My plan was to have tomorrow’s post be a conglomeration of “Root Two” postmortem thoughts, updates, and some other assorted things, but I just changed my mind.
Exciting!
Here’s what I’m going to do instead. Tomorrow, I’m going to make sure you get more of my sweet, sweet fiction in your inbox. It’s going to take me a minute to arrange that, but I promise it’ll be out before tomorrow ends.
This means that today, I’m going to get into the other stuff. But I’m not going to be precious about it. I’ve been avoiding this post because I’ve been too precious. Worried that if I don’t make sure everything that I send to your inbox is polished, clean, and beautiful, you’ll hate me.
Hello, perfectionism, old friend. Please leave. Thank you.
OK.
The “Root Two” Postmortem
On multiple occasions, I’ve committed to telling you all how the original version ended, so here it is:
Hemmy conscripted KrisLove to pull an elaborate prank on Cyn.
That’s it.
Because way back when I wrote the first draft, I was more eager to end the story (which at the time I panicked had gotten way too long), than to figure out a satisfying way to pull together all the threads I’d started. Like I said, it was a total let down. I hope you agree that the new version is better.
I made lots of other improvements, all of which I’m proud of. But the thing that ended up surprising me most was that I didn’t shorten it at all. In fact, this version is longer than the first one. I have this medium to thank for that. As I think I mentioned in an earlier post, serialized novellas fit perfectly into the fiction-focused Substack model.
It’s more than likely I’ll do another one soon.
But first!
Here are the things I’ve got in the pipeline…
Shorter (than a novella) Stories
I’ve got a few in the pipeline. Most of them are olderish, but I’d like to get them all out, here, for the whole world* to read at its (their?) leisure.
There’s also one I meant to finish by now, but…
My Novel Won’t Leave Me Alone
A few weeks ago, I finally admitted to myself that the relentless desire I had to work on my novel again probably meant I should work on my novel again.
Since then, it’s been very hard to work on anything else. I’m completely absorbed. This is both a very good thing (creative energy! spiritual fulfillment! a profound sense of purpose!), and a very inconvenient thing — it’s been eating up pretty much all of my writing time every day, and I’ve lacked the discipline to set it aside in order to move the ball forward on some of those other projects, including one I’m actually getting paid for! (More on that last in a future post.)
In order to strike some kind of balance between this renewed passion to finish this massively ambitious project and not abandon the Dispatches in the meantime, I’ve decided to periodically write about my progress on the novel, and even share excerpts here and there.
I’m not sure what that looks like yet, but you can expect more soon.
Fiction > Nonfiction
This is the shorthand tag I’ve been using lately to file away a whole bunch of ideas and ambitions that all fall under the same theme.
But instead of explaining more, I’m going to tell you to expect a whole post about it next week. That way I’ll actually finish the post I started earlier this week.
I’m out of time!
More fiction tomorrow.
More other stuff next week.
PS - if you want to share something of mine, please pick something else.
*You, dear subscribers, are my whole world.