Quarterly Update Post

Michaelmas Edition

Welcome to The Story Scrapbook, a fiction newsletter by E.B. Howard! If you’re new in town, check out my Fiction Directory for navigation.

This is my quarterly update post for all subscribers.

What’s In This Edition

• Author’s update

• Links to this quarter’s work

• Thoughts on heroes

• A recipe for sweet potato (or squash, or pumpkin) cookies

• Reader appreciation <3

Well, Northern Hemisphere friends, we survived another summer together. Happy Autumn! It’s been quite the September here, very busy on the personal-life front, but such a relief to be reasonably able to go outside again. Only one thing was strange: on the autumn equinox, I looked out the window and was equally surprised to find that the grass was turning brown and that I felt a little sad about it. But I’m allowed to have some conflicting character traits.

This summer, I put a lot of thought into one question: what am I doing here? Less existentially than usual for me, by ‘here’ I meant ‘on Substack’. I’ve always said that it was about having an external structure incentivizing me to write, and after laying out my goals and taking an honest look at which ones I’m actually spending time on, I think that’s largely still true. I want to entertain—my dream is to write stories that people want to be invested in, that are easy and fun to get invested in. Everything else is hanging out in the backseat, and I’ve made up my mind to be okay with that. Remember in “Cinderella” when the wicked stepsisters start cutting off pieces of their feet so they can fit in somebody else’s shoes, and then they don’t get the prince and they’re in horrible pain forever?

…we did all read that version at young and formative ages, yes?…just me…? Moving on.

I’m leaving Radiance where it is for now, knowing it’s going to need substantial edits and probably some redevelopment before I’m ready to commit it to print. If I can find the funds in the budget, though (thank you, paid subscribers!), I’m strongly considering a fully-DIY-by-me Crimes Fan Club edition of Science! Girl and Chained Lightning next year as a test run. Learning by doing! One step at a time!

Meanwhile, I’m going to continue practicing my storytelling and creating things that make me happy. Mirai, Mirai will continue weekly through what looks like June of next year, to be followed by the main-timeline Radiance sequel, Blaze; I aim to publish at least one other story monthly while it’s running, besides the writing that I’m doing behind the scenes for future projects. Plus, I’d like to start doing voiceovers soon for my work.

Oh, yeah, and I finally started an author Pinterest…so now I can also procrastinate on writing by making moodboards and collecting writing prompts. Follow me here!

What I Wrote This Summer

It’s been absolute madness here at The Story Scrapbook this summer. I keep trying to dial back my schedule so I don’t burn out, but I have so many ideas right now that it’s a struggle. Over the last thirteen weeks, I’ve posted seven stories, three of which were long enough to be split across multiple posts. Three stories were for my “Tales from Terra-32” capepunk superverse, and four for other settings, including two shared settings. It was a good stretch!

✨ Mirai, Mirai: What if, in order for the events of Radiance to take place, the next generation from various “bad ending” timelines had to figure out how to work together—with their parents, no less—and save the past? Now includes character sheets!
Multiverse family drama. 14 posts (in-progress): currently 15,800 words.

☢️ The Sonic Vorpal Incident: Dr. Marissa’s origin story.
Capepunk drama. Two-parter (complete): 6,600 words.

🔮 Clear-Sighted: Clarevoyante’s origin story.
Postpartum psychic drama. 3,000 words.

🏹 The Bride-Price: A retelling of Robin Hood and Allan-a-Dale.
Historical adventure. Three-parter, two posts (in-progress): currently 4,400 words.

🪫 Battery Low: What would you lose if the power went out forever?
Post-apocalyptic drama. 600 words.

☁️ Elizabeth (Weather Reports): What would you give to keep from growing up?
Middle-school cosmic horror. 2,000 words.

🍰 Helpers’ Cake (The Ynysfall Codex): Recipes, rumors, and rhymes.
Domestic history with a touch of doom. 500 words.

Additionally, this summer I opened up 🔒The Drafting Table, an exclusive section for my paid subscribers. Paid subscribers get a monthly email in which I talk about my upcoming posts and goals for the month, nerd out about my characters, go behind the scenes, etc.

🔒August Paid Update: In which I work on a design for my favorite second-generation Terra-32 character.

🔒September Paid Update: In which I review all the drafts I have going for alternate-timeline stories.

🔒October Paid Update: In which I pull out a binder full of old character sketches.

Thoughts on “Heroes”

As I recovered some of my time, health, and energy postpartum, I decided it was time to start working through my fiction backlog. I love reading wildly diverse works in conversation with each other, and this summer’s conversation was, without a doubt, about power and responsibility: what do knowledge and power require of those who possess them? Must the good, as Hugo wrote of his revolutionary student Combeferre’s beliefs, also be perfect—can moral actions be accomplished without moral character? Is the line between villains and heroes their ends, their means, their actions, or something else entirely? And if you could act but choose not to, what makes the difference between prudence and dereliction of duty?

Given that I’ve spent the past 18 months writing superhero fiction, you’d probably expect I had strong opinions on the matter already, but I’ve really been forming my ideas as I go. I’ve begun describing my Terra-32 stories as part of the ‘capepunk’ subgenre, though that’s not as useful a distinction as I’d like, given that it’s difficult now to find a mainstream super-story that doesn’t fall under that heading. Capepunk just describes a less theatrical and more realistic approach to the typical superpower premise. You still ask the audience to suspend their disbelief about what the characters do, but you don’t ask them to suspend their disbelief about why they do it. This covers a lot of ground, including digging into the implications of using a goofy costume to cope with trauma and giving more attention to how the premise affects ordinary people’s lives, but a lot of critics get hung up on what it can mean for the story’s moral tone—maybe it’s more realistic for the hero to have serious flaws, but is it right to ask the audience to identify with him that way?

To be fair, moral tone is a pretty big deal, and the moral exemplar is one working definition of ‘hero’. I don’t think that’s how everyone’s using the word, though, and I’m not sure that’s how I’m using it myself. From what I’ve observed, the minimum definition of a hero is tribal. A hero is ours. He’s Our Guy, on Our Side, defending Our Values and protecting Us. Maybe Our Side is actually all of humanity, and maybe Their Side is his own inner reluctance to get out there and save them from themselves, but being a hero requires the presence of some conflict with a side to choose and fight for. Even if he doesn’t live out the values he’s defending, the fact that we call him an antihero and not a villain shows that he’s not just any bad guy, right? He’s Our Bad Guy.

We have different standards for what we’ll forgive in heroes and villains—Our Guys and Their Guys—whether we want to admit it or not. Part of writing less theatrically is looking past the curtains to examine that double standard and ask the audience some hard questions about it. However, I don’t care for the takes on this theme that end up flattening the moral landscape altogether, or that switch the hero and villain behind the scenes as a “gotcha” on the audience; I think there has to be a better way to do it. All that and I want to be funny, too…

This was probably a very long way to say that I enjoyed my summer, but didn’t really come up with answers…yet. Lots of thoughts happening. Keep reading my work to see where I end up.

What I’m Baking This Week

My daughter’s homeschool group had an Archangels party this week for Michaelmas, so obviously I had to find an autumn recipe to send along. In our climate, this means orange vegetables. The carrots aren’t nearly ready yet, but the winter squash are starting to pour in, and it’s time to hurry and use up last year’s sweet potatoes (cooked and frozen) before those come out too.

These cookies are crunchy-soft, dense and filling, warmly spiced, and not too sweet. It’s nominally a sweet potato recipe, but I use white and orange sweet potatoes, hard-fleshed squashes, and (when purée is called for) canned pumpkin interchangeably in the kitchen. Of course the taste will differ some, but as long as you don’t have a serious outlier in water content, they bake about the same. Just add a little half-and-half or milk if the dough you end up with isn’t coming together.

Spiced Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Sweet Potato Cookies (or pumpkin, butternut…etc)
Makes 48 to 60¹

2 cups flour (240 g)
1-1/2 cups oats (120 g)
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
4 tsp cinnamon (or 2 tsp Saigon cinnamon)
1/2 tsp ginger

1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground cloves

1/2 cup butter, softened
1/4 cup brown sugar (53 g)
1/2 cup white sugar (99 g)
1 egg
2 cups cooked and puréed sweet potato, squash, or pumpkin (one 15-oz can of pumpkin is ~1-3/4 cups.)
1 tsp vanilla

1-1/2 cups chocolate chips (255 g)

1. Oven to 350.

2. In a medium bowl, combine dry ingredients.

3. In a large bowl, mix the butter and sugars together.

4. Add egg, vegetable purée, and vanilla to the butter-sugar mixture.

5. Add dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. You should have a thick, sticky dough.

6. Stir in chocolate chips.

7. Scoop cookies onto parchment-lined pans and squish with a fork (they won’t spread in the oven, so I get 24 to a cookie sheet. You want heaping or extra-heaping tablespoon size.)

8. Bake for 25 minutes. The tops should look set and lightly browned, and the bottom should be browned when you pick one up.

In Conclusion

I know you have a choice of how you spend your leisure hours, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart (wherever I’ve misplaced that old thing) for choosing my work. I’m sincerely so grateful to have you as a reader, whether you’re a free subscriber or you’ve chosen to invest in my madness. To the regulars, to the lurkers, to the newbies, cheers. Here’s to another great three months on the newsletter.

And if you’ve found my writing a worthwhile use of your time, please consider sharing it! You know there’s a hole in your group chat where you and your friends could be yelling about the latest plot twist, don’t you? Forward an email, restack a post, maybe text somebody a link. In a world dominated by algorithms, an honest recommendation by a real person is worth everything.

Until next time, have a good day, God bless.

—EB

1. 48 for me, closer to 60 if you have an actual tablespoon cookie scoop; I recently discovered that mine is actually a little bit larger (rabbit hole of the day: standardized scoop sizes! I use a #40 Zeroll scoop for cookies and a #16 for muffins and can vouch for the quality.)