12 articles about writing serial fiction from 2025

Author conversations, world building guides, AI criticism, endings

According to Substack Recapped, I published something every week of the year.

That’s a lot of newsletters. To make all of my gibberings less of a slog, I’m going to go month-by-month and pick out the most useful 12 articles I wrote in 2025. I’ll throw in some retrospective musings along the way.

January

Substack Live was flavour of the month back at the start of the year. It had launched in late-2024 and I wanted to use it to have regular conversations with other writers and show some more behind-the-scenes insights.

In January I chatted with John Ward and Ben Cohen about Substack’s algorithm, which was fascinating. It also contributed significantly to me not panicking about algorithmic developments around here: there’s always a lot of speculation about development of the platform, but talking with the developers and designers tends to be reassuring. Substack is far more transparent about this stuff than most:

It’s notable that back in January I still thought the ending of Tales from the Triverse was imminent. LOL.

February

The live streams continued! This month I nattered with Eleanor Anstruther and Ben Wakeman:

Look at that fine beard.

At one point there were plans afoot for a Substack Live-powered mini literature festival, but tech and workloads made that a tricky prospect. Something to return to when time allows.

March

This was a busy month, with Triverse barrelling into its most complex story phase and several articles that took some serious writing. This is also when I started trying to incorporate my illustrations into articles, which is how I ended up with the buckets of pacing metaphor:

Later in the month I hit 330,000 words on Triverse, at which point I realised just how absurdly large the project has become.

April

More live streams, including a fun chat with ZK Hardy and T K Hall about Bird by Bird:

April 2025 was notorious for the arrival of EMMA HORSEDICK, which might be the first big internal viral moment to hit the Substack community. In case you missed it, here’s Mike Sowden’s explainer:

May

This as a busy month, including lovely chats with Eleanor Anstruther and Neill Cameron. With the summer looming, this would be the last month of doing regular live streams — something I’m hoping to return to in 2026.

If I was to pick an article from this month it’d be this one:

Not least because of the fun sketches. These pillars of world building have been essential for working on Triverse and I hope can be useful for anyone else working on fictional settings.

June

Clearly I was feeling existential this month, with an essay on being old, the inevitability of death and the need to write:

June was also when my subscriber growth completely flatlined for a month and a half. This seemed to be the experience of multiple writers at the time and felt like something was afoot. Note that circled spot here:

My subscriber growth has always fluctuated, but I’d not seen an extended period of total non-growth. It looked oddly artificial. My best guesses are either a temporary algorithmic change at Substack’s end, or it was the impact of a new Gmail feature that made it easier to one-click bulk unsubscribe from newsletters.

As mysteriously as it began, the drought ended in July. This coincided with me exploring BookFunnel promos, but as with all these things it’s very difficult to ascribe reason to events.

July

There was a mini-controversy in the Substack fiction community around whether it was necessary to read 50 books a year in order to be a real writer. (this wasn’t really the original point of the discussion, but it’s how it ended up being interpreted)

Can we take a moment to recognise that the major controversy was about reading books? You don’t tend to get that kind of heated debate over on X. Anyway, I had thoughts.

The article I look back on most fondly was this one:

It’s about how I ran into a thorny continuity issue with the made-up pseudoscience in Tales from the Triverse, and tentatively turned to the physics community for help. Like the lighting of the beacons in Return of the King, they answered.

August

Ever since I’ve used Substack as a tool for writing and sending newsletters, there has been controversy around the platform itself. At a certain point it’s angered just about everyone, regardless of political stance. There’s a vocal minority (isn’t it always?) who are stuck in 2023 and make it their mission to shame writers into leaving.

It had bothered me for a while, not least for seeming hypocritical, but also because I’d had enough of a sort of purity test approach to community The only result is that we turn on each other, even when we’d normally be aligned in our thinking. Anyway, in August I finally got round to putting my thoughts in order:

September

By this point I knew that I was in the thick of it with Triverse. Endings were very much top of mind, although I hadn’t yet recognised the mental load I was about to take on:

October

The world building pillars I’d talked about earlier in the year got distilled down to a fun infographic in October:

I’d love to do more one-pager info sketches like that one. Hopefully something I can get to in 2026.

November

I’ve avoided mentioning AI in this 2025 round-up so far, but it was never far from mind. It’s an inescapable topic, whether you use it or not, whether you’re pro-AI or anti-AI or fall somewhere in the middle.

November, it seems, was when I felt compelled to spell out my position. This was prompted in particular by some quite weird comments from the head of a big publisher about how generative AI can be a cure for writer’s block:

Of course, there’s no getting away from the reality that I used generative AI extensively in 2022 to illustrate Triverse. Until I ceased all use of genAI in 2023, having reconsidered my ethical position, I thought it might be a useful tool for writers. Part of that was using it to create elements for a comic-style intro to Tales from the Triverse.

It had bothered me that I’d never got round to fixing that, and so I finally sketched out a hand-drawn alternative.

December

A topic I didn’t really expect to be writing about was the UK’s Online Safety Act. As annoying as it is, as poorly conceived as it is, it had only affect me as a consumer. That is, until one of my Triverse chapters was flagged and age-gated by Substack’s systems:

Writing about this has been uncomfortable and revealing. Responses have been across the board, and often say more about the commenter than my article or the OSA. Everyone has their position on freedom of expression, online moderation and censorship, and I fear that none of us are making much sense.

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And…relax

A busy year, then. Eight articles per month is a lot, it turns out. In my case, four of them are fiction and four are non-fiction. For much of 2025 the fiction side in particular has been exceedingly challenging: final acts are hard.

Looking ahead to 2026, it’s going to be a markedly different year for me as a writer. Tales from the Triverse will send out its final chapter sometime in January or early February¹, which will free up a huge chunk of my brain. I’m hoping to then have the time and brain capacity to put together some specialist courses on writing serial fiction, and how fiction writers can make use of newsletters. Maybe something around Scrivener. I may slow down my publishing schedule in order to give me space to work on larger, more detailed resources — we’ll have to see how it goes.

Anyway! The main thing is to thank all of you for subscribing and reading. Your support is a continual point of astonishment for me. I started from zero back in 2021 and there are now nine and a half thousand people here. 2025 was the year that newsletter started bringing in enough to pay the groceries and directly support my work. Even though I put out almost everything for free, a significant chunk of you still opt to sling a paid sub in my direction.

I hope you’ve had a good 2025, and that you have an even better 2026.

1. Yes, yes, I know.