Hi everyone!
First things first, as of last week, I've officially moved over to Ghost(Pro) instead of self-hosting. There are a couple of small things that still need to happen behind the scenes, but hopefully all the major changes are done.
New Sample Stories
Including one I'm really excited about! As of this week, I've swapped out the exemplars' section of the web version of this newsletter, which means that there are 2 new free stories available for readers to access. For those not aware, I publish new fiction every Wednesday to this very mailing list. If you're already subscribed, please consider sharing with friends who might be interested — this newsletter really does depend on word-of-mouth recommendations, I definitely do not have a marketing budget, currently everything I earn from doing this goes to hosting fees.
Each story I write comes with an analysis summarizing a piece of research that went into writing the story. Interested folks can sign up for a membership to get access to the complete archive, or check out the examples first. Flash fiction like The Laundress & the Beanstalk goes out on the first Wednesday of the month, and you can get microfiction like Poison (Laxatives, confections, & stimulating pies) the other weeks.
My Publications
I've also updated the public repository of my notes, which are here.
In other news, I wrote Considerations for Fostering a Healthy & Active Online Community after several people asked for my opinion about how they could create healthy online communities for their software applications.
One thing I did not touch on was fan communities. I think it's always a creator's hope that we can create a community of fans around our work — hopefully one that tempers honesty with kindness, enthusiasm with a recognition that creators do sometimes need to hunker down and "just write."
To be clear, I've never had any of these issues — I've only been sharing my stories for a couple of months, at this point — but I'm a fan of a lot of great creators with strong online presences, like Ursula Vernon, Seanan McGuire, and Ilona Andrews. I admire them, and hope to emulate what they've accomplished in some small way.
Commenting Features
To that end, now that over 500 of you (!) are signed up to read this newsletter, I want to make sure that there was an easy way for folks to react to and comment on the research overviews, stories, analyses and updates I post. As part of the migration to managed hosting, I opened up commenting to all subscribers. You should be able to log in using the email address you're subscribed to the newsletter with, and comment on posts.
Many of you have reached out with neat anecdotes, additional resources, and fun references on the topics I write about, and I'm hoping that adding commenting software to the website will help us centralize that and share relevant, interesting information with other interested folks subscribed to this newsletter.
NaNoWriMo
Ona more personal note, I'm doing National Novel Writing Month this year. It's an annual, international creative writing event where participants attempt to write a 50,000-word manuscript during the month of November. The manuscript I'm working on is not a novel per se — it's a series of interconnected short stories set in the same world as the stories I've been sharing here — but I'd deeply appreciate if you left a word of encouragement in the comments section of this post by viewing it online. I'm interested to hear which facts, characters or plots you'd like me to expand on. I'd also love to know if you're doing anything exciting for November.
The story I'm working on right now, by the way, is about the daughter of the conqueror from Eavesdrop & Succulent. A couple of people reached out to let me know they were enjoying that storyline :)
Thank you for your support,
` Eleanor Konik