STORYWORLDS TURNS ONE!

REFLECTIONS ON AN ANNIVERSARY

by brilliant Jennie Santos, a year after her first piece instagram.com/artmangoart/

StoryWorlds is one-year old today.

One year.  102 posts. 

Fam, before anything — from the core of my self and my art — a thousand thousand thousand thanks. 

Honestly, never thought I’d make it this far — but this community is something else. 

No question, no doubts: StoryWorlds would never have reached this incredible milestone without the kindness, brilliance, and community that you create every day, with every damn post. 

Community is collaboration, community is struggle-together, community is we-feeling, community is joy.  Found here in all our stacks — in our diverse communions — in wild abundance. 

 How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free¹.

With StoryWorlds I had hoped to share with you un chín about myself y un chón about how I see the art of writing. I wanted this stack to diverge from the nuts-and-bolts writing advice that tends to overflow the internet — wanted to offer something a little more philosophical. 

My aspiration was to offer deeper tools for deeper work. 

I didn’t want to be all-encompassing, just to offer an array of compasses and lenses and maps and prisms and arguments that folks could pick up and put down as needed.

The hope was to encourage, to ignite, to help, and to be of use.

And so at year’s end: I truly hope that StoryWorlds has been of use to folks. 

Over these twelve months we’ve covered a lot of the fundamentals of Story — from standards like Character and Conflict, to esoteries like Point of Telling and Blocking Time and Consequentiality.  And I squeezed in some nerditry as well.  (Need to finish the third part of my Dune trilogy sooner rather than later.)

Looking forward: I intend to tie up some loose ends on the Character + Conflict front before turning to Context (known more colloquially as Setting).  And once we’re all finished with what I’ve been calling the Big Three (Character, Conflict, Context), I plan to embark on a long series on Worldbuilding — a little more practical, maybe — but we’ll land on that Farthest Shore when we get there. 

And what about the novel I was trying to write?  The ill-fated Martian calamity that kicked off the whole substack? 

Wish I could say it’s gone well. 

It hasn’t. 

Wish I could say that the destruction of Mars hurtled me towards a newer better world. 

It hasn’t. 

But that’s what it is to be an artist.  Sometimes it comes easy.  Sometimes it don’t.  Either way you have to keep fighting. 

Either way you cannot despair. 

At moments like these, I try to keep Gandalf’s words close to heart: “Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt.  We do not.”

No, we do not.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring? 

Anyway, fam, thank you again, for real. 

In closing, I’ll quote another of my favorite writers, Gene Wolfe:

“Here I pause. If you wish to walk no farther with me, reader, I do not blame you. It is no easy road.”²

But I do hope some of you will stay.  If not here, at least with your projects.  Either way, it has been a great honor and your company and genius a source of inspiration, a shield against despair.

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1. Toni Morrison, of course. Beloved.

2. Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer.