The Cat-alyst Chronicles Coming Soon

On Friday, November 7, book 5 of The Library Saga will be available to buy on Kindle Unlimited and in paperback, then a day later, as an audiobook as part of Audible Plus. If you’re into parody, with mix of fantasy, sci-fi, noir, and other genre mashups, then check out the series. Except for the first two, which was to pretty much introduce the characters and their world, books 3 through the rest are (or will be) the length of the novels I usually write.

Every character gets their own book and an adventure in different genres. The Unwritten Fallout was Alexandria’s, book 6 will be the Archivist’s, book 7 will be Bonnie, and book 8 will be Nora Clue. Books 9 & 10 will have them rejoin each other with new characters from their own adventures to take down the overall antagonist of the series.

Dewey has to team up with six cat heroes in his own adventure. They must rewrite their fate one thread at a time, but the saga is fracturing and a multiversal crisis is calling. They’ll have to deal with animal-verse fanfiction, a threat to their nine lives as cats, overlapping boss fights, and a genre-mashing antagonist before they can continue on. The Cat-alyst Chronicles is a surreal, genre-savvy adventure.

Amazon

The Library Saga Series Amazon page

Teaser from chapter 3

Dewey hit the ground with a thud, rolling through a patch of hay that smelled faintly of ink and cotton candy. He spat out a tuft of narrative fluff and staggered to his paws, blinking at the bizarre landscape around him. Wooden fences stretched in every direction, painted in garish carnival colors. Signs dangled from posts, each one scrawled with cheerful slogans:

“Pet the Plot Devices!”
“Feed the Foreshadowing!”
“Don’t Tap the Fourth Wall!”

Behind the fences, enclosures writhed with impossible creatures. A herd of Chekhov’s Guns clattered their triggers nervously, each one mounted on spindly legs like startled gazelles. A flock of Red Herrings flopped in a shallow pond and their scales glittered with misleading clues. In the distance, a towering Deus Ex Machina dozed in its pen, its golden wings twitching as if waiting for the perfect moment to swoop in and resolve everything.

The Cat-alyst Team tumbled in behind him, landing in a heap of capes, wands, and hoverboards. Pawlette scrambled upright, brushed hay from her fur, and exclaimed, “We’re alive! The system redirected us safely!”

Clawdia rose more slowly, her eyes narrowing as she scanned the enclosures. “Safely is a generous word. This place reeks of narrative containment.”

Meowgenta laughed, spinning her hoverboard in a lazy circle. “Containment or carnival, it’s all the same thing. Look at all the exhibits! It’s like a theme park for tropes.”

Dewey flicked his tail, unimpressed. “Yeah, a theme park where the rides eat you if you get too close.” He eyed a nearby pen where a pair of Love Triangles hissed at each other, their sharp angles sparking whenever they collided. “And I’m not buying a ticket.”

The HUD blinked back to life, its fonts now styled like a zoo brochure.
[Welcome to the Genre Petting Zoo!]
[Objective: Learn Cooperation by Touring Exhibits with Your Team.]
[Warning: Do Not Feed the Metaphors.]

Dewey groaned. “Great, a field trip, that’s just what I needed.”

The Cat-alyst Team perked up at the directive, as if the HUD had handed them a mission. Pawlette clapped her paws together. “This is perfect! We can bond as a team while exploring the exhibits.”

Clawdia’s ears twitched. “Or we can watch him fail again.”

Meowgenta grinned. “Either way, it’ll be fun.”

Dewey sighed, already dreading whatever “lesson” the zoo had in store. He padded toward the nearest enclosure, muttering under his breath. “If this ends with me singing another theme song, I’m using one of my lives to escape.”

The HUD blinked insistently, its fonts now styled like a cheerful zoo brochure.
[Objective: Learn Cooperation by Touring Exhibits with Your Team.]
[Warning: Do Not Feed the Metaphors.]

Pawlette perked up immediately, with her wand twinkling as she pointed toward the nearest enclosure. “Look! The Red Herring Pond! This is the perfect place to start.”

The pond shimmered with fish that glowed in misleading colors. Some were painted with arrows pointing toward nonexistent exits, while others had flashing signs like “This Way to Destiny!”

Dewey crouched at the edge, unimpressed. One particularly gaudy herring leapt out of the water and slapped him across the whiskers before flopping back in.

“Subtle,” Dewey muttered, shaking off the splash. “A whole pond dedicated to wasting my time.”
Clawdia smirked. “Maybe if you followed them, you’d finally get somewhere.”

“Yeah,” Dewey shot back, “straight into a dead end. Which, come to think of it, is probably your idea of progress.”

Guardians of Genre Chapter Sample

New Short Story Series

Hey all. While I’m attempting to write another novel (my seventeenth), I’ve decided to go back into my files, a mix of digital and written on paper, and look for every short story I’ve ever written to see if I can clean them up and publish them. Since my novels are somewhat serious, ten of which being Christian end times, I figured I’d do something light-hearted.

With that in mind, I remembered one that I started writing back in 2008 when I worked in a library, before I had independently published anything online (I first vanity published with iUniverse for Out of Time in the later part of ’08, KDP wasn’t letting in self-published authors just yet & Smashwords was a couple years later), and it was a story that I really kind of just wanted to make my co-workers laugh. I have this weird sense of humor sometimes, when I’m not an oh-so-serious introvert, and I was thinking of having various characters from the books in the library meet each other in a goofy kind of way, maybe magically, maybe technologically.

The library staff in the story gets mixed up in all sorts of shenanigans from Sam I Am randomly appearing to Nancy Drew investigating the various mysteries of the goings-on in the library to the actual physical card catalog causing book classification anomalies because of Melvil Dewey himself to The Communist Manifesto and The Federalist Papers arguing with each other in the background on the The Shelf of Disputed Ideas. The staff gets everything sorted out at the end of the story-or so they think….

The story’s name is Guardians of Genre. It’s for anyone who love whimsical fantasy, libraries, metafiction, satire, and genre mashups, and might appeal to people who like Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett. It’s probably not for everyone, but what is?

Here’s the cover.

This is a ten chapter short story. Thirty pages, 9400 words. Depending on how well this does, I’ll probably make it a series. I will release this first in ebook and paperback and then I’ll make an audiobook.

Will be widely available, instead of just on Amazon, and I’ll also put it on my website bookstore to give away copies for free. If you want a free copy, just let me know.

Here’s the Amazon Kindle sample: