Embodiment and the Fiction Writer: An Epiphany Update Post
Children, I have been reliably informed that it's cold outside.
I recently had to fact-check myself on a statement that made sense, but couldn’t possibly be right: have I really written all of Radiance so far under the influence of pregnancy hormones?
Without getting too personal, yes, the dates check out. And because I’ve gained most of my subscribers since Radiance started, it follows that most of you have missed out on what baseline EB is like.1
Although I like to think that my online presentation remains fairly consistent, my fiction tendencies hit a definite inflection point around that time, and I really can’t say how my writing will be affected by the return to business as usual in 2025. Since this summer I had to drop my horror reading (sorry, Macabre Monday) and ended up writing what might be my most sincerely emotional story ever, I suspect that things will gradually again become darker, rougher around the edges, and less sentimental. But that’s only a guess.
What I can do, since these mailings are all about working on my craft in public, is give a plan for the next couple of months, discuss my general intended direction for this ’stack upon return from baby leave (for 8 weeks or so I’ll almost certainly be reading and on Notes, but not actively posting), and pay the meme tax.
A depressingly realistic look at the next five weeks
Although my doctor’s now given me a hard-stop delivery date to plan around, I could potentially have to sign off well before that. Either way, I doubt I’ll get much time to write during February, as weekends are for my family and I’ll be spending the workdays trying to wrap things up at my day job. Since I did not get as much written ahead as I hoped I would, this gives me three to four weeks to write about 15K words, which is certainly not impossible but will require some focus. Do I have that focus?…asking the real hard questions, aren’t you.
Posts I fully intend to complete and send out by February 13, but may have to apologetically postpone if life gets the better of me:
Radiance #8.5, Stay Under Glass.
Radiance #9, Lion-Hearted Girl.
Radiance #10, Until She Saves My Soul.
Radiance epilogue. (In which I’m not sorry for making you scream at me, but I’m going to try to make up for it anyway.)
Additionally, in my drafts:
a tangled and overgrown retrospective about the Radiance inspirations and writing process, desperately in need of edits. As much as I’d like to have that scheduled out beforehand, I’m going to go ahead and call it a postpartum project.
a short story for
’ The Tipsy Taxi Tales, which I will make no promises about because it may have finally sunk in to stop making promises about future creative work outside the current serial.So many serials that I’m going to have to do some serious thinking about which to actually work on when I return in April.
Lessons learned for my return in April
With everything going on, I’ve quietly let some milestones pass unremarked: one year of It’s For A Story, and 100 subscribers. I currently have 113 of you signed up for my posts, despite completely ignoring any ‘best practice’ beyond, I guess, making sure my Notes-posting aligns with what you get here. I’m not unhappy with this number at all! I am, as always, incredibly grateful to each of you for your time and attention. I really do have wonderful readers.
I’m also not really surprised by where that number is at; I’m not writing in the popular genres, my serial installments are reliably 30+ minute reads, and I haven’t had the energy to do any of the self-promotion or exposure work that I would recommend to other people. Another big thing is that I don’t have a strong pitch yet. Flipping through my own fiction subscriptions, many of the authors who have two or five or ten times my subscriber numbers also have very clear identities (“this is who you subscribe to for _____.”) I’m not sure if that’s something I can narrow down, but I’ll consider it. A lot will depend on which project I decide to run with.
My singular 2024 goal for Substack was to finally complete a novel. I didn’t finish the novel I started—not by a long shot—but with the completion of Radiance, I will have the first draft of a different one. That itself is a big accomplishment for me, if…weird. I dropped my superhero stories years ago and didn’t think I’d ever write them again, much less grow a whole audience based on them. Now, I suppose I have to decide if that’s a larger direction that I want to go in or not.
In 2025, obviously, I do want to complete Radiance. After that, I have three goals for the year:
Write at least 75% of a second serialized story.
Enter at least one short-story competition. (GWC ’24 was incredible for my writing. This year I’m thinking about the Lunar Awards.)
Complete edits and rewrites on a second draft of Radiance.
I should also get some proper marketing work in (submitting to Top in Fiction, interacting with more theme days, starting a Pinterest, writing and pushing short stories, joining collaborative projects, speaking up more on Notes), but I’m going to call that a stretch goal because I’m still So Very Tired.
Whatever I decide to serialize, this time around I want to post weekly and make the installments shorter, maybe in the 2.5K word range. This is less because I’m concerned about reader attention span (you’re here, aren’t you?) and more because of how I’ve noticed myself organizing my writing. While my “chapter” buckets do get very long, I rarely have an individual scene that goes over 3K, and a lot of my chapters could easily be split. I’d just rather keep myself in consistent writing and posting habits.
If the serial looks longer than 30K words or so, I may also break it into seasons to give myself some breathing room. My schedule and methods are not like everyone else’s, and I’ve learned that in times when I’m leaning in at home, I simply can’t get the writing done. That’s why I spent my first 5 years of motherhood barely writing at all. Left to my own devices, yes, I would be the archetypal obsessive professor dad who’s always grumping around in his office and not to be bothered. But that really wouldn’t be good for anybody…
I will say that Poets and Chess Players is not going to happen. Maybe other stories in that universe, but not that one. It’s been in development for something like a decade, and all I’ve really accomplished is to over-plan future story details. I gave it my best try, and found out it didn’t really work, and I don’t really think it can work. So that’s fun.
I hope you and yours had a wonderful Christmas season. Today we’ll put away the decorations, bless the house, and start really working on getting through the desserts, and tomorrow I return for a few short weeks to what passes for daily life in Carnival-time. I will, as they say, keep you posted.
—E.B.
Be sure to give yourself plenty of grace as you go through this next season of your life. I hope all goes well for you!
My cat likes to sit under my Christmas tree, like she's a present (which she is, tbh).
I can certainly relate to not having a strong pitch. I purposefully called myself "The Casual Writer" because I can't bring myself to commit to certain goals. Then again, maybe I need to have some sort of plan...