Happy last day of May!

I hope you’re doing well. I’ve been (very) slowly making progress on the audiobook of The Midnight Land. I actually recorded it a couple of years ago, but what with one thing and another, I only edited the first half of it. I’m now (very) slowly editing the second half of it in order to include it in my upcoming Kickstarter. 

If you want to get a preview of it, however, the first chapter is up on YouTube. I recorded it myself for a variety of reasons, one of which being that it would be very hard to find a narrator who could pronounce all the made-up but basically Slavic names. In fact, I had to look up a bunch of the stresses myself.

How, you might ask, could I look up words from a made-up language? Well, the language is mainly based on Russian, so I had to look up similar words and then back-solve to figure out the appropriate stress. Sometimes I just went with what sounded right to me, but sometimes, to my chagrin, I discovered that the stress in the “real” word was much different from what I’d originally thought. As one of my professors in grad school said, first you think the hard thing in Russian is the case endings, then you think it’s verbal aspect, and then eventually you achieve true wisdom and realize it’s stress.

Anyway, the good news is that this is my language and I can stress it however I want, so if something is different from the mainstream pronunciation of a similar Russian word, let’s say that I did that on purpose to differentiate Zemnian from Russian 🙂

So again, if you want to check out the first chapter of the audiobook, you can find it on YouTube here. It will be available, along with a brand-new bonus short story and a deluxe color-illustrated boxed set, in the upcoming Kickstarter campaign. The short story and color-illustrated boxed set will only ever be available on Kickstarter, and the audiobook will be released there first and with a PDF of the Kickstarter-exclusive color illustrations. 

You can follow the campaign by clicking the “Notify me on launch” button on the preview, which will ensure you get notified as soon as it launches! That will probably be some time in June and I will be sure to share it here as well, but early backers will get a special video call with me and my artist Madison (backing right at the start of the campaign helps me out a lot too, by the way)! Even if you just get the $1 short story, you will still get to join the live video call, as well as access to any other special rewards that are unlocked during the campaign.

Here are the links to the audiobook preview and the campaign preview again. Happy reading, and I look forward to talking to you (maybe live!) in June!

E.P. Clark