An End to Stasis — Author’s Notes #9

Reflecting on the end to 2023, and a look ahead at what's to come in the next year for members of Cole's Chapters

Photo by Benjamin Voros on Unsplash

Thanks for a Great Start

I’ve been writing on substack just shy of 3 years. But only about 5 months of that has been spent doing fiction. I love the community of both writers and readers I’ve met here, and look forward to serving you up more stories in 2024.

Quick summary of what’s below:

• 2023 highlights

• Redesign

• Montauk retrospective

• Stasis retrospective

• Future plans

2023 Highlights

• One of my favorite ventures of the year was launching the Authors and Embers Podcast. The premise is simple: I bring on other writers from the community, and we lend our voices to table read one another’s stories. If you haven’t listened yet, I highly recommend checking out one of the episodes.

• I also loved working on the collaborative Christmas anthology I launched. The Chronicler inspired me with her Blackwater project, where writers were challenged to create a storyline around a unified premise, jumping-off point, and an antagonist. In similar fashion, I crafted the fictional portside town of Arnold’s Landing, and other writers fleshed out the world with stories from the perspective of employees at a painter/holiday decorating service.

Design Overhaul

For the new year, I also decided to completely overhaul the site design. I was previously going for the feel of an old mysterious library, full of my works. It started feeling generic, and didn’t really meld with my writing style.

At heart, I really am an adventuring creative. Rather than a library, I see this collection of stories as chapters in a battered journal; accounts from the fringes of our society where the fantastical is possible.

I think the new design is much more distinct. Me.

The overhaul is also coming with a change to my publishing schedule, which I basically nuked. I’m now pledging 5 posts per month, rather than tying myself to a specific date or time. The old way prevented me from jumping on fun, time-sensitive ideas, while I slogged through some stories I was not quite as interested in.

Montauk Post-Mortem

When I launched Cole’s Chapters, it seemed all fiction writers were doing serials. I thought it would be a great way to build interest. I had this dusty old project I’d written three years prior, and never done anything with. Perfect!

It was not perfect.

Serializing Montauk didn’t go as planned. I would go so far as to call it a failure. I still like the story I told, but I don’t think it really worked for a few reasons.

Montauk was an old piece of writing, drafted back when I had far less narrative skill, for a very different medium. The vignette style storytelling meant we spent little time with each member in a large cast, before their plot lines and problems wrapped up.

Compare with something like DUEL by Scoot where characters we care about are left in danger between episodes, creating a strong motivation to keep reading. This is something I think Montauk utterly failed to do.

The story may have worked better, framed as a morality debate between the viewpoints of Jacob and Rex Rook. But the idea came too late to bake in a meaningful payoff.

Stasis Post-Mortem

Ultimately, I think I told a complete story. But it was hamstrung by decisions I made as a novice writer, years ago. In fact, much of the Stasis collection felt like a bit of an albatross. I’d argue “Killer Cookbook” is the strongest entry, and it was never meant to be a part of the original quartet.

“Restitution” and “Goldfish Threshold” worked because they executed their premises well. But the other entries basically had to be canned and rewritten entirely. They all suffered from a high commitment to premise, with less attention paid to characters.

“Ideal Scenario” became a piece about asymmetric friendships. “Coyote” became a warning about dwelling too deeply on the past. These fixes were necessary, and I think the stories would have been stronger if these elements were part of the foundation, not the coat of paint on top.

Future Plans

All of these lessons are distilled into the upcoming collection. I’m looking forward to sharing it with you in the coming weeks. I’ve spent a long time in the past month outlining and working out the kinks in this story. This is one I’m actually very excited to be working on.

As for Stasis: everything is going behind the paywall on January 11, except for a sample story, and the handful of pieces I’ve done as part of a collection with other authors.

I can’t wait to show you what’s in store!

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Thank You for Reading!

The Stasis Collection

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