Cassandra Clare shares new snippet and art from her Kickstarter project

Happy Monday! To kick off the new week, let’s have a recap of recent news. 😀
Cassandra Clare sent a summer newsletter last Friday (26 July) and not only did she include a snippet from her Kickstarter project Careful of Books, we also got accompanying art. The novella “centers on Matthew, traveling on a 1904 ocean liner that happens to be infested with vampires.”
From “A Sea Change,” the Kickstarter novella about Matthew.
It was a beautiful night.
The promenade deck wended its way around the entirely of the Majestic like a necklace of polished wood and brass fittings. There were few out walking like Matthew, perhaps because it was cool and windy, but Shadowhunters were used to the cold. Besides, the wind blew the clouds away, exposing a sky so full of stars it looked as if a jeweler had hastily stuffed a drawer with handfuls of loose-cut diamonds.
A year ago, Matthew would not have been able to enjoy the path the moonlight made across the water, or the sky afire with white flame. He would have been thinking about his last drink, or where he would find his next one. A frantic circle of pain and shame and longing: one he’d had to trudge invisibly, keeping his secrets from his friends, his family.
Now the weight was off him. He felt light, and sometimes strangely at rest, like a windmill on a windless night. He no longer despised himself, but he did not know his purpose, either. If, he mused, one had to have a purpose at all. Was it not enough to be a Shadowhunter — one among many, but each sworn to protect humanity against demons? To keep peace among mundanes and Downworlders — warlocks, werewolves, the Fair Folk, and vampires?
A year ago, he wasn’t sure he would have so quickly identified Miss Gwendolyn as a vampire, either. But then Matthew spent more time with Downworlders than most Shadowhunters did. Some he was friendly with, but he did not trick himself into thinking that meant they were not dangerous. And a vampire hiding out among humans was cause for concern.
He’d noted the way Gwendolyn hadn’t eaten, and had drunk sparingly of the wine. The translucence of her fingernails. Her pallor, even under a layer of makeup. The veins at her temples — if those were visible, she was hungry. And there had been the odd behavior of Orville Cole. The way he’d stared at her worshipfully. Humans often fell under the spell of vampires, finding them impossible to resist. It was not the same as a thrall relationship, where the vampire fed from the human and in return promised them eternal life, but it was a use of vampire glamour forbidden by the Accords.
Though Gwendolyn had seemed, if anything, annoyed at Cole’s attentions. Perhaps she’d enchanted him without meaning to and wished nothing more than to be rid of him. It was hard to say; Matthew did not get the sense she’d been a vampire very long.
At that moment, lost in thought, Matthew collided with something solid.
“Pardonnez-moi — oh. It’s you.” The young man from dinner, Sylvain Allard, had evolved out of the shadows of the night. He wore a dark summer suit which blended with the night.
Here are “the Cassandra Jean endpapers for the Kickstarter novella book, featuring Matthew and his intrepid companion, Oscar.”

There is also an older A Sea Change snippet from tumblr:
“And where did you say you were from, Mr. Worthing?”
Matthew set his wineglass down. He hadn’t drunk any of the wine, of course, but he found that simply twirling the stem between his fingers and occasionally gesturing with the glass was enough to fool most people, which avoided annoying questions about why he was abstaining.
“My family’s estate is in Hampshire,” he said, in as plummy an accent as he could manage. He had decided that for the purposes of this sea voyage, he would adopt the persona of a British upper-class twit of the fox-hunting variety. Hunting poor little helpless foxes all around the grounds of some massive house, he thought. Why not try something actually difficult, like hunting a Feroci demon through the back alleys of London? “I will return there after I visit Constantinople, having completed my Grand Tour.”
A third snippet was shared a while ago and it also featured Matthew’s beloved dog Oscar.
This past Friday, Cassie also revealed the cover for The Mortal Instruments: The Graphic Novel, Vol 8. This 8th installment will continue the story of City of Fallen Angels.

There’s also been some Sword Catcher/The Chronicles of Castellane news recently. While in Spain, Cassie shared the title of the third book: The Bone Conjurers (40:16). Cassie actually “would like to do four books”, so we’re only missing one more title! Furthermore, she teased “[r]ight now I don’t have any big announcements, I’m not allowed to share my Sword Catcher Hollywood news ;).”
Don’t forget that The Ragpicker King is published on 4 March 2025, so make sure to pre-order your copy before that date!
During Cassie’s event in Spain, she also talked about In Fire Foretold, her upcoming YA romance duology:
[It’s] a totally different book that started out as a novella that I was writing and became of course a book because everything I write gets bigger. So it’s actually about – the word for this in English would be portal fantasy. […] It begins with a young girl, a child and she is the daughter of the magician of a king’s house in what is clearly a high fantasy world that is not our world. It is discovered that she has a power, a power that […] she is not supposed to have. That’s very dangerous if anybody were to find out about it and her father the magician opens a portal and shoves her through to our world. She grows up in our world, not having any memory of the place that she came from and not having any memory of magic or of her parents or anything. She doesn’t know where she came from and as far as she’s concerned and that she’s been told, she was found wandering the streets when she was six years old with no memory of where she came from. And that stays that way until strange things start to happen in her life. She winds up going to the library near her house and while she is at the library, a very large monster appears and at the same time a man on horseback appears and is like “If you want to survive, come with me. We’re going to another world.” So that’s the beginning of the book and we […] go back to the world where she came from. We discover sort of what’s going on in that world, who this guy is, who the other guys are, what happened with her family, what is her power, how can it be useful in the kingdom which is in a very dangerous situation. It’s a very […] interesting mashup between Shadowhunters and Castellane because half of it does take place in a high fantasy world and the other half takes place in our world, but these worlds are kind of cut in half. They’re separate and only a very few people can go back and forth.
That’s all this time! Have a great rest of your summer/winter. 🙂