A Lon Story’s website is now live, and so is the Patreon.
This is a science-plausible universe about our near and far possible futures.
The backstory has been in development since 2010, and the first installment, A Lon Beginning, takes place thousands of years from now, following a child looking for their mother through a weirdly wonderful world of our own making.
The larger Lon Universe seeks to answer a number of questions:
What if, in trying to save the world, we ended up figuring out how to colonize the stars?
What would it take to send humanity to another star system?
What if a bunch of intersectional feminist geeks designed an android, gave it all their knowledge, and sent it off to make a planet?
Would the last generation of humanity LARP football in the broken Tacoma dome?
What might it take to teach an android how to love?
How much fun would it be to live in a world where Arthur C. Clarke’s third rule is very much in effect?
A Lon Beginning is a Different Kind of Kid Story
While the bulk of the series is going to be aimed at teens and up, the first story is surprisingly kid-friendly for a dystopian post-apocalyptic future. (Mostly because it takes place after all of the worst stuff, and provides a child’s-eye entry into the story.) Each of the seven chapters of the first story will have been read aloud multiple times before posting, and it works really well as bedtime reading for kids as young as five. The really special thing about this is that the main character is a nonbinary child, and that is not what the story is about.
There will never be a big “reveal” about Kel’s gender. They are nonbinary and that is that. Down the line, in other stories, it will become apparent why Kel has been raised nonbinary from birth, but it is not a plot point of this story. For me, as a nonbinary writer, with nonbinary kids, it was important to me that they have that.
Very few of the characters in this universe (and none in the first story) are white, for a huge number of reasons. This includes Kel, whose genetic background is complicated, and whose culture is necessarily unique.
@teasugarsalt, @rhysiana, @lysikan, @allmydokkuns, @bonehandledknife and many others have spent so many hours helping me, listening to me ramble and reading my incoherent pile of notes. @camillo1978 was deeply involved in my process for developing Kel as a character. As I post more, I’ll talk more about the people who helped me develop each part of the story.
And the best boost to getting this up right now came from Craig Burrows, whose luminous photographs gave me the last bit I needed to really put the website and Patreon together.
In the long run, I hope that this does become a true community effort. As I get more chapters up, I’m hoping to get artists engaged and on board to expand this into a multimedia project. My Patreon goals reflect that. The more people we get on board, the more artists I can pay.
Right now, all actual content is on the Patreon, but this will change as more of it is posted. There are three posts up at the moment. Two of them are public (and free), and one of them is set to the $1 tier. Tier rewards are not entirely tied to the posting system, so please look at the higher reward options, even if there are not yet posts there.
I will be working on putting up more advance chapters for higher level tiers later today. My goal is that by the weekend, people subscribing at the $10 level will have access to the entire first story (7 chapters), with most of it becoming available to lower levels by December 1. One chapter per week will be going public.
A day or two after each chapter is public on Patreon, I will be posting them everywhere (the site is Wordpress, and I’ll be using SNAP to broadcast to Twitter and Tumblr, possibly Dreamwidth, and possibly Facebook.)
How fast things post after the first story may well depend on how many people jump on board. I have years worth of material to write for this. I hope you’ll join me (and I really hope you’ll reblog. The scariest thing about launching a new project is having it disappear without anyone seeing it.)
