Odds and Ends: Going Home

Spoiler-free thoughts on my second short story experiment

Welcome to my little corner of the internet! I’m so glad you’re here. Below you’ll find my reflections on my second episodic short story Going Home.

Just interested in the fiction itself? I’ve got you covered:

Short Stories

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The Story

With Going Home, I wanted to write something beautiful.

I don’t mean the way the story unfolded, or the deeper meaning behind the choices my characters made, although I suppose that’s also true.

But in this case I wanted the words themselves to be beautiful. To make the reader pause, consider, feel something.

And it’s all Patrick Rothfuss’ fault.

This is Patrick Rothfuss. My muse and my nemesis

In case you don’t know who that is, I’ll give you a brief introduction: he’s the author of one of my favorite books ever, The Name of The Wind. The sequel is mighty fine as well, and part three is… well, part three is a dream that fans hope one day turn into a reality.

But seriously, The Name of the Wind is good. It’s the kind of work that forces its way into your brain and stays there for years. And the prose is just lovely. Here are a few sentences from the prologue:

The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.
The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn's sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music…but no, of course there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.

Good, right? Some of the sentences in that book are painfully well crafted.

What that in mind, here are the first few sentences of Going Home:

There was once, long ago, a hole in the middle of the world.

The locals called it N’Uata, which means The Hungry One.

It was deep. Deep as an idea. It was dark. Dark as the bottom of the sea. 

It was wide…but not too wide. If you were to squint, in the middle of a sun-soaked day, you could have seen from one edge to the other, if only just barely. 

But this story is not only about the hole. Not truly. N’Uata was a cold, impersonal thing. Our story is about life and warmth. About the truth within tradition. So instead, we must change our focus. 

So instead, we must begin again.

My words are but a spark amidst a roaring flame compared to Rothfuss, but I hope you can at least see what I was going for.

Did I succeed? Did I create something beautiful?

Of course, that will be for each individual reader to decide. I will say that I’m very happy with how chapter one turned out. It’s simple, solitary, and I think effective.

As I kept writing I think I became more concerned with the story than the prose, except for a few specific places. I suppose that’s inevitable and I could have spent more time in the editing phase pretty-ing up the words.

Still, I’m happy with the result and I want to aim for beauty more often, instead of words that simply serve their purpose and then get out of the way.

The Art (or lack thereof)

In my first episodic short story Through the Valley, I experimented a bit with AI art, at least for the first chapter. The results were a decidedly mixed bag and I abandoned it after part 1.

For Going Home, I didn’t use any images at all besides the Unsplash photo I grabbed for the thumbnail. I would LOVE to have some art commissioned for this one, but my currently publishing budget is $0 and I’m just not comfortable pushing further into the AI world and it’s maze of ethical questions.

There’s another Rothfuss book (a sort of prequel to The Name of The Wind) that has some gorgeous black and white art. I think that style could have worked really nicely for Going Home. It’s something I’m open to revisiting in the future:

Art from “The Slow Regard of Silent Things”. Illustrated by Nate Taylor

The Music

I continued my practice of adding a music video to the end of each chapter. This is one of my favorite parts of getting the posts ready, because I get to really engage with how I want the audience to feel while/after they read. I’m still not sure that anyone actually listens to the music so this is possibly something that is more for me than for others.

I wish there was a feature to have background music playing while you scroll, although I know music with words can be very distracting while you’re trying to read something.

Haven’t quite cracked the presentation of the music but I’m very likely to keep doing it for my next episodic adventure.

What’s Next

Last week I posted a tongue-in-cheek discussion of the difficulties I’ve faced in trying to grow an episodic fiction based newsletter.

In a somewhat ironic (but perhaps predictable) turn, it’s already my most-viewed, most-liked offering. Cleary it has resonated with people and the response made my Grinch-like heart grow three sizes.

Does this change what I write in the future? I’m trying to avoid “click chasing” but at the same time two things seem to be true:

• One-off stories perform better than episodic ones (less is asked of the audience)

• Non-fiction likely performs better than both (that’s what people expect from a newsletter platform)

My fiction will continue to be the main emphasis of The Corner Bookstore, but I don’t want to be afraid of mixing things up a bit. If more “topical” writing can lure folks into my spiderweb, then I can sneak up and inject them with my poison short stories.

As always, thanks for reading. These words are for you.

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