Morning, Patreon fam. Happy Caturday. Today’s image comes courtesy of Master Library Radish Loki Izzar, who has taken to napping on the bookshelf directly above the couch whenever I sit down to write or watch TV. Usually it’s the chin which drapes over the edge of the shelf, but he recently decided showing off his legs was best.
I’m officially back to writing this week! I started a new story on Friday afternoon, despite the hideous Brisbane heatwave, and I’m starting to build up a bit of a posting buffer for the serials running alongside the stories. I’m trying to focus on walking instead of running, because this time of year is deceptive in terms of figuring out what’s feasible, but I’m feeling pretty confident I can get back to a regular rhythm with fiction.
On the other hand, I’ll be back to two meetings a day plus workshop prep from Wednesday next week on top of being my spouse-mouses driver on their commute to and from work. We’ll see how all my good habits progress once we’re back in the everyday chaos.
2024: YEAR OF THE SERIAL
Assuming things do go to plan, I’ll be running two serials simultaneously starting January. Warhol Sleeping will have new entries every Friday, while I’ll be posting new installments of The Shackleton Job every Wednesday. By March, I’m hoping I’ll have a third serial in the mix, while also keeping the non-fiction and short stories ticking along. It’s a big, ambitious amount of writing every week, but I’m hoping I can keep things under control.
Part of my logic comes from my experiences writing what’s, in essence, pro-wrestling fanfic for the Total Extreme Championship Wrestling franchise over the years. While my writer-brain will look at a thousand words of story draft and think of it as a hard days work, my fan-writer brain would regularly disappear into three-day long writing binges where I’d produce tens of thousands of words. Partially this is because there was a structure that’s easier to navigate, but I suspect it’s also because I could post things and get immediate feedback from readers.
I’m interested to see if the serial schedule and structure can help me write something a little more long-form. Warhol Sleeping is a series of 16 chapters comprised of four vignettes per chapter, adding up to about 3,000 words per instalment. It’s an exercise in structure and form as much as narrative, and it’s about 90% done at this point with one chapter left to write.
The Shackleton Job entries are going to adopt a similar chapter length with the new entry, with an eye towards a familiar sixteen chapter structure. This will make it a bit more cohesive than the series has been in the past (the first post was an early work in progress vignette before I’d turned the stories into a weekly thing. It was the third or fourth entry before I realised I should create a graphic to unify the series).
The other part of my logic is, frankly, the desire to build up a backlist of longer titles alongside my short fiction. Eclectic Projects often mutates to match my needs as a writer. 2022 was all about the short fiction because I needed to reconnect with my process and stop being afraid of finishing work, and the Saturday Morning Stories helped with that. 2024 is the year I have to stop fucking around, to a certain extent, and put out some books that are a little easier to market than short story collections. Much as I love them, there’s no escaping the fact the majority of my book sales come from the novella-length works, and publishing is a ultimately a game of numbers.
Plus, I’ve got a lot of story ideas I really want to clear off the decks, and the only way to do that is to write the fuckers.
WARHOL SLEEPING
There are days when the influences on Warhol Sleeping seem insanely obvious to me. Yes, there’s the broader cyberpunk genre, but the world-building owes a huge debt to the Cyberpunk RPG and early 90s Anime like Cyber City Oedo 808. Second tier science fiction built over the top of the original cyberpunk, ostensibly built on the credo “style over substance.”
There are also less obvious influences, like Hal Duncan’s The Land of Somewhere Safe, which is very much not a cyberpunk book but blew me away with the way it cleaved to a formal, artificial structure which became part of the effect. Duncan treated prose like poetry, to a certain extent, playing with formal structures to make you feel and read differently, and it definitely informed the way I thought about Warhol Sleeping when I came back to the book after a decade.
Also, too, the way I’ve tossed folks into the deep end without any real explanation for stuff, trusting in the voice to carry us forward as context accretes around the reader.
THE SHACKLETON JOB
The next instalment will go live Wednesday and should, all things running smoothly, become a weekly thing thereafter. This serial’s had a patchy start given it was running monthly, and then intermittently, but the prior entries are all available to read here if you’d like to catch up.
Short version: immortal cat-burglar from the American south is forced to work for otherworldly forces thanks to a bad deal her father made. Said forces want her to recover bottles of Shackleton’s Scotch which are said to be made available on the black market, although nobody knows who is selling or where the bottles come fro. Our immortal, Tallulah Wyndham-Price, tracked clues to a remote Pacific island where a deranged Chronomancer has been raising dinosaurs. She asked questions, he gave her a head-start before setting his velociraptors on her. Hi-jinx abound.
Thie next entry is end of Act One, AKA the gear change chapter. Tully learns something important, a new player is revealed, and the direction of the next four chapters is set. if you’re dropping into the series for the first time, it’s not the worst place to start.
NEW STORIES
I’m writing stories again for the first time in a long, long while, coming back to the keyboard despite a heatwave that’s making my spouse-mouse incredibly grumpy. Trying to hit a cruising speed of about 2000 words a day, and the current story is a little taster for the character who sits at the heart of my thesis novellas (Which isn’t unexpected, given I wrote about series works and iterating characters out across multiple narratives).
Expected this to be a short one, but I suspect it’ll end up being a 5,000 word beast by the end. I have a rough budget for these now — approximate 260,000 words of fiction over twelve months —which will allow me to keep the Eclectic Projects magazine running after the year is up. I can do twelve months of print issues writing around third of that, given the original fiction already generated for Patreon but not yet used, but I miss doing stories regularly.
BRAIN JAR PRESS
I’m meant to be taking a short break from Brain Jar, but our press had over fifty submissions in the space of twenty-four hours which is a big aberration in our numbers. Lots of reading in my future, and lots of rejection letters to send out (big surges, by and large, often mean we’ve been featured on a “get your novel published” website full of folks who aren’t big on reading guidelines or making sure we publish the kinds of books they’re writing).
ECLECTIC PROJECTS 5
I’ve started putting the edits in and should have it ready to upload by New Years — later than intended, but still within my margin of error to keep the magazine going.
Which means I turn my attention to issue six, which is almost done. I just need to finish the non-fiction piece and proof the draft – this time, without a thesis looming over my shoulder!