Write More with Simon K Jones

You’re listening to my weekly serial The Mechanical Crown. Find out more here.

Previously: King Guijus rules the valley of Lagonia, a hidden kingdom entirely locked within the ring of Barrier Mountains. His daughter, Princess Kirya, grows restless, as do the rival powers in the north…

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Today we take a break from our regular programming for a one-off, self-contained short story. This one’s been buzzing around my head for years and I wanted to get it written before it turned from science fiction to science fact.

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Note: We experienced some considerable lag during the livestream due to Martin currently being stationed in orbit around the moon. The recording has smoothed out some of it, but bear with: there’s good stuff in here for those with patience.

Everyone has a podcast these days, it seems. My first foray into podcasting was producing the Writing Life podcast a decade-or-so back, and it was an absolute joy, and I rather missed hosting it when I moved on to other things.

If you get the subject right, a podcast is essentially an excuse to talk to interesting people on a regular basis. Hence chatting to S.E. Reid once a month, where we can natter about whatever writerly things are on our minds. This month we’ve our first guest, in the guise of Martin Grace.

Martin has been the driving force being Future Britains, a new anthology of dystopian near-future short stories that is out this week from Sol Stories. The collection began as a call-out to the Substack fiction community and now exists as a Real Book. It’s a brilliant example of what happens when a bunch of creative people combine forces, and in the show we pick Martin’s brains about how it all happened.

Also on the agenda:

* Are we living in the best time or the worst time to be a writer?

* Why is ‘indie author’ not as cool as ‘indie filmmaker’ or ‘indie band’?

* Writing cliché of the month: ‘kill your darlings’

* Weird snack of the month: Fairy bread (with thanks to Leanne Shawler)

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I’ve really enjoyed figuring out the book publishing process, and how all the pieces slot together. I’m working through the various challenges one-by-one, with not a little help from the writing community. Everything was going smoothly, but I knew there was a horrible beast lurking along the path: the final gatekeeper, the troll on the bridge demanding a toll, and I couldn’t avoid it any longer.

I needed to buy some ISBNs.

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Earlier in the year I co-hosted a mini-series called Crafting Serial Fiction with S.E. Reid which turned out to be rather popular and well-received. Turns out that talking with Sally seems to result in good conversation, and we didn’t want the conclusion of the mini-series to be the end of it.

Hence we have this ongoing sort-of-podcast Reid and Jones, which is set to be a monthly, hour-long discussion show where we mull over whatever has caught our eye in the writing scene. Sometimes we’ll bring in guests!

In today’s episode we cover these essential topics:

* Can we write without serialising our work?

* The benefits and pitfalls of being influenced by television and movies. Can it be useful? How does it lead us astray?

* Writing Cliché: in this regular segment we look at a well-known truism and ponder whether it’s actually true, let alone useful. This month’s cliché under the microscope is: “Write what you know.”

* Sally thinks you should put butter on toast before peanut butter. WTF

Let us know what you think about these topics down in the comments. Especially the peanut butter one.

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Authors have always been the target of scammers and those trying to extract money from vulnerable people. This may seem like something of a paradox, given that writers famously tend to be broke, but apparently nobody told the scammers and criminals on the other end.

I’m going to keep it fairly brief today but this is something worth shining a light on, so that we’re all equipped to identify the tricks being used against us. By the end of this you should be well armed to spot these things when they show up in your inbox.

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I’m 45 years old. That isn’t especially old. nor is it especially young. It’s right in the middle. They should come up with a name for that period.

This halfway point in life is when we start to build up more time behind us than we have remaining up ahead. As children we have no concept of time, with a week feeling like an eternity. As teenagers we think we’ll live forever. In our twenties there is time enough to do everything and anything we put our mind to. Slowly, with each subsequent decade, we wise up to the fact that we really need to crack on if we want to achieve anything in life.

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Last week I wrote about the many dubious covers that have accompanied my story The Mechanical Crown over the years. You can read that here:

What was missing was a conversation with Shane Bzdok, the designer behind the new cover that adorns the new serialisation. That’s today’s video, in which I chat with Shane about his process, and the path we took from inception to completion.

Do check out the newsletter, where you can see the visuals accompanying the conversation.

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Here it is, part 6 of our 5-part mini-series on Crafting serial fiction. As is appropriate for a series all about serials, we ended up running over slightly.

This episode is something of a wrap-up. What are your options once you’ve completed the serialisation of your story? You have a manuscript ready to be transformed into other forms, so how can you make that happen?

We natter about some of this:

* Trad publishing, self-publishing and hybrid publishing

* The DIY route and how much to do yourself

* Software to use

* Ebook and print-on-demand distribution

* To Amazon or not to Amazon

* The concept of the Collector’s Edition

And a bunch of other stuff besides.

Huge thanks to S.E. Reid for being up for this series and sharing her wealth of knowledge. And, of course, to everyone who has showed up to the livestreams and watched the replays via the newsletter.

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Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states:

“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

When journalists and reviewers frame a title as a question, it intrinsically suggests the presence of significant doubt; otherwise they would simply state it as fact.

So, is Deckle a Scrivener replacement? No. Not yet.

At this point I imagine the more pressing question is “what the heck is a Deckle?”

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonkjones.substack.com/subscribe