Your Final Chance for Handmade Bookmarks!

Mailboat VI is launching on Patreon!

TODAY: The last day of the Handmade Bookmark Promo
TORROW: “Last Time in Lake Geneva”
Friday, September 26h: Mailboat VI: Chapter One

My friends, TODAY is the last day of the Handmade Bookmark Promo.

Ordinarily, these bookmarks—100% unique, and 100% handmade by yours truly—are only available through sporadic online giveaways, or as part of one of my premium tiers.

But they were also one of the most-asked-for rewards when I updated our Patreon page earlier this year.

And so, for the rest of TODAY ONLY, you can sign up to our core tier (The Captain’s Log) or higher, and straight-up GET one of these bookmarks. (Two, if the tier you selected already includes one.)

At the time of writing, these were a few of the bookmarks still available:

These bookmarks are all made of high-quality, heavy-weight cardstock, and are decorated with any combination of gems, glittery washi tape, stickers, stamps, distressing/antiquing etc. They all have a water theme to go along with the Mailboat Suspense Series!

Personally, my own handmade bookmarks are all I want to tuck between the pages of whatever I’m reading. I adore the many textures under my fingers as I run the bookmark down the page. If you read physical books because you love the physical experience—the smell of the page, the texture of the paper—then you might enjoy my bookmarks, too.

I made some of these at local craft nights when I was living in Wisconsin, sitting around a table with lots of other talented people, chatting about art and life. The rest, I made this summer while I was manning my bookseller’s booth at the summer events. The front of my table was covered in copies of the Mailboat Suspense Series; the back was covered in bits of paper I was trying to keep out of the wind. In between readers discovering my table and picking up a new autographed book, I was bent over my gems and washi tape, following my muse, making little bits of useful art I hoped some of my readers would enjoy.

I had such a great time making these bookmarks, and I’d love to send one (or two!) of them in the mail to you.

And I’d love even more to welcome you aboard to the deepest dive you can get with the Mailboat Suspense Series. If you don’t just love eating a tasty dish—if you love getting into the kitchen to watch the chef in action—then you should give one of my Patreon subscriptions a try.

In Answer to Your Questions…

In my last announcement, I asked y’all to send me your questions, cuz if you were wondering, good odds, someone else was, too.

Here’s what you wanted to know:

When will Mailboat VI be available in finished and/or physical format?

Life and the creative process always play havoc with my estimated release dates—so grab the salt shaker off the table, as well as that giant Morton cannister out of the pantry (you know you have one), and forget everything your doctor mentioned about sodium.

The current ETA for Mailboat VI in its finished form is sometime in 2026.

I’d love to provide a more concrete time frame—but your doctor is frowning at me. Heavily.

Instead, I’ll say what I’ve always said: I put quality first. I obey whatever the creative process demands of me in order to produce the best book I can dig up out of my soul. Long after I die, my art will be floating around the surface of this planet somewhere, and if someone discovers an old copy of one of my books a hundred years from now, I want it to be one of the coolest things that ever happened to them. I want my stories to inspire people—or at least be worth the trees that sacrificed their lives so we monkeys could stare at pulped wood and hallucinate for a few hours.

I’ll provide updates on how the project is coming along—in great news, even the free tier on Patreon includes Monthly(ish) Progress Reports—and as we get closer, I’ll be able to provide a more concrete release date.

While the book is being written has never proven to be the right time to announce that. So… watch this space…

How much does it cost to join a Patreon subscription?

That depends 100% on which tier you join! I literally have tiers from $5 per month to $500 per month. (By the way, the fact that people actually subscribe to some of my premium tiers blows my mind. Words escape me to express my gratitude—and wording is what I do.)

But don’t worry—like I said, I have tiers to suit many different budgets.

At a minimum, every tier includes the Chapter Releases, allowing you to read my next book months ahead of anyone else, one chapter at a time. I aim to release one or two chapters every week—but again, the characters and the creative process are in charge of that department, not me. If it looks like I’m going to skip a week or two, I try to give the Patrons a heads up.

“The Captain’s Log” is the core tier, including everything the Founding Patrons and I created together on our maiden voyage: Chapter Releases, Book Club Questions, and Behind-the-Scenes Posts, which I aim to release weekly-ish. (You can hear the veterans talking about all of these features in the video below.) At this tier, you’ll also get a complimentary ebook of the book you supported, and you’ll get an invitation to the exclusive, in-person, Patron-only meetup, to coincide with the book release and book signing tour in and around Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. At this meetup, we can talk full spoilers, up to the most-recent book—and this will be the only event where that’s permitted. You can also vote on the date, time, and location of the meetup, to help optimize the event for your schedule.

At “The Captain’s Log” tier, you get all of those rewards for just $20 per month.

Together, these core rewards are like a backstage pass at the concert—but it’s more like you were sitting in the music room with me, months before the tour, while the band and I wrote the music, and you even weighed in on what you liked and didn’t like, and talked it all over with the other top fans and came to a sort of consensus.

So, it’s more than a backstage pass. It’s more than a meet-the-musician. You’re in the sound booth with me. I asked you to pass me that guitar, seeing as you were in here anyway. I amped up the bass a little, and asked you if it sounded any better that way. When the track was laid and we were happy with it, we cracked open a cold one and sat around, proud of our work, and I opened up a little and told you why this song was so special to me. Where it came from. Why I had to write it.

And when the whole album was done, we realized we kind of just wrote the music together, you and me and the other superfans.

We kind of just wrote the book together, you and me and the other superfans—you know what I’m saying?

You didn’t just get to hear the music before anyone else did. You got to see it being born, and you got to see why it was so special, and you even got to put your finger on the scale a little bit and influence how it turned out.

Like I said, there are tiers both above and below “The Captain’s Log.” But if you ask me and the Veteran Patrons, that’s the tier where the magic of this experience really happens.

What The Veteran Patrons Have to Say

In case you missed it, here was the super special video some of my Veteran Patrons recorded during our inaugural in-person meetup, after we released Mailboat V: The End of Summer. They’ll tell you what it is they loved most about being one of my Patrons: