Newsletter for the week of 2/9/24

Newsletter for the week of 2/9/24

Sorry about dropping off there. As you may have picked up, things are getting busy.

News: Vol 1, on sale right now over on Amazon. $2.99, go check it out! Audiobook for Vol.2 has finally reached me, and is completely screwing my focus and work schedule. Todd did an outstanding job, especially with all the Siphios accents. Really great stuff, and it becomes weirdly addicting to listen to. Like, I know the story. I wrote the story. I rewrote those scenes and chapters, posted them, lived with them for what feels like absolute ages. And yet, hearing them read aloud completely changes the experience of them. I find myself wanting to write in a way that will sound good when read aloud. I don’t- maintaining a consistent “voice” in a story is crucial. But the temptation is there.

For those of you who asked about paperback, it IS coming, they were just finalizing the cover design. Should be up sooner rather than later, though as of this writing, it wasn’t up yet. They have the new cover up for Vol.1, so that’s good. It’s basically a zoom in on a detail from the previous cover. Which works a lot better, tbh. Well, you have all heard me bang on about that until you must be sick of it. Still, busy days. Lots of writing being done, various projects prodded along, plus lots of family activities going on. Not bad stuff, just lots of balls to juggle.

Writing/Philosophy thing which this week is a brief thing on writing-

Webnovels are weird, ain’t they? I am writing here about the daily or weekly serial, not ebooks more generally.

Serials are nothing new, of course. Tell me if this sounds familiar-

His books were written as weekly or monthly serials… They were read out aloud in the cities or halls. The illiterate would come around to hear them; vicars would read them at the village hall. Everyone hung on the words, and each chapter had an ending that made you want to know what was going to happen next…

The story goes that when Little Nell was on her deathbed in The Olde Curiosity Shoppe, the ship was sailing to New York with the new copies of the book onboard, and the port was swamped by thousands of people desperately trying to get their hands on the book to find out if Little Nell died or not.

This was from a national geographic interview with Dickens great-great-grandson. Well worth a look if you are at all interested in Dickens. 

So the basic concept of serials in print has been around since at least the Victorian era, and of course, can trace their structural lineage back to the oral tradition. Storytellers reciting linked stories, day by day. The Iliad and The Odyssey, for example, or the various celtic epic cycles. 

I still reckon webnovels are pretty weird. They are stories built in small chunks around a single mechanism- the need to find out what happens next... tomorrow. Not at some distant time, tomorrow.

David Eddings (a somewhat grim name these days) had these long running serials. Huge, continent spanning adventures. Eddings, for all his failings as a human being, had a real gift for writing the fantasy equivalent of pringles. His characters were simple, one or two notes, clear thematic design for each of them, clear verbal ticks. Like pringles, his books are low-key brilliant in their construction, even if the end result is neither very good nor very good for you.

I would find them in the library and compulsively read eight in a row. Then they would be done, and I would be wondering if there would ever be another Eddings book ever again.

Other authors did the same, of course. I’m blanking on the name, but that one where everyone lived in Fantasy Florida and was born with a unique quirk? There were TONS of books in that series. But they were BOOKS. Not very long books, three hundred pages of cheap, small paperback, but books. You didn’t get that same daily microdose of fiction. It wasn’t built around the daily chapter structure, or even Dickens weekly or monthly structure.

Frank L Baum did this too, with the Wizard of Oz books, now that I think about it. If you havent read them, you are missing out. Kids books, yes, but more distilled imagination per-page than almost anything else you could read. 10/10- read 'em.

So I am coming from an environment where long running book series were common enough, especially in the pulp trade, but new books ment waiting a year or longer. Hi GOT fans! That last book will be out any day now, right? Right? 

Running into webnovels was… odd. I honestly thought it was just a Chinese thing, before being reminded that Light Novels were a thing that existed and almost painfully Japanese. And plenty of authors from around the world were piling in too.

It was like finding out that they were just handing out cocaine for free, or at least cheap. You mean I can just turn up and get my fix? There is a metric ton of it on hand, and more will be delivered more or less daily? I don’t have to wait a year for the next installment? Sign me up!

What I didn’t consider until I started writing them was how it changes what you write and how you write it. Some books simply don’t work as webnovels. Webnovels are a product of two competing factors- audience attention and the author’s ability to consistently write. There are functional limits to both, and it is strongly in the author’s interest to write in such a way that the audience is eager to find out what happens next.

I won’t get into a deep dive into the structural bizarreness of a successful webnovel chapter. God knows I don’t always nail it. Just believe me, it’s there.

Consider, for example, Catcher in the Rye. It would not work chopped into five page chunks released daily. Nor would Flowers for Algernon, The Great Gatsby or Harry Potter. 

As a result, certain genres and formats get preferenced over others in both reading and writing webnovels. Fantasy is by far the most popular, but I have to wonder if this isn't the result of early mover advantage shaping the market. All those Chinese and Japanese books, and their fanstatical elements. 

For example, there is no reason, structurally, that a war novel or a highschool romance couldn’t work as a webnovel. They would be brilliant, actually. But- hooks. How do you end every chapter with that moment of tension? With that “I have to know what happens next!”

Not like there is no market for ‘em. Women make up the largest single group of readers, and while the dominance of the romance genre is highly exaggerated, its fans are very loyal, and very active. The WWII enthusiast suburban dad would probably get a kick out of reading his stories on his phone as he waits for his morning coffee. They are just a lot harder to write and promote effectively.

I don’t really want to be the author that cracks the code on that one. Just not the kind of stories I enjoy writing. I just hope that the person who does crack it remembers us little folk as they cruise around the world in their gold plated helicarrier. Though we may be quite hard to see behind the pallet loads of bullion.

So where does this leave us? Webnovels are weird, because the structure of them is built around a dopamine loop. It limits the stories authors can tell, and it limits how we can tell them. But! We can look back to our literary forebears- Dickens, and “Homer” (Don’t @ me, I know but work with me here) and all the others who crammed in romances and war stories and family dramas into serial fiction. It can be done again. The medium is evolving rapidly, and growing. It will be interesting to see what this weird little creature grows into.