Captain's Log: October 2024
The story so far, and what's next for Coracle Voyager
This is a new quarterly-ish update post summarising what’s been going on at Coracle Voyager recently, and outlining some plans for the future.
If you’ve recently joined the voyage, welcome aboard! This is the first time I’ve done a “housekeeping” kind of post, but I hope this will be a regular (perhaps quarterly) feature to highlight what’s been happening in my fiction writing and hint at what’s coming up in the next few months.
At the time of writing, it’s a little under a year since I posted my first piece of fiction on Substack. It was rather a spur-of-the-moment decision: I was publishing a non-fiction newsletter, while also writing bits and pieces of fiction that no-one saw except my family, when I stumbled on a prompt for a collaborative writing project run by
. I couldn’t resist. I had an idea, and regardless of everything else going on in life at the time, it itched at me until I got it down. The result was Kharis’ story in the Blackwater Files.I had no strategy or grand plan for Coracle Voyager at the time. But as I joined in and connected with other writers on the platform, and read some of the wonderful sci-fi and fantasy writing being published, I decided to give a fiction newsletter a proper shot.
Short stories
Since that first leap, I’ve published eight standalone (one or two-parter) short stories. Six of these were sci-fi and two were supernatural fiction. I also published a longer (about 10,000 words) standalone story called Prince Shisin’s Revenge, which loosely follows the Chinese wuxia genre of fantasy. That one was a lot of fun to write, but in retrospect I should have broken it into several shorter parts and published it as a limited serial. I might still do that… Over the year, I’ve been learning what works and what doesn’t, and I reckon over-long individual posts are harder for folk to read.
Of the standalone stories, the most popular to date has been the sci-fi short story Deep Calls to Deep. It also happens to be one of my favourites!
Destination Europa
In recent months, a lot of my creative energy has been taken up with my serialised novella, Destination Europa. Twenty-five weeks later, it’s finished! I’m celebrating, and looking ahead to what’s next.
For a spoiler-free retrospective on the story and my experience writing it, check out Destination Europa: Behind the Scenes.
I now plan to let the story rest for a while before editing it and publishing it as a book somewhere. Stay tuned for news of that sometime in 2025! Meanwhile, the serial will remain available to read for free until such time as the book is for sale.
Looking ahead
Now that Destination Europa is wrapped up, I have a few other things I’d like to work on. First off will be a couple of short stories that I’ve had ideas for but not had time to write yet. Expect these in your inbox over the next few weeks.
Between now and the end of the year, I do not expect to post something every week. Chances are it’ll be every other week. The little grey cells need a slower posting schedule after the marathon of publishing Europa every Friday!
I also have an idea for a fun collaborative writing project that I hope to launch soon! Watch this space for news of the MacNair Stevenson Collection… 👀
Thank you!
Finally, I’ve been honoured to have so many people read and subscribe to Coracle Voyager over the last year! Thank you to everyone who’s taken the time to read, like, comment on and share my stories. The community aspect of publishing a fiction newsletter is one of the most fun things about it!
With immense gratitude,
SDG.