A few days back, I realized this Saturday would be a year since I posted the first chapter on this site. Hard to believe I've been writing these characters for so long. And the story's still unfolding. I sure hope nothing else terrible happens to them...
The web serial thing is a strange way to publish, unproven and (in my hands) undisciplined. I kind of like making the rules up as I go, and I've tried to find the happy medium between publishing the whole thing at once and chapters so short that events of any depth or breadth couldn't happen in them. Admittedly, more time has elapsed between chapter postings than I would have liked, and it's strange to spend such a long time writing about a single day, but it won't keep going forever. There's an ending to this story, and it's coming.
I've been thinking back. Even after a year's worth of public procrastination, I like the idea of stories you have to wait for, of being forced to spend time wondering what's going to happen next. If I write another story in the same format, I'd probably change things a little, keep things that worked and try a bunch of other stuff differently.
I've tried this before, actually, and my first narrative blog experiment, The Flying Guy, was kind of a wash. The whole Camus-inspired super hero thing was a neat idea, but even I don't want to reread it, and I wrote the damn thing. At least I got it out there before Will Smith released his crappy movie with a similar premise. The point is, I retired that blog on its first anniversary. Now this one surpasses it.
Does the serial have a future? Three members of my writer's group were recently the first to publish their novels exclusively online through the new Scribd store. Maybe that's the direction online publishing is going. Guess we all have to wait now and wonder what'll happen next.
