Spring Update (2026)
Personal Reflection
It’s getting close to the one-year anniversary of my first Substack post (May 2025). Looking back, I can see the process I went through as I learned how the site worked. It took a few months before my notes feed was free of marketing notes, and about six months before I found myself interacting with a set of writers whose names showed up consistently in the feed.
When I joined, I had no idea that Substack is a social media platform mixed with an e-mail delivery system. The platform advises beginners to sell their niche through notes, in order to attract subscribers who will want to read their long posts. It doesn’t mention that people on the platform are other writers, not general readers, and most writers with large accounts find readers off the platform. If you’re a fiction writer, or you like to write about different things, the platform’s advice doesn’t really fit. I’d advise people starting out to consider what they want to get from posting weekly (or periodically). Don’t assume the goals set out by the site work for you.
I sketched out my initial goals for Substack in my post Penning A Sampler. Essentially, I reflected that when I’m done with my time writing here, what I will have is the collection of my posts. My Substack sampler at this point includes 100 posts. I’ve learned something from every post, which is important to me. Looking over my posts, I can see that I’ve recorded ideas I would like to expand on later. Also, over the past year, I’ve gotten practice writing to prompts - not something I ever liked doing before. We have people on the site who are thoughtful about the prompts they present! I appreciate their efforts to encourage fiction writers.
As far as the schedule, for the most part, I’ve enjoyed the weekly timeline for posting. Having something ready for public view every week is a good exercise! It’s like having a newspaper column, ready to be filled.
What would I like my newspaper column to encompass over the next six months?
I’m not a short story writer, though I’ve written two short stories this past year that I liked [Retreat Into Silence and Keeping Watch]. For me, short stories are a different form than long fiction. I’ve discovered that I enjoy reading short stories more than I realized, since I joined Substack, which I consider a benefit of joining. But - I couldn’t write a short story every week!
My real love is reading and writing long fiction. You might think that’s an odd match with my publication, Four Minute Fiction, which focuses on flash fiction length (750 to 1000 words). As I’ve discovered, flash fiction is its own form. It can be written in different ways.
Flash fiction can present a self-contained story, or it can resemble an episode from a longer tale (though sufficient for one sitting). I tend to gravitate towards the latter style, which means that over the past year, my mind has generated a number of worlds I’d like to explore further.
It brings me to serial fiction. Before joining Substack, I had a general idea about serials - some of Dickens’ books read like a serial, and there’s a Bengali writer named Bimal Mitra, whose novels make me think the chapters, which came out in serial form in magazines, were put together into books, without much editing to turn them into novels. His books were popular, but they are repetitive! The repetition works in a serial - think about long-running soap operas, we wouldn’t want a movie to follow that pacing, but it works when the story is told in small segments over time.
And there’s the rub. Writing a serial requires a different skillset than writing other long fiction. It’s not the same as putting out a novel by chapters. I’ve been contemplating writing something serial-adjacent that works as online episodes (and lets me lean into my love of long fiction). I don’t think I’d want to post a novel (by chapter) before completing the whole thing, but part of the experience of the serial is that it’s being read as it’s written. It’s actually a good fit with Substack’s model in that respect. So, this next year I’d like to write something serial-adjacent, and post it as I go. I’ve been thinking about a dystopian, quasi-science fiction story for about 18 months, I might try posting that one as I write it.
Last year, I started posting episodes from the Mahabharata, retelling the epic in roughly chronological form - the Mahabharata was originally spoken, not written, and the written versions I’ve come across lose the storytelling aspect. That project required immersion in a densely-written translation, and I took a break from reading my source to focus on job search, and then settling into the new job. I’d like to resume posting episodes from the Mahabharata this month - that will be another thing I’m working on this next half-year.
For everyone who follows, subscribes, and interacts with my posts, I appreciate you all!
Until next time.
My newsletter is a mix of fiction (speculative and slice of life), creative non-fiction, and occasional poetry. If you’re interested, I hope you will subscribe. Thank you for reading!