★★★☆☆ A thrice-told tale

In That Sleep

Seanan McGuire

In That Sleep is Seanan McGuire's December 2024 Patreon reward. This came out twice, in a first post, then a corrected one. In the first post, 01-Dec-2024, she introduced it as follows,

(Image: Two blue classic tabby and white Maine Coons against an orange and pink background. One, Alice, is looking at the camera.)
We've had a few months of pretty short stories. So here is my Hogswatch present to you all, as I return one last time to the well of Titania's shitty version of Faerie, to see how August got on during the enchantment. Warning: quite long.
If you haven't read Sleep No More and The Innocent Sleep, this may not make much sense. I recommend picking them up if you can.
Enjoy!

The corrected post appeared 06-Dec-2024, with this introduction:

(Image: A very green frog sits on a brown houndstooth cane, against a background of blue.)
So "In That Sleep" is very long. As in, 60,000 words, as opposed to the normal 8,000 to 10,000 words we're usually looking at. And because of that length, some errors crept in. Many were introduced by the necessary copy and paste used to clone dialog from Sleep No More, but that doesn't make them less incorrect. We have gone through and corrected them, and converted fresh sets of files. Ta-da!
Now, that being said: 60,000 words is technically considered a short novel. It's literally more than halfway to being a full book. Of those 60,000 words, more than 30,000 are entirely new, which is still well over the 8,000 to 10,000 that I promise to provide. The rest are, yes, cloned from the books this story parallels: that's what happens when something is locked by having appeared in print. It was not a time or effort-saving measure; if anything, it introduced a lot more effort, for exactly the reasons that caused the errors.
If you have already downloaded this story, I suggest grabbing the new files, just for accuracy in future. If you have not, this is the version to download.

In That Sleep retells the story of Sleep No More from the point of view of Toby's sister August Torquill. It is indeed quite long -- a short novel. That's a good thing! Sadly, some of it is copy-pasted from Sleep No More, so if you've read that, as you must to have any real hope of understanding this, there will be a lot repeated here. I liked Sleep No More and it's been a long time since I read it, so the repetition didn't bother me as much as it might have.

In That Sleep is in fact the third telling of the story of Sleep No More. First we had it in Sleep No More from Toby herself -- that was novel 17 in the October Daye series. Then in novel 18, The Innocent Sleep we got the same story from the point of view of Toby's husband Tybalt. Now in this Patreon novella we get it again from Toby's sister August. At this point it is definitely Too Much Of A Good Thing.

In That Sleep on Patreon

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