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"I KILLED MY LAST SERIAL TWELVE YEARS AGO. NOW I'M MEDICATED, AND THERE ARE CRYPTIDS. (Introducing The Cryptid Cataloger)"

May 27, 2026

A frazzled cryptozoologist-librarian in a cardigan and headlamp frantically filing index cards into an enormous wall of wooden card-catalog drawers, each drawer labeled in cramped handwriting — “MOTHMAN (SEE ALSO: INSOMNIA),” “BIGFOOT — UNRETURNED CALLS,” “LAKE MONSTER, LOCAL,” “THE THING IN 4B” — while the actual cryptids loiter impatiently in a waiting-room line clutching paper number tickets; a sasquatch reads a six-month-old magazine, a chupacabra taps its claws, a very small unidentified blob fills out a clipboard form; a flickering “NOW SERVING: ???” sign hums overhead; towering stacks of bestiary cards avalanche off the desk; one sticky note on the monitor reads “TWELVE ENTRIES DONE — DO NOT JINX IT”; warm dusty lamplight, dramatic shafts of sun through grimy blinds, deeply over-organized chaos

Twelve years ago I started a serial. I hosted it here, then moved it to some custom-domained Medium situation, and then — like a frankly alarming percentage of things I begin — I just… stopped. I don’t even remember why. One day there were updates, and then there weren’t, and the story has been lying in a ditch beside the information superhighway ever since. (If you’d like to visit the crime scene, here’s the original post about it.)

So naturally, the obvious move is to start another one.

I can hear you. “Dylan. Buddy. Why would you start a second serial twelve years after the first one died in a ditch?” Excellent question. I’m so glad I imagined you asking it.

Here’s the thing: people change. Possibly even me. The me of the early 2010s was an unmedicated pantser running entirely on vibes and the storage capacity of a brain that — as we established earlier this week — functions less like a memory palace and more like a memory hoarder’s storage unit. The me of right now is medicated, outlines like a feral raccoon, and — this is the important part — has already written twelve installments.

Twelve. Banked. Done. Sitting in a folder, waiting.

If I post one section a month, that’s a full year of serial without writing another word. I have essentially pre-paid my own ADHD. Future Dylan can fall off the face of the earth for eleven months and the thing keeps updating without him. It is the closest I have ever come to outsmarting my own brain, and I am fully aware that saying this out loud is precisely how I jinx it.

The serial is called The Cryptid Cataloger. It is about — shockingly — cryptids. And because I am incapable of doing anything the simple way, I’m not just posting the story. I’ve been building catalog entries for the cryptids themselves: little field-guide bestiary cards that’ll post alongside the chapters. So you get the story and the monster manual. Value.

It’s going up on Patreon, launching around the first of June.

Which — and I want to be transparent about my own decision-making here — is the same week I’m kicking off the book club. Two launches. One week. Did I plan it this way? No. Should I have spaced them out like a person with a functioning relationship to time? Probably. Am I going to? Absolutely not. Classic Dylan.

Anyway. Twelve chapters banked, a folder full of monsters, and a launch date I cheerfully stacked on top of another launch date.

Stay curious, keep a respectful distance from anything with too many eyes, and stay tuned.