Please wlecome Tristan Tarwater to my blog today, who is sharing a guest post about writing series and serials.
Guest Post: Serials
In my neverending quest to try new things and also make things hard for myself, I decided to release HEN & CHICK: The Marauders’ Island as a serial online. For about a year, I released one episode/chapter a month for an exclusive audience, first through Patreon and then through Gumroad Memberships.
I am a big fan of mini-series, Netflix and shows on E4 like Humans, The Aliens, Peaky Blinders, which have shorter seasons but definite story arcs and endings within a much bigger narrative. While the story of our mage Azria is ongoing and there is still much of the world of Mun for her to explore, I definitely wanted to have definite endings to larger plot lines. Having definite end points and goals gave me something to write towards, which kept the plot moving. With a quick turnaround of a month, knowing what it all lead to helped me trim the fat and kept me focused. Planning larger arcs with the end goal of a trilogy helped remind me to drop hints to keep Azria barreling towards the problems and adventures of the next two books. I wanted to serialize a story for several reasons, but the process of writing and finishing a concise but compelling episode really helped me shake off and hone some of my habits as a writer.
Some writers have daily goals for getting their prose wordcount in; I used to try to adhere to this, at 1,000 words a day but would beat myself up when I didn’t hit it. Writing and editing an episode a month was a decent sized goal that incorporated a lot of the different things writers have to do: not only writing but editing, writing promo for it (can’t just dump it in the inbox! You have to write a little something something for your wonderful readers!), writing a bit of a blurb, doing promotion for it. It left me time to work on other projects as well. Sometimes I would write short stories about the other characters in the book or work on different projects entirely. Having an episode done in a month was a small but mighty accomplishment which kept me working towards more!
In HEN & CHICK: The Marauders’ Island, Azria’s first quest in finding a long lost treasure is completed. In her second adventure she faces more challenges, more dangerous and more personal than before. Azria has learned a lot as a mage and a crew member of the ship, The Hen & Chick and I’ve learned quite a bit as a writer! Are we both up to the challenges facing us? I guess we’ll find out one month at a time!
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