Author: Gavin Cameron

I've been writing fiction and poetry since 2010, and I run writers' groups. This is a blog to talk about writing and adjacent topics.
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How to End a Series That Was Never Meant to Be a Series

For the last three years, I’ve been writing a fantasy series under a pseudonym on a well-known website.

To set your expectations, this has been purely a passion project. I’m not at a stage where I wish to claim public ownership – and I might never be. As such, there will be no links to the series in this entry and only vague references to the plot. However, I feel now is the time to bring the series to an end, so I’ll be discussing the mechanics of this.

Back in September 2020, I published the first part, intended as a one-off story. It received a positive reaction, plus I found there was more I could do with the characters. I went on to write a sequel, then a third instalment, then a fourth. All the while, I’d been peppering my introductions with hints that the next story might be the final one.

In the early days of the series, my greatest hurdle was adding characters and moving them to new locations once the plot was exhausted in the first location. I was able to do this by taking unnamed side-characters from the first two stories and applying some retroactive continuity, known as retconning. Around the fifth story, the series had grown enough legs that it could stand up as its own self-contained universe.

Three months ago, I posted my 23rd part, and the 24th will definitely be where it ends. It’s taken so long because I wanted to tie up the loose ends while taking all the necessary space to explore that ending. So while most parts of the series have ended up between 1,500 and 2,500 words, the finale is likely to touch 5,000. There is even a circle back to the early days with the surprise return of two characters.

After that, I’m considering compiling the parts into a single volume and giving it some more editing, but that’s a long way off at this stage.

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Embracing New Beginnings, or Something Like That

Regular readers will know I run an open-mic event called Hotchpotch. This is primarily for writers rather than musicians, and it’s been happening since 2010. Since I took over in 2015, the one constant has been the need to change venues from time to time. We are now in such a transition period again.

This time, we had several weeks’ notice from the venue. The owner intended to sell the place, but it unexpectedly closed before the sale went through rather than afterwards. The new place has not responded to our email asking whether they would honour the bookings for the remainder of 2023.

As a stop-gap, we held the July event in an open-air amphitheatre. It was a lot of fun, but the Scottish climate means this is not a feasible long-term solution, so it won’t be repeated any time soon.

On Friday, someone did reach out to us to offer assistance, and I hope it leads to a fruitful outcome, especially as a couple of other venues in the area have also closed suddenly.

For 13 years, we’ve been able to secure venues free of charge in return for members buying drinks and snacks from the bar. I’ve come to accept these days are probably at an end, and I’m actively considering how we might implement a new model involving donations.

That said, a fallow period of a month or two might give Hotchpotch a chance to reinvent and reinvigorate itself, just as we’ve done for the last 13 years.

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The Satisfaction Line vs the Finish Line

At the weekend, I was talking with other writers, which led to a discussion about narrative structure.

Unlike a theatre or film script, there is no standard or accepted narrative structure for a short story. While this can be freeing for an author, my experience also tells me it can lead to a disappointing story without a decent resolution. I’ve had some difficulty articulating exactly what makes a satisfying story, but I’m working on a way of explaining it.

Bear in mind that I’m still working out some details of this metaphor, but below are my initial thoughts.

I’ve started thinking of a story as having two endings. The first ending is where the author stops the narrative. The second ending is the point at which the reader feels satisfied; this will vary from person to person, of course. That second ending is the Satisfaction Line.

Ideally, the Satisfaction Line should come before the end of the narrative, as close as possible, but never after it. Note that the two examples I’m about to give both happen to come from The New Yorker, and the website often arbitrarily says you can’t read any more articles without paying.

The first one is The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. For me, the Satisfaction Line comes a few paragraphs before the end. Structurally, it’s one of my favourite short stories.

The second example is the notorious Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian from 2017. The story ends with a string of phone messages, which I found vaguely threatening but hardly a resolution. My own Satisfaction Line might have been crossed if the author had continued to a more dramatic ending.

I’m going to park this thought for the moment with the intention of returning at some point in the future, however distant.

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When Non-Fiction Might be Fiction

When I was growing up, I ploughed most of Roald Dahl’s output and selected titles from Enid Blyton. Additionally, I kept returning to a children’s publisher called Antelope Books – not to be confused with the political publisher Antelope Hill – which would feature works by authors such as Penelope Lively and Anne Fine.

But as much as I enjoyed novels, I definitely spent more time reading factual volumes. On visits to the library, I’d stay around the non-fiction section, finding books about subjects like why the weather acts like it does, how nuclear energy works, what happens at an airport, and so much more.

I owned a lot of books as well. Easily the best one was a thick A4-sized Reader’s Digest collection called How Is It Done? with simple explainers about the logistics of staging an Olympic Games, how a building is demolished with explosives, how and why Christo and Jeanne-Claude would wrap landscapes in material, &c. From what I can gather, no updated version has ever been released.

All the non-fiction books I’ve mentioned so far have one factor in common: they were from reliable sources. They would typically be assembled by established publishers and/or have a bibliography for further reading. Even today, my non-fiction YouTube subscriptions are carefully curated from established channels and/or who link sources in the description.

However, I owned some books that played fast and loose with such standards. The pages would often contain lists of nothing but facts – and I use that word loosely – along the lines of:

  • From 1 June to 30 July 1987, a schoolgirl completely wore out a pair of shoes.
  • In 1970, Clive Bunyan robbed a shop in Scarborough. He hid his face with a motorcycle helmet but was caught because his name was printed in large letters on the front.
  • There is an African village where the women have to catch a once-weekly bus to go shopping, but it stops for only three minutes.

Looking back, I can imagine the authors going to the pub, sinking five beers and writing the most outlandish nonsense they could get away with.

However, while young readers tend not to have the type of critical thinking skills that older ones might, I was always happy to take what I read at face value and be entertained by all these ridiculous nuggets.

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A Weekend of Reading

I’m in a few different literary groups that meet on a monthly or weekly basis. There is also one that’s active only a few times a year, set up by a pal who is a particularly enthusiastic reader. The group has come to be known as the Seasonal Readathon.

From its inception until earlier this year, its format had been largely the same: we would reserve a Saