#serialised fiction

[machineofreality]

Wirrin and the Fiends: Difference in perspective

Previously: Wirrin and the Fiends: Church Types The rest of the week passed quite pleasantly. Ketla and her mage did not, at any point, try to kill Wirrin. Wirrin did not, at any point, let up on taking in the scenery. But as they walked, Ketla pulled ahead less, and even deigned to look at the scenery with Wirrin. ‘Not much for the natural world?’ Wirrin had asked, as Ketla fidgeted and…

[keyboard-squared]

You're Missing One Thing from Your Serialised Story

Before you write that new serialised fiction story, don't miss this one crucial element!

Have you ever felt the breathless anticipation of seeing the next chapter from your new favourite story drop? There’s nothing quite like serial fiction. No other kind of story causes such eagerness and intense expectation, so it’s no wonder the medium has been around so long! Many of today’s beloved classics like Little Women and Great Expectations were originally serialised before being…

[voidtreader]

Depart 01

A planet looms into view, dimly lit by a smoldering red star: a pinprick of wavering light in the velvet void. From this small, backwater planet, with its small, dim star, a grand departure is underway. Its people are fleeing.

But the courier does not notice this speck outside in space. She is looking at the cargo bay, at the place where there should be cargo—her most important cargo yet in fact, the delivery that would prove her worth, the ancient artwork that should, by all accounts, be in a museum (and certainly is, in some fairer parallel universe)—but the bay does not contain it. The bay is, in fact, almost empty. Almost empty, except for the scattered crumbs of packing material, leading across the bay and to an ill-fitting panel on the back left wall.

Solas Vega is a tall, imposing woman: her broad right arm is covered in dark, thick tattooed tendrils; her left arm is an equally broad mechanical prosthetic fitted with menacing silver tools. Her face, now, looks somewhat serene, or calm—but she cannot completely hide her emotions, and her right knuckles grow pale and her fist clenches and releases, clenches and releases. She has learned to ground herself, in the past years: it’s a lifetime since she earned her callsign Havoc. Many of the younger couriers only know the new her; they assume the name is perhaps ironic, a joke. As if Havoc tells jokes, or lets them be told about her.

A man tried, once. To laugh at her. She was less forgiving then; hadn’t yet learned to control her rage. He had not joked again. Ever. The lights in the cargo bay flicker. The infestation must be big, Solas thinks. She doesn’t have room to worry about the possible dangers that entails, not with the empty cargo bay in front of her. You might think her priorities are questionable, considering the dangers of an energy-sapping swarm of jellyfish-like fungi living, floating, devouring, inside the electronic-stuffed panels of your space vessel, a space vessel currently drifting through the cold dead chasm of open space, where everything—life support systems, propulsion, communication—everything was dependent on said electronics functioning properly. If you do think this, if you think that maybe she should consider the present peril a more pressing issue than the missing (eaten? Probably eaten. Almost definitely eaten) cargo, then count yourself lucky you have not encountered the type of people Solas has to answer to.

[machineofreality]

Absolutely no shame in bailing! Serialised fiction has the potential to really get fouled up if you decide that you don't like something you've already published. I've given up on heaps of my first drafts on the blog because I hot a point where I really needed to change what I'd already posted to get a story I liked.

For me, that means trying to stay way ahead of what's posted (eg: I've got about 30k more words written than posted at this point) so that I have the opportunity to do more structural edits than if I'm posting as I go.

Picaresque/episodic stories are also a good option, where it's more like a series of adventures than a single overarching story.

So publishing a book vs publishing say an anthology chapters? In terms of prep, which one is would you recommend?

Not sure what you mean by anthology chapters. Like a short story collection or like an online serial?

[lokh]

oh my god. a manga where everyones actually wearing masks???

edit: NEVERMIND jumped the gun here it was just for one scene cos they were at a nail salon 😭

edit 2: hmm actually. depending on how recently this manga was drawn it could just be reflective of how not everyone wears masks. the customers are wearing masks in the salon but outside usually not but Sometimes. they are

edit 3: I WAS RIGHT??

[adelidae]

i need to write.

[merelymatt]

Later, they figured out the sequence of events.

