What is this, exactly?
For those who are unaware, the current nine novel version of A Warm Place is a rewrite. In order to explain everything, I’m going to have to give a little history lesson, but I know that there are some people who don’t care and would like a TL;DR version, so here it is: A Warm Place - The Original Series is a 12-episode novella serial written in 2019 under the name Crystal Candy. I finished it, eventually took it down, and did a from-the-ground-up rewrite in 2020, resulting in the version most people are familiar with. I am re-releasing this to the Kindle in case some people would like to read it and see the differences or just to read more A Warm Place content. There is nothing important/new in here, however. If you don’t care and want to skip, that is totally cool, you won’t miss a thing.
Now, for that history lesson.
I began publishing as Misty Vixen in late 2014 - early 2015. I published serialized short stories roughly 7-9,000 words long and I used silhouette covers like the one you see above. Because I had no graphic design skill, I relied entirely on Lara X. Lust to help me make these. Lara tirelessly provided these covers for me for the next three years, until I finally made the switch over to whole novels with hand-drawn covers.
As 2019 rolled around, I found myself frustrated and missing the relatively simpler days of the serialized shorts. Writing novels was paying better, to be sure, but they took so much longer and now I was having to rely on artists halfway across the world. I wanted something I could completely control, something that relied on me, myself, and I to release. I came up with Crystal Candy. I would treat it as a side project and release serialized shorts again, only I could write stranger stories that didn’t fit so well with the current zeitgeist.
I’ve always loved snow, and I had been drawn to the idea of a slower, quieter survival story of living in a very near-future frozen apocalypse. I came up with A Warm Place, and it became a kind of survival slice-of-life. I was really feeling it, so I banged out a dozen episodes, or roughly a trilogy worth of novels. I liked it a lot. Sometime after I finished it, I took down Crystal Candy as a project for a few different reasons. It was eating up my time, half of the projects hadn’t panned out creatively, and after doing some math, I determined that I was pissing away potentially hundreds if not thousands of dollars in lost earnings by releasing anything as Crystal Candy instead of as Misty Vixen. And I wasn’t hiding the fact that the two were connected, everyone knew plainly and the sales still sucked by comparison.
So, I took it down. Even by then, I knew I had something cool on my hands. The more time went by, the more I thought about A Warm Place. I began to have ideas upon ideas about how I would do it if I tried again. Eventually, I figured, well, why not try again? What’s stopping me? At the time it was: too many other projects. But eventually a slot opened up, I wrote the prologue and the first novel in the series, and the rest is history.
Why am I doing this then?
Two reasons: convenience and earnings.
While I know that the current version of A Warm Place is superior in, as far as I can tell, every way from the original version, I don’t think the original version is trash. So I put it up on my website for free download to anyone who wanted to give it a shot. I thought that’s where it’d end up until doomsday, but I kept running into problems with people trying to actually read the thing on their Kindles. So I finally decided: fuck it! Why not just republish it and make it as easy as possible for people to read it on their Kindle and also make some money in the meantime?
And so here we are.
If you do read it, I hope you enjoy it.
If you’re looking for specifics of what it actually covers, this is basically what ended up becoming A Warm Place 4 & 5. It’s very similar to how it played out in the current version, though the farther along you get, the more the little things diverge.