🌿the start of something new

January '25 Newsletter 0.1

Hello and Happy New Year folks!

If you’re reading this, then thank you for subscribing to my newsletter. I figured I should have someplace to make formal, gathered updates on my writing now that I’m agented, and substack is the most straightforward, so here we are! I intend to update on the first of the month, and intersperse other entries as I see fit.

For those of you who may be new to me and my ventures: my name is Catherine Hellens, and I am an author of adult sci-fi and fantasy novels. I’m also a university textbook manager, a classically trained mezzo-soprano, and a Capricorn. Very recently, I accepted an offer of representation from Azantian Literary Agency, fulfilling a goal I’ve worked toward over the course of fifteen years.

I have always had my sights set on traditional publishing, ever since I was in elementary school and realized that writing books was an actual career I could have. My stories have always been written for myself first and foremost; to see my books sitting on the shelf in Barnes & Noble has been my dream for so long. I don’t have a guarantee that I’ll get there yet, but I am one massive step closer, and I’ll be riding that high for quite a while.

I’ll have another newsletter out sooner rather than later that will breakdown How I Got My Agent—I really believe in transparency and communication more than anything else, in every facet of my life—publishing is not exempt from that. For now, I’ll just give a brief teaser of the book that got her attention.

THE GREAT GLAVENISEAN THEATER, also known as TGGT, or, affectionately, my weird theater book, is the story of a tailor named Morgan who joins a 1920s theater known for the interdimensional portal in the belly of the stage. It is a story about a man losing his mind and questioning his reality, a story of pining and yearning and the lengths we’ll go for love.

Or, as my agent has put it, “the dreamiest and strangest adult fantasy I’ve read in a long while.” Which is tremendous praise.

I truly feel like one of the most fortunate people in the world. TGGT has been a labor of love, and oddly enough, rather an outlier among my other books and concepts, as the love story within it, while prominent and very narratively relevant, is not as centerstage as those in my other stories. However, I am a self-professed romantic on main, and the romantic relationship in TGGT was one of the very first bits that came to me, back in 2020 when this story sprung into being. Love, in all its myriad shapes and forms, will always be at the core of my writing.

I’ll go into more detail about TGGT later (including the DVPit Discord pitch that gathered vital attention in my HIGMA breakdown), but for now I’ll keep things short and sweet. Thank you again for joining me for the ride, and I hope you’ll stick around!

As a closer, I have to give a shoutout to Leah Saint-John, my favorite modern poet, who wrote this piece for me years ago, and is where my newsletter title comes from.

‘For whom / and to whom all this love, / all this light falling.’

If that stanza doesn’t encapsulate the soul of everything I desire to write, the kernel secreted away in every story no matter how dark it gets, then I don’t know what does. So thank you Leah! This is inscribed on my heart forever.

Until next time,

Catherine

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Currently reading: The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger
Currently playing: Dragon Age: The Veilguard (Antivan Crow, Bellara romance)
Currently listening to: Bible Belt by Dry the River

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