Pilot Season and Paid Posts

Housekeeping and 2025 Announcements

If you aren’t interested in the minutiae of what’s happening and just want to cut to the meat of it, click here to check out the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read).

Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash

Starting Paid Posts

I’ve been trying to figure out how to monetize my Substack and what value I can add. I didn’t want to start charging for my writing advice, considering I haven’t had very much “traditional” success, but I also didn’t want to keep all of my content free when my eventual goal is to make enough money from my fiction writing that I can quit my job (or at least retire early).

For the month of November, all of my paid posts will be free so that people can understand the benefits that they will get for their support. After November, the following types of posts will be available only for paid subscribers:

• Personal posts. These will include “Writer’s Diary” posts, as well as sporadic posts like The Sword of Damocles where I talk about something in my personal life.

• Case studies. These are posts where I’ll break down how some existing media follows some of the techniques I’ve described, like this post on outlining.

• Serialized fiction five days early. I’ll be posting short pieces every other Friday for the entirety of 2025. If you are a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to these posts five days ahead of time.

For non-paying subscribers, you’ll still get my posts on technique, and access to serialized fiction posts, alternating each Friday.

But let’s talk about what’s going on with the fiction I’ll be sharing.

Announcing Pilot Season

Every November, there is National Novel Writing Month. I’ve participated in the past and have found it useful, even though that’s not how I usually write stories. Deadlines and constraints are healthy. A couple years ago, I took a writing class where you write the first draft of a novel throughout the course of the year. Having to produce something every month I found to be useful to keeping me on task.

So next year, with my blog, I decided to implement my own versions of deadlines.

In the TV industry, they used to have something called “Pilot Season” which was a time when everybody in Hollywood came together and pitched their TV series ideas. For my blog, I’m going to have a pilot season this month. By which I mean, the “everybody” will be me and the “TV series ideas” will instead be short chapters from a story that I will serialize over the course of the next year (starting in January 2025).

Over the next three weeks, starting next week and continuing through the end of November, I’ll be posting two blogs a week. The first one will be on Fridays and will be the first chapter of a serialized story that will go out on a bi-weekly basis throughout the rest of the year. The second will come out the Monday after the “pilot” goes out and is a “Writer’s Diary”: a description of my thoughts and considerations as I worked on a particular piece. Think of it is as a commentary track to the particular chapter I released a few days earlier.

Each pilot will be from a different story, in a different genre, with a different main character. At the end of the month, I’ll release a poll where my readers can choose which piece they want to read in serialized form for the rest of the year. In case you’re curious, the three pilots are:

1. The Three Hilled City (fantasy) – a good-natured cobbler tries to gain access to a city in a foreign land.

   1. Release Date: November 8^th

   2. Writer’s Diary Release Date: November 11^th

2. The Prime by the Cliff (steampunk) – a mysterious high-born land assessor receives news of an unexpected windfall.

   1. Release Date: November 15^th.

   2. Writer’s Diary Release Date: November 18^th.

3. A Ship Called Aspiration (science fiction) – the owner of a hacker shop finally saves enough money to achieve her life-long dream.

   1. Release Date: November 22^nd.

   2. Writer’s Diary Release Date: November 25^th.

The poll will go out on November 29^th and the results announced on December 1^st. The chapters from the winner will be released on a bi-weekly cadence starting on January 3^rd. I’ll be taking December off from regular blog posts to give myself a chance to build up some rainy-day blogs, and just take a bit of a vacation. Just as regular deadlines are useful, regular breaks are useful too.

This is a shorter blog this week, partly because I’m currently in Tokyo for a work trip, and partly because I’m gearing up for the first pilot post next Friday.

Ta-ta for now…

TLDR:

• Posting a serialized novel; a new chapter every two weeks starting January 2025

• Paid subscriber only posts will begin in January 2025, which will give you access to the chapter five days earlier, “Writer’s Diary” posts (or commentary tracks on the chapters), and sporadic case-studies.

• Readers will vote on which story to serialize from three possible first-chapters (or pilots).

• December will have no blogs to give me a chance to work on the subsequent chapters.