp book and reissuing the whole thing as a trilogy. Which is to say, probably at no point before the literal heat death of the universe. Does that bother me? ahahaha of…course…not…

What I don’t want to do here is spoil things that are going to show up in the third Archivist Wasp book, so I’m going to try to very carefully tiptoe around those. If you’ve read Archivist Wasp, Latchkey, and Firebreak, and you still come away from this post with questions, all I can say is hopefully I’ll answer those for you in future!

The line I had to walk in Firebreak is to tell a story that would hopefully appeal to those who hadn’t read that older stuff, while kind of also talking over their heads at the people who have.

For instance, one thing I hoped was clear when I wrote Archivist Wasp and Latchkey but probably was not was that calling this operation the “Latchkey Project” was me making fun of all the absolutely unbelievably stupid names they come up with for these things in real life. Firebreak gave me the opportunity to lampshade that a little.

Or, like, okay. It’s weird really getting into this! So. I have a folklore background and one of the things I had way too much fun with in Archivist Wasp was creating an entire postapocalyptic mythology from whole cloth. I’m fascinated by how folklore and mythology are basically just people playing Telephone with ideas that expand to a point where all the original context has been stripped away and they end up about a zillion times larger than life. So I started thinking about the time that the ghost and Foster lived in, and what might have been important to people who lived about a hundred years in our future. I knew that the army that the ghost and Foster fought in was a corporate army and not a typical government-controlled military, and I wanted to take the whole children-as-supersoldiers trope and put my own spin on it. And I didn’t want this corporate army to be secretive. I wanted it to be playing an all-in hearts-and-minds marketing game to popularize a war that had no real valid reason for existing beyond that they could make bank off of it. So it was an easy jump from there to: these people are celebrities. Big celebrities. Even if nobody knows who they really are under all the branding. And that if they figured largely in the general cultural consciousness of the place where they lived and worked, and they died not long before humanity was wiped out, the idea of them might still be lingering in this place until the end.

In terms of folklore as people-playing-Telephone-across-the-centuries, many readers have picked up on the similarities between the words Latchkey and Catchkeep, especially when spoken aloud. There’s, uh, a reason for that.

Also:

Jillian, by the way, in Jillian vs. Parasite Planet, the same middle-grade book SABRINA comes from, starts out in the same building in the year 2113, before Stellaxis was Stellaxis and had a space program, now defunct (the stars-and-arrow logo is a holdover from that era). Here she is:

21 years later, here’s Mal:

And quite a bit later here’s Wasp:

But why would these people be such a big deal? After all, they’re dead by the time the world ends. They were a literal product of a hypercapitalist society with a nonexistent attention span, but in that society they were revered. 06/Foster especially had a lot of the optics of a folk hero, which we see in some of Mal’s asides in Firebreak:

And the implication of the end of that book is that big changes are coming, probably not for two corporations that control everything but maybe at least in this one city. Which is where, thousands of years in the future, Wasp’s town of Sweetwater is situated. Right on top of the ruins of New Liberty. Which is why in Latchkey, Wasp’s there exploring the same subbasements where Mal was interrogated and released and then returned.

So the ruins of this particular city are where these ghosts are tied to, not just because that’s where they died but because that’s where they persisted in the cultural consciousness. Wasp knows that ghosts are made of memory, but what she doesn’t understand (yet) is that it’s not only their own memories that make them.

These two ghosts in particular had help.

This is what I plan to really get into in the third Archivist Wasp book. It starts literally where Latchkey leaves off, no three-year time gap this time. So the ghost knows the stories of Ember Girl and Carrion Boy from Wasp, and he’s just helped out, kind of, in the fight for Sweetwater, so he’s seen what Carrion Boy’s followers are like, and he’s coming off of two books that have basically beaten him over the head repeatedly with the fact that everything he tries to fix he just ends up fucking up worse (Foster’s death! Foster’s chip!), so he’s, um, kind of primed to jump to conclusions here. Here he is a couple chapters into an admittedly messy draft-in-progress of book 3, where Wasp has found him, having dragged the corpses of the Ember Girl/Carrion Boy/Crow analogues out of their temporary coffins so he could torture himself wondering about this oooone teensy detail that’s been bugging him.

And oh yeah, about that crow…

He doesn’t remember Mal too well, because he never knew her very well. But she made an impression, even if it’s mostly gone (along with 99%+ of his other memories) by the time we first meet him. But those of you who’ve noted how similar Mal is to Wasp, personality-wise, there’s a reason for that too.

He does remember that house in the woods though. Or that there was a house. Details a lil hazy. He is, to repeat, a mess.

New Liberty comes through to the ghost-place though in full fidelity. Much more so than this one random house does, because it’s of greater significance to more ghosts, and everything in the ghost-place is made of memories crowdsourced from the dead. The more people remember something, the clearer it comes through.

Meanwhile the paper that Wasp reads Foster’s memories off of is part of Mal’s collection of 06/22 news stories. One thing that was interesting in these books was being able to describe the same events/locations/etc with totally different vocabulary, depending on whether it was Wasp’s point of view or Mal’s. This is just one example. There are a bunch. That whole scene that happens in both books, for starters.

Wasp does see one of the ghost’s memories that has Mal in it, but doesn’t realize at the time that this is at all significant:

I mean technically she sees more than one…

One thing that was just incredibly fun to do was piecing scenes back together based on what I knew of them from earlier books. The whole chip-and-sword thing, for instance.

And just to anchor the timeline a lil:

Or like just messing around with unreliable narration:

It’s probably clear by now that I have a major problem when it comes to these books.

As such, I have of course written many many thousands of words of Extra Stuff. Just a really inadvisable number of words of Extra Stuff.

It took me a long time to find a publisher for Archivist Wasp. I’d say it was for a lot of reasons, but it really boils down to two. One: it was a YA book without romance (and I had zero intent to compromise on that point, and I had to turn down agents’ requests for revise/resubmits that added romance in but I was not going to budge on this). Two: it was Weird. So while I was trying to figure out what the fuck to do with it, I messed around with a short story alternate version that basically told the story of some of the constellation/myths through the lens of a very-far-future anthropological paper. It’s called “On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse” and you can find it in Clockwork Phoenix 4 or in The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women.

Archivist Wasp changed a bit between that first draft and the final, and this story came out kind of in the middle, so don’t expect the story to be super consistent with everything else–I don’t remember much about it but some of the constellation names, for instance, changed. Also it is really super old.

Still, though.

And just to anchor the sixteen stars thing a little, because it’s also in the Stellaxis logo as seen above:

At some point after I finished writing Latchkey, I started kicking around this idea about the relics of a current civilization as found by a far-future post-apocalyptic civilization, and how to small children they might be indistinguishable from fossils–or, depending on the nature of the extinction event, they might be the only approximation of fossils discoverable at all. That turned into “Last Chance,” published at Clarkesworld, which takes place several years before Archivist Wasp but in the same world. Some of you might recognize the narrator.

My no-less-massive-for-being-totally-unavoidable regret with Firebreak is that I wasn’t able to include more 06 and 22 in it. I got to lament it a little here on Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog back in May, but trust me when I say my sorrow on this point runs deep. I vented some of it in the novelette “Pathfinding!” which appeared in Uncanny Magazine. It’s about 06 and 22 when they are fifteen years old and they, along with all the other surviving operatives, are testing out the Director’s new combat simulator. Things then go sideways with maximum rapidity. It’s full of stupid little Easter eggs that I expect literally nobody to notice, such as:

or:

And since this story actually came out before Firebreak, it contains the first published instance of the company (which has not been publicly named in either of the Wasp books) monopolizing water, and people being unhappy about that

This is the big one though.

(The trail where Mal finds 22, tangentially, is based on the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail, which is about two blocks from my front door. It’s also where That Bridge Scene from A Quiet Place was filmed. There was a community container garden on that bridge and a Little Free Library and they pitched both off the side of the bridge in order to film that scene and I’m honestly still mad about it. But if you’re ever in the Rosendale-New Paltz-Kingston neck of the upstate-ish NY woods, check out that trail, I love it a lot.)

And then there’s a ton of stuff over on my Patreon because no I don’t know why I’m like this. There are deleted scenes from these books over there, and I’ve written up a bunch of the myths mentioned in the Wasp books in their entirety (more of those to come as I get around to them).

And then there’s, um, this.

And of course the third Wasp book is on there as well, such as it is. I’m hoping to get back to it really soon. It’s going to be a very different book than the first two (and extremely different from Firebreak) in that it’s probably not going to be very action-y or fastpaced and will be absolutely packed with Character Feels and hopefully answer a lot of the questions that the first two books raised. It’s about how the memories of these people got corrupted across the ages–their personal memories but also the remnants of humanity’s memory of them–and for what reasons, and how deep that goes, and how both your own memories and everyone else’s memories of you, if inaccurate enough, work together to corrupt your manifestation as a ghost that is literally made of memories, and whether in the end it’s just irreparable. It’s going to be big and slow and sprawly and I exist perpetually in a state of terrified eagerness to really dig into it and hopefully not mess it up too badly.

Anyway!

In the off-chance that anyone has actually read this far, I’m honestly kind of impressed and thank you so much! If you noticed anything I should have added to this list, or questions about stuff in the books, let me know!! And if the concept of all these extras is intriguing to you, my Patreon is no tiers, pay-what-you-want for access to everything I post. Which is at this point about three years’ worth of extras from all the books mentioned above, plus that 40k 06/22 piece that’s going up monthly as we speak, plus an eventual full draft of the third Wasp book (it’s a few chapters in right now, more soon!). Also, I’m trying to get better about putting tip jars on things that take me ages to put together (friends yell at me about this A Whole Bunch) so here’s my ko-fi if you felt like tossing something in.

But honestly just the fact that you enjoy these books enough to have read this far (seriously this has taken me twelve straight hours at this point and I totally expect to be addressing an empty room by now) is frankly incredible. If you’re still here to see this, thank you so much.

I know that as soon as I publish this post I’m going to remember about nine hundred other bits I forgot to add into it. So it may well end up getting edited going forward as my brain decides to cough things up. I deliberately left out stuff that will be super spoilery for book 3, and honestly that 06/22 thing on my Patreon is so loaded with references to ::gestures at everything:: it’s kind of stupid. And not only Easter egg things, but things that end up really mattering to the character backstories and I’m kind of annoyed it’s almost definitely unpublishable. When it’s all up, I’ll go back into this and update it with the stuff that ties that novella back into everything else, but as it’s still coming out monthly, I don’t want to spoil stuff that’s not readable yet.

All in all this whole thing’s an absolute labor of love, and it’s a long game, and it’s not over yet. Thank you so so much for exploring it with me.