Write More with Simon K Jones

I started publishing Tales from the Triverse in September 2021. The weekly serial will likely wrap up in January 2026, or February at the latest. As I wrote last week’s instalment, I had a palpable sensation of coming to the end, of nearing the point at which I say goodbye to the characters and the world in which I’ve been playing these four and a bit years.

Unknown territory approaches: this newsletter has never existed without Tales from the Triverse. It’s the biggest, most ambitious project I’ve ever worked on, and I can’t really remember a time now when I wasn’t thinking about it.

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The chapter of Tales from the Triverse that went out a couple of weeks ago fell foul of the UK’s Online Safety Act. If someone in the UK tries to view the chapter on the web and isn’t yet ‘age verified’, they are greeted with this message:

Outside of the UK, you won’t be seeing it. And if you’re in the UK but already age verified, you won’t see it. If you’re a paid subscriber to any Substack-powered newsletter you’re automatically verified, apparently, due to having a credit card.

Money = freedom, as tends to be the case.

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There are many ways of publishing your work, and we’re living in something of a golden age for author choice.

My chosen route is to send out chapters in serial form, and I’m now fairly certain that for the last four years I’ve been doing it wrong.

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Earlier today I had a delightful chat with Tom Albrighton in which we both tried to not be grumpy about AI and mostly succeeded. I think?

Tom’s been a copywriter for a couple of decades, and is someone I found hugely helpful back when I was starting out doing a lot of copywriting myself back in the day. More recently, he’s been especially vocal about the impact of AI on his area of work, and in 2024 published AI Can’t Write But You Can.

Anyway, our chat ended up being about what it means to be a human creator, why we bother doing anything at all, and how it doesn’t really matter how good AI ends up becoming because that’s sort of missing the point.

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Last week The Guardian published comments from Nigel Newton, chief executive of publisher Bloomsbury.

“I think AI will probably help creativity, because it will enable the 8 billion people on the planet to get started on some creative area where they might have hesitated to take the first step…AI gets them going and writes the first paragraph, or first chapter, and gets them back in the zone.”

Hmm. I have thoughts.

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It’s increasingly hard to care about fiction on TV, with producers of the biggest shows doing everything they can to undermine their own stories. The seemingly inevitable push towards cultural irrelevance is driven by the insatiable hunger of streaming platforms, and all of the issues are entirely self-inflicted.

As creators of and audiences for serial fiction, I think it’s worth poking at what’s going on so that we can at least avoid the same traps.

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Heroic characters tend to provide diminishing returns. We are often drawn to origin stories because they provide a built-in character arc, where development is part of the package. Once they have reached that apotheosis, going from ordinary person to hero, what then? Often the response is to ramp up the action and spectacle to ever-more absurd levels — and dwindling audience engagement.

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What is Tales from the Triverse? There are so many more of you reading this newsletter now, or passing by on ways to parts unknown, that it’s time for a re-introduction.

It's a gritty police procedural set in 1970s London, each case shining a light on the dark corners of society. Each story deals with a particular case and doesn't shy away from difficult topics. People trafficking, drug addiction, illegal immigration, fraud, murder, terrorism, police corruption. It's about the news and the society we live in.

It's also science fiction, .diving into the far future to see what becomes of humanity. There are spaceships, flying cars, robots, AI superintelligences. Humanity has colonised the solar system, with stories visiting settlements on Mars, Enceladus and Venus. Go inside the asteroid Ceres, or travel the space elevator into Earth orbit.

It's high fantasy, journeying across an unknown land, where magic is real and there are monsters in every cave and canyon. Feudal city states battle with native insurgents lurking in the forests, while fire breathing dragons guard people's houses and dig the mines. The universities rule over everything, pushing at the boundaries of what is possible and the fabric of reality.

Tales from the Triverse is, madly, all of those things.

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Sometimes a shortcut makes sense, but take too many of them and you might miss something along the route. Going for a walk isn’t always about reaching a destination — sometimes it’s about the walk itself.

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“I might have found my tribe.” EasterCon keynote, 2008

Read the news and it’s easy to think that publishing fiction is a waste of time; an indulgence in a world beset by so much horror. Is being a writer a luxury we can’t afford? WELL.

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