Weekly Update — 13 (Patreon)

Before we get into anything else, let’s get the important announcement done first… this week I'm going to be publishing a short story from the Creakylid universe. With any luck it will be released on Sunday at around the normal time and will be available for rare, epic, and legendary patrons.

I’m not announcing a release time for the next Richard Struggle chapter right now, but next Friday I should be in a position to announce it either for that Sunday or the Sunday after that (depending on my non-writing life).

Now that that’s out of the way, why am I playing with short stories?

Here’s my current thinking…

1. Short stories are complete projects — something I haven’t really had the pleasure of experiencing much. Learning requires the learner to do lots of the thing they are learning to get good at it. While I’ve been getting much better at things like sentences, scenes, dialogue, and chapters, whole stories are another matter. I need to write whole stories to get better at the flow of whole stories, and short stories should be perfect for this.

2. When I was a teenager, i used to play Warhammer Fantasy (and to a lesser extent Warhammer 40K). One of the things I always loved about that hobby was reading the short stories in the rule books for each race. They always managed to pack in so much character and lore into them, and made what would otherwise have been very one dimensional factions, far more rich and real. I want that for my world.

I currently have a ton of world building notes lying around for Creakylid, and while much of their contents are going to emerge naturally in the novels, writing short stories is another way for me to build up the world for those of you who just want every last detail.

3. I’d really like to have as many weeks as possible when I’m actually giving you all something worthwhile to get your teeth into, and with my chapters often reaching 8,000-10,000 words (and sometimes as much as 18,000 words for my other project), that’s unlikely — not without compromising the level of quality I want to write at — and sometimes (like the last few weeks) I have periods of time when I just go deep into writing self improvement mode and produce very little of actual content at all. I’m hoping that because short stories are, by their nature, short, they will help me plug some of these gaps (and teach me to better control my word counts). 

and 4. Short stories may help me reach people who aren’t yet familiar with my work (through online platforms for short stories and similar), but this last one is very experimental, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this angle doesn’t pan out. In any case, you will always be the ones to get first access (again, if you’re a rare patron or above), probably a few weeks or months before I publish elsewhere.

And that’s about that.

Like I said at the top, this week is an experiment. It will be different, but if you like what I’ve been writing up till now, my hope is that you’ll like this too.

— J.M. Coombs (LeadVonE)