Off Track?
Reflecting on my third year of publishing fiction online
I began writing and publishing fiction on Medium at the beginning of 2021. It was one of those things.
The time was right and I was ready. After a year of passive Medium membership, I’d worked out what I could do with this platform, that there was a community of writers and readers here I wanted to be part of. ScienceDuuude welcomed me into the fold at WotWU.
After three decades of embedding short stories and dialogues in my language courses, I was ready to risk writing stories for adults which would stand or fall on their literary merits, not as language teaching ‘inputs’ with a side-order of entertainment.
Quite soon I had a plan of sorts. I’m a mildly obsessive planner so that was inevitable.
I was going to put my stories on Medium and Substack, build a mailing list and reader base, then publish selections of my output in book form: a collection of short stories and a collection of novellas — for starters.
My output was regular and prolific.
On Medium: about 150 episodes (novellas, novelettes, one-offs) in 2021.
On Substack: from February 2022: two illustrated chapters and podcast episodes a week: one for free subscribers; one for paying subscribers…