The sequence started with Callum, locked in a bare basement room with a corpse for company, ripping cabling out of the walls through a rusty junction box in the corner, and ended with Callum and Lisaveta warily circling an alliance in Lisaveta’s living room.

Chapter 12 of A Net Too Wide To Break His Fall is in the latest Foggy Outline newsletter, out today.

Ready: Dominoes all lined up

📇 Skipton Business Expo Learning Zone update

🌅 I Need A Miracle @inyourbenevolence trailer and release date

⛓️ A chain of events in A Net Too Wide To Break His Fall chapter 12

[joncronshawauthor]

Announcing: Wyvern Rider (A story in the Ravenglass Universe)

Good news, everyone! I am thrilled to announce that my new serialised story, “Wyvern Rider”, will be releasing weekly chapters every Saturday at 2pm UK time, starting May 25, exclusively in my Ream community. Set in the Ravenglass Universe, “Wyvern Rider” follows the journey of Irina, a young village girl who forms a profound bond with an injured wyvern hatchling named Nim. Under the guidance…

[prokopetz]

Do you happen to know the origin of the fantasy trope in which a deity's power directly corresponds to the number of their believers / the strength of their believers' faith?

I only know it from places like Discworld and DnD that I'm fairly confident are referencing some earlier source, but outside of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, I can't think of of any specific work it might've come from, 20th-c fantasy really not being my wheelhouse.

Thank you!

That's an interesting question. In terms of immediate sources, I suspect, but cannot prove, that the trope's early appearances in both Dungeons & Dragons and Discworld are most immediately influenced by the oeuvre of Harlan Ellison – his best-known work on the topic, the short story collection Deathbird Stories, was published in 1975, which places it very slightly into the post-D&D era, though most of the stories it contains were published individually earlier – but Ellison certainly isn't the trope's originator. L Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber also play with the idea in various forms, as does Roger Zelazny, though only Zelazny's earliest work is properly pre-D&D.

Hm. Off the top of my head, the earliest piece of fantasy fiction I can think of that makes substantial use of the trope in its recognisably modern form is A E van Vogt's The Book of Ptath; it was first serialised in 1943, though no collected edition was published until 1947. I'm confident that someone who's more versed in early 20th Century speculative fiction than I am could push it back even earlier, though. Maybe one of this blog's better-read followers will chime in!

(Non-experts are welcome to offer examples as well, of course, but please double-check the publication date and make sure the work you have in mind was actually published prior to 1974.)

[machineofreality]

Wirrin and the Fiends: A great deal of digging

Previously: Wirrin and the Fiends: A meeting of explorers Ayan was true to his word, and the digging continued to be leisurely. Even Veyoc got puffed fairly quickly compared to Wirrin. She didn’t mind, though, she was still in no hurry. They had to pause most of the next morning to cut some saplings for supports to keep the walls of the emerging tunnel from flooding in on the excavation. The…

[rebel-wrath]

I'm something of a chaos goblin at heart, my DND alignment is always chaotic, and the only use I have for rule books is toilet paper, unless their on my kobo because that would not be comfortable. Or sanitary.

There is one rule I've found that cannot be ignored if you want to grow as a writer. Everything else you can burn. Show don't tell is great as long as you understand where to tell not show. Proper spelling and grammar can be ignored, if you understand how and can justify it. Don't infodump except when you are required to, because there's times when you have to. Don't head hop unless you're using a narrative style that allows you to head hop. Every rule except this one comes with caveats, and growth as a writer isn't measured in how well you learn the rules and can stick to them, but in how well you learn when they don't apply, and can write around them.

Don't believe me? The first Discworld novel starts with an infodump. It has to, because readers expect fantasy worlds to still be globes, and if you're breaking that rule you have to start by stating outright that you are breaking it. There are incredibly popular books filled with head hopping (the thriller genre especially). Even spelling can be ignored if you want to write in a dialect, or have a POV character writing the story who struggles with this.

I'm posting a serial story on here three times a week (Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday) under the tag #NofNA which repeatedly breaks rules that are constantly said to be inviolable. It works, because I write comedy, because my narrative style makes it work, and because I actively seek ways to break rules all the time.

So, what's the one rule that can't be broken? It's WRELA. And it's the most important writing rule there is, and the only one you should never break.

WRELA. Well, technically, W.R.E.L.A.

Write. Write something. Write anything. It doesn't matter what you write, and it doesn't matter how good it is. Write.

Read. Read your own work back. Read old pieces you wrote years ago, and the thing you just finished. Read it out loud. Read it to yourself. Read it to others. Read things others have written. Read comments, blog posts, movie reviews, short stories, fanfic, scripts, and novels. Read the back of the cereal box, the receipt when you buy something, the terms and conditions, the small print. Read skeets and subtitles and emails and the sms from your granny, God bless her.

Edit. Go over the work you have written, again and again if you have to. Edit it once or edit it 1000 times. That story I'm serialising? It took me fifteen years (on and off) and two lifetimes (when I believed I was cis and after I learned that I'm trans) to write, and the finished version is as different a book to the original as it was possible to be whilst still being about the same thing.

Learn. Learn from your writing, from your reading, from your editing. Don't learn the rules. Don't take what worked for Vonnegut or King or Aristotle and blindly apply it to your work. Learn yourself. Learn who you are, what your voice is, what you're trying to say to the world. Learn how to say it. Some of those rules from other writers might work well with you. Some of them won't. That's fine. Learn what makes you a better writer.

Apply. Put the things you learned from the last piece of fiction into the next piece of fiction you write. Then do it again. Learn from that and put that into the next and then again.

The next section is me using my writing to back up my previous statements. It's a bit "markety" because I'm discussing my writing. Feel free to skip it if you want.

Okay, let's back this up: NofNA, Noun of Noun and Adjective, is a fantasy comedy that satirises our world and parodies other books. I have a few chapters up already, if you want to read it. It's about a transgender princess who joins a magic mirror reality show called Heroic Quest in return for a magical gender transition (she's a trans woman). Structurally, it has similarities to Discworld novels (one thing I learned was footnotes are a pain in the ass). Another thing I learned was that I had to keep editing the narration because I wanted to directly comment on the story as the narrator and it wouldn't work.

So I applied what I learned to the next book I wrote, Attack of the 50 ft Trans Woman.

This is a story about a Trans Woman who undergoes an experimental procedure to change gender. She grows to fifty feet, and the government sends the army after her even though she's done nothing wrong. So she heads to London to have a word with the Prime Minister.

But I knew what I'd learned from Noun of Noun and Adjective, I knew I wanted to narrate however I pleased. So the prologue makes it clear that the story is actually being told to you by an alien. As the alien narrator, I was able to interrupt the narration, go off on tangents, make jokes, and just generally be weird. It sounds like it shouldn't work, but it does. Even the huge dance scene near the end works. There's a scene from the POV of a terf, Karen, that doesn't have pronouns in it and was an absolute pain in the ass to write, but it works because the narrator is respecting Karen's insistence that Karen doesn't have pronouns. Therefore, no pronouns are used to refer to Karen in Karen's scene except the occasional first person when directly quoting Karen's tweets because Karen does not respect Karen's choice to not use pronouns for Karen.

Seriously one of the most difficult things I've ever written, but it backs up my point that you can ignore any rules you please if 1) you can justify it, and 2) you can pull it off. I ignored basic grammar itself there.

Attack of the 50 ft Trans woman is available from all major ebook retailers and a paper version is planned for later this year

Readers have told me it made them laugh, it made them sad, it made them angry. Since anger was the point, I can happily say it works.

It was also the most fun I've ever had writing and it took me a week to do the first draft. Remember, writing is meant to be fun, and when I applied what I learned from the previous book, I went from a book that took me 15 years from start to finish to a book that took only a few months.

So I took what I learned from Attack and I applied it to Bigoted Book Burners Bloodily Bludgeoned by Badly Burnt Books. I wanted to write about book burnings, and I decided the best genre for what I wanted to write was a horror. This story had a more traditional narration, but it's essentially two different stories told simultaneously, and has a bulleted list of content warnings a page long. The even chapters are the story of a kid growing up trans when the only parent she has is her terf mum. It was horrendous to write, there were days I could only manage a paragraph. I'm not looking forward to the edit.

