IF I SERIALIZED A YA FANTASY NOVEL HERE WOULD ANYONE READ IT?

photograph by Joseph Rodriguez, from his amazing Spanish Harlem: El Barrio in the 80s

So it’s been a year and a half since I began this substack journey with you all in the hope that in helping others this practice might help me jump-start my fiction. For those not in the know, I belong to that sad category of artist who loves their medium — who is called to it — and yet for complex reasons cannot easily engage with it. Or said simply: on the spectrum of productivity I’m all the way at the bottom. Thank you, depression.

Notable exception: this substack. Despite my difficulties with writing in general and how much I’ve struggled with deadlines in the past, I’ve somehow managed to keep up with the two-times a week substack rhythm, done my best not to sand-bag or phone it in. Which for someone like me who could never write consistently on demand is pretty much miraculous.

But I still ain’t managed to do shit with my fiction. I write a lot about fiction, but write and post no fiction myself.

And so it’s gone for a year and a half.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking for the millionth time about how I might re-start my fiction. A couple of close friends made the obvious suggestion that I should serialize something fictional on my substack. They ain’t the first to do so and normally I’d dismiss them, as the resistance inside has felt impossible to break. But something must be up because when the latest friend suggested serialization I found myself for the first time actually contemplating the possibility.

As a consequence, over the last few weeks (since returning from Tokyo), I’ve been trying to hack what little there is of my practice — trying to figure out how to mobilize the discipline that my substack routine has given me in the service of fiction.

What is super clear is that a big part of the reason that substack fucks with me and I fucks with it is (A) the time/length constraints (two posts a week) both focuses me and keeps shit from feeling too overwhelming. Equally important (B) because writing the substack is not writing my fiction, it seems to sidestep most of the blocks and resistances my fiction suffers from.

In other words, if I want to serialize fiction on my substack, I need to keep it small, keep it different.

Start with something that won’t automatically activate my blocks, something completely unlike my previous short stories and novel.

Many years ago, I began a young adult “novel” and abandoned it after twenty pages. I was trying to write something for teen boys who grew up like I grew up, but instead of producing a small YA novel as planned I was heading towards something short-story length and pitched way too young. I had written, in effect, a thirty-page picture book. Too long and elaborate for a picture book, and too short and kiddy for a YA. Not much of anything, really, more an outline than a functional narrative.

It is, however, a story that I haven’t stopped thinking about. Mostly because the genre speaks to me (fantasy) and because I’ve always wanted to write a story for the type of boy readers who ain’t typically served by our predominantly white publishing and white public school system. The boy reader who don’t yet read, but who would if given half a chance. The type of boy reader I would have been had a wonderful teacher not taken the time to introduce me to books, to reading, to the library.

There are plenty of universes, I am sure, where I never got into reading and yet that potential would still be in me, dormant, an X-Men who never activated their mutant gene. That’s the boy I would like to reach.

So: that’s what I’m thinking. Taking this fantasy outline of mine, of which not a word can be used as the fiction, and trying to spin up something that I can serialize here on StoryWorlds with the hopes that the constraints and demands of substack will help motivate and sustain me. Something different from my usual bag, something YA, aimed at teen boy not-yet-readers, which hopefully folks of all stripes will enjoy and be moved by.

(Such are the ambitions of the artist that never survive the page but one has to have dreams, right?)

As to whether the book works or not, on the page or in me, only the book itself will tell.

The question remains: would anyone here read it?