It’s live.
A few days ago I told you I was doing the objectively unwise thing and starting another serial, twelve years after my last one quietly died in a ditch. Today the bus is actually running. The Cryptid Cataloger is up on Patreon, and Chapter 1 is sitting there right now, waiting for you.
Here’s the part I am most smug about, and I want it on the record before I jinx it: I wrote twelve chapters before launching. Twelve. Banked. Which means the schedule holds even when my brain decides, sometime in August, that it would simply rather be doing anything else.
So — what is it.
The Cryptid Cataloger follows Sutton Cove Attwater, a folklore PhD who lives in a 1972 VW bus named the Jackalope and drives from sighting to sighting, cataloging the legendary creatures of North America. She has a Sphinx cat named the Duchess who comes on every case and, as Sutton puts it, does not vote. Right now she’s in Charlotte, Vermont, working a deep cold lake that the local park service will not discuss on the record — sunken boats, near-drownings, and one set of underwater photographs nobody wants their name on. The Duchess hates the water. Sutton has learned to trust the Duchess about water.
Here’s how it works. Every Tuesday you get something. One Tuesday it’s a new chapter. The next Tuesday it’s a catalog entry — an actual page from Sutton’s field guide, plate plus field notes plus sighting log, the same document she works from in the bus. The chapters are how you keep the bus in gas money. The catalog entries are free and public, because the whole point of this is to work in the open. Today’s a double drop to kick us off: Chapter 1, plus the first catalog entry — the Wampus Cat.
If you want in, there are two tiers. Field Notes ($5) gets you every chapter as it drops, plus the full archive from day one. Cryptid Society ($12) adds a vote on what gets written next and a free ebook of each finished book. And for the first 30 days — through July 2 — founding patrons lock in a lower rate for life: $4 and $10. Stay subscribed and it’s yours forever.
One thing I want to say plainly, up front, because you deserve to hear it from me and not guess: the catalog plates are Midjourney-generated and run through a little rendering pipeline I built so the field guide keeps a consistent look. The chapters are 100% human-written — that’s me, at the keyboard, no shortcuts, no exceptions. I’ve got a longer and more honest post about the where, the why, and the lines I’m drawing coming later this month. It deserves its own space.
And yes — the serial launches today, the book club kicks off tomorrow, and I scheduled both of those myself, on purpose, in the same week, like a person who has never once met me. We’ve discussed this. Classic Dylan.
The bus is parked off a Forest Service road, the door’s open, the cat’s claimed the dashboard, and there’s a lake downhill that nobody wants to talk about. Chapter 1’s waiting.
Stay curious, trust the cat about water, and come catalog some monsters with me.