Write More with Simon K Jones

I’ve produced a huge amount of written material over my life, and especially in the last decade since I started serialising stories every week. Hundreds of thousands of words of fiction and non-fiction, and that’s without counting copywriting in the day job. I’m confident in my writing voice.

That’s not what I’m going to focus on as an example here. Instead, I’m considering my attempts to be a better illustrator, which are in very early stages. I’m still trying to figure out my visual style, and it’s an interesting process to go through having already gone through it with my writing.

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At a literature event programmed and produced by a bunch of teenagers last week, I found myself talking to a 16 year old about the challenge of judging your own work.

“It’s really hard to know if what I’m writing is any good,” he lamented. “It’s basically impossible to know if anything is good until I put it in front of an audience.”

He’s got a point.

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Last week there was a bit of a fracas on Notes. By social media standards, having a bit of a tiff on Notes is a fairly gentle affair. While Twitter is arguing with Mecha Hitler and Bluesky is…doing whatever Bluesky is doing, a major scuffle on Notes is usually a back and forth about an obscure aspect of literature.

In this case, it was about how many books per year a writer should read. The focus rapidly became about the specific number (50 seemed to be the commonly cited threshold), rather than any kind of nuance. The implication was that to read fewer than 50 books meant you weren’t serious about writing.

It was all very silly, and I don’t want to relitigate it here. That said, I found myself going down a couple of tangential rabbit holes.

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Choosing the point of view for your story is the big make-or-break decision. You have to figure this out ahead of time, because it directly affects every aspect of the text. It’s not really something you can decide upon while writing.

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My son was born towards the end of 2012, forcing me to acknowledge, perhaps for the first time, that I was going to die. Turns out, that's just what I needed.

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If we fiction writers got everything we wanted, what would that actually look like?

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One of the great pleasures of the fiction community that has emerged on Substack, and in the newsletter space more generally, is its diversity of thought. Eleanor writes literary fiction, I write science fiction and fantasy. A typical literary festival would never think to program us on the same panel event, or in conversation, and yet here we are, having a good old natter about writing serials.

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I first had the pleasure of interviewing Neill Cameron back in 2021, when I was hosting the Writing Life podcast for the National Centre for Writing. He’d just published a new book, Freddy Vs School, a spin-off from his long-running MEGA ROBO BROS comic.

Zip forward to 2025 and he’s published many more books for young readers, including the final volume of MEGA ROBO BROS. Neill serialised that story over ten years in the UK weekly comic The Phoenix (and I thought I’d been working on Triverse for a long time!).

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When I was in the early stages of preproduction on Tales from the Triverse I ran into a problem. The serial is structured as crime fiction, with each storyline focusing on an investigation by the detectives. Sensible crime fiction writers set their novels in the real world, so that they can borrow from reality for their world building. Here's how I developed the setting without falling down rabbit holes.

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This week I'm pondering word counts, prompted by the superb micro fiction work of Mata Haggis-Burridge in 'I Could Gobble You Up'. Read it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/matahaggisburridge/p/micro-fiction-i-could-just-gobble?r=3rwg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

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