Last week I was invited by Erica Drayton to join her and S.E. Reid to natter about publishing serial fiction on Substack. What followed was a very nuts-and-bolts discussion about the process of publishing serials, including taking a close look at publishing on Substack specifically.
Check out the recording if that sounds like your sort of thing. If it prompts any questions, do stick them down in the comments.
If you’d like to take a look at Tales from the Triverse, the serial I mention, you can find it here:
I’m intending to hold more conversations like this with a range of writers this year, digging more into the craft of writing a serial rather than the technical requirements of publishing one. Stay tuned!
Lots of people showed up for this one — thanks to Ben Wakeman, Shaina Read, Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️, The Horror of Miles Carnegie, Sean Thomas McDonnell, and everyone else who joined us.
Meanwhile.
The short story I’ve been working on is nearly complete. It’s been an alarmingly slow process: I really don’t get on well when I’m writing in quiet isolation. Apparently my brain needs the thrum of a serial, the pressure of weekly releases, to keep me properly focused.
Sometimes it feels like writing a serial is incompatible with our inevitably busy lives, but I’m finding it to be the other way around. A serial is the type of project that most easily fits into a busy life, because it has a structure and a timeframe built into it. That makes it easy to slot into the gaps.
A short story, or a project that you work on without defined deadlines, where publishing is some vague point in the future, or entirely optional, is actually harder to squeeze in. There will always be a more important job to do, something more pressing. Sitting down to indulgently write a short story will never be at the top of my list of priorities, whereas getting the chapter finished so I can post it out on a Friday will always rise to the top.
The good news is that I’ve finished the first draft, so will hopefully be able to get this thing out the door sooner rather than later. After that, I’ll be back to doing serials, albeit in some new, experimental (for me) forms.
Most podcasts I’m listening to at the moment are political (UGH), so it was delightful to listen to Post Games’ chat with Christoffer Bodegard, designer and writer of Esoteric Ebb. A fascinating conversation about interactivity, storytelling, design and more:
There’s a period from 2012 to about 2015 that is a cultural blind spot for me, due to my son just being born. Anything that wasn’t toddler-oriented slipped through the net. I’d never heard of the film Now You See Me, and we watched it over the weekend. Enjoyable silliness, put together with a decent level of skill and style. It’s the mid-budget sort of film that leans heavily on an excellent cast that doesn’t seem to get made so much these days.
We’re playing through Blue Prince, which is a very devious puzzle game. It starts off devious, but then becomes considerably more devious. I suspect I still do not fully grasp quite how devious it is. As far as I’m aware it was the work of primarily one bloke, which is a remarkable achievement. There are pretend children’s picture books inside the game that you can read which are better than many of the actual books I read to my son before he could read. I can’t quite fathom it as an artistic achievement.
Right, that’s it for this week. Thanks for watching / reading!