The odd number chapters start with the book burning, with the grimoire of a witch being thrown on the fire, then causing all the books in the village to animate and kill people. It's a massively over the top splatterpunk extravaganza and is hilarious and the perfect antidote to the even number chapters.

What I learned from Attack was that I'm not a very reliable free flow writer. I need plans. And so every chapter of B5bB3 was planned before it was written. I could see how dark some scenes were, and it meant I knew where to balance them out with correspondingly funny scenes. I learned more about character agency and development.

And from B5bB3 I learned about building narrative tension, about holding off the horrible so it's not overwhelming until suddenly bang! it is overwhelming, and I'm applying that to TWTSQ, my current WIP.

B5bB3 will be out later this year, hopefully around June.

There's other books I've written, under various other names, but I'm only discussing the ones I write as Caledonia Fife. But everything I've written and everything I've read has taught me about writing, and I can honestly say that the books I'm putting out now, under this name, are so much incredibly better than the first book I put out in 2010 under a different name.

So if you want to be the best writer you can be:

Write

Read

Edit

Learn

Apply

THIS CHAPTER - IN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

NEXT CHAPTER IS CHAPTER Two- THE INTERVIEW

ALL - Noun of Noun and Adjective

[mxcottonsocks]

Reading Like A Victorian

A while ago, I discovered the website 'Reading Like a Victorian', a digital humanities project from The Ohio State University and collaborators.

Since tumblr's been going through a bit of a serial-literature revival, I thought I would share...

Here are some extracts from the website's 'About Us':

RLV is an interactive timeline of the Victorian period. It focuses on serialized novels [...] and adds volume-format publications for context. 

When we read Victorian novels today, we do not read them in the form in which they originally came out. Most Victorian novels appeared either as “triple deckers,” three volumes released at one time, or as serials published monthly or weekly in periodicals or in pamphlet form. Serialized novels’ regularly timed, intermittent appearance made for a reading experience resembling what we do when we are awaiting the next weekly episode of Game of Thrones, watching installments of other TV serials in the meantime. Whenever we pick up a Penguin or Oxford paperback of a Victorian novel today, we are engaged in the equivalent of binge-watching a series that has already reached its broadcast ending [and is] a very different experience from what Victorian audiences were doing with novels. Reading Like a Victorian reproduces the “serial moment” experienced by Victorian readers [...]

More info and screenshots and so on below the cut:

[...] if reading serial installments at their original pace is valuable, it is even more valuable to read them alongside parts of novels and of other kinds of texts that Victorian readers could have been following at the same time [...] [...] a reader who, in 1847, had been following the part issues of both Dickens’s Dombey and Son and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and then picked up Jane Eyre, published in volume form in October of that year, might notice in Florence Dombey, Becky Sharp, and Jane Eyre a pattern of motherless or orphaned girls trying to negotiate a hostile world on their own. While this figure is well known to be a character type in Victorian fiction perfectly embodied by Jane Eyre and Florence Dombey, Becky Sharp does not often emerge among the heroines who fit that type; reading the novels simultaneously foregrounds parallels between Becky, Florence, and Jane that are not at all obvious if their storylines are experienced separately

I find that, for browsing, the website is easier to use on a computer or tablet than a phone, but it's ok on phone to search for something specific.

The timeline:

Here's what the timeline looks like:

It shows 12 months at a time, and using the left and right arrows will move you back or forward by a month. You can use the 'Jump To Date' function to navigate to a different twelve-month period. Or you can use the 'Author Search' function to navigate to particular works if you know the author's name.

In the above screenshot of the timeline, which shows the period January to December 1852, there are several works shown, including:

ongoing serialised works which had at least one installment published prior to 1852;

works which began serialisation during 1852;

works published in three-volume format during 1852;

other works published during 1852

Details about each work:

You can click on the bar that represents a book's publication to get a drop-down that provides information about that book, its publication, and links to help you read the relevant serial parts.

Here's what happens if you click on Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford:

On the left of the drop-down, there's some general information about the work, its publication history, and how to use the links.

On the right, there's information and links to help you experience the book in its serial parts: it separates out the parts, indicates the month and the year they were published, and what chapters of the work were published in that part. It also provides notes on each part where helpful. There is a scroll-bar at the right of the drop-down, so you can scroll down to the later installments of the work.

[I chose Cranford as an example as it helps demonstrate the value of the Reading Like a Victorian website... From what I understand, Gaskell initially wrote 'Our Society at Cranford' as a standalone piece of short fiction, but was encouraged to write more, so further pieces also set in the fictional town of Cranford were published intermittently in the same magazine over the next year or so. While a particularly dedicated Gaskell fan who wanted to 'read along' with Cranford following the original publication could probably search 1.5-years-worth of a weekly magazine to find the 9 issues which included the material which would later be published as Cranford, the Reading Like a Victorian website has already done that work for them... and also for anyone else who might be interested, but not quite that interested.]

The links

You can then click on an individual chapter to get links to various places to read it online:

When available / where possible, the website tends to include links to:

a facsimile copy of either the relevant serial part in the original publication, or in an 'annual' or similar volume collecting together the content of that publication, or a volume-form edition of that work if the work was not published serially or if facsimile copies of the original serialised publication are not available. [Most of the facsimiles are hosted by either the Internet Archive or the Hathi Trust Digital Library, but some are hosted as part of smaller, more specific collections, such as - in the case of Cranford - Dickens Journals Online which provides online access to the journals/magazines edited by Charles Dickens);

the text, usually on Project Gutenberg (this is usually the volume-form text, so the exact content and chapter breaks and so on may be different than originally published in serial parts; the Reading Like A Victorian website will generally explain when this is the case);

audio recordings, usually volunteer recordings from Librivox (again, the recordings are usually based on the volume-form text, so the exact content and chapter breaks and so on may be slightly different than originally published in the serial parts).

So yeah, I just thought it was a cool website and worth sharing. I believe the website is already used as a resource by some University courses and for academic research, but it can also be used by book clubs and to aid personal reading, etc. I'm using it to inform a personal reading project for 2024-26 where I follow along with six or seven novels serialised in 1864-66.

To save a scroll to the top, here's the link to the RLV website again: Reading Like A Victorian (osu.edu)

[If you want to join an already-planned read-along based on the original serialisation schedule, @dickensdaily will be doing Charles Dickens's historical novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty from mid-February 2024 to late-November 2024, to follow along with the original weekly publication of the novel in Master Humphreys Clock from February 1841 to November 1841. I personally found Barnaby Rudge a really engaging, thought-provoking read, and I'm really looking forward to reading it again. (Anyone with particular triggers or other reasons to be wary of the content or language used in older books may find it helpful to look up content warnings for the book before making a decision to read it.)]

[haveyoulistenedtothispodcast]

Summary:

Camlann is a post-apocalyptic fantasy by Ella Watts from Tin Can Audio. It’s a serialised fiction podcast inspired by folklore and Arthurian legends. Alternatively - it’s about three idiots and a dog in Wales, fighting for their lives. This series was funded by Creative Scotland and the Inevitable Foundation.

[merelymatt]

"You could yell in this woman’s face,”

said Anton, chinning at an elderly passer-by approaching with the help of a wheeled shopping bag.

“She wouldn’t notice. Wouldn’t hear anything.”

“You could spit on her?”

“She’d feel that,” said Callum. “If I time it right, she’ll decide you must have done it.”

A Net Too Wide to Break His Fall, chapter 9: Hypothesis, experiment, conclusion

Ready: Things that go Boom

The Ready edition of Ready & Waiting, the Foggy Outline newsletter, is out today – with:

🥫 Who's pitching at Interactive Soup, the community funding event where @merelymatt volunteers

🗣️ A review of our flagship environmental literacy course

🔫 An explosive new chapter of A Net Too Wide to Break His Fall, where Callum gets to know one of his new acquaintances ... but they also get the measure of him.

[boombox-fuckboy]

🌻?

The etymology of the pod in podcast comes from ipod, which is attributed to scifi "pod bay" terminology, which of course comes from pod as a space (like, capsule). You keep stuff in it. This, as far as I can tell, comes from the concept of plant pods, most famous of which are from family fabaceae, the legumes (beans and peas).

While the word podcast dates back to ~2004, serialised audio fiction is much older, with radio plays dating to the 1920s. Legume consumption has that beat by at least 58,000 years. But verbal storytelling? Who's to say.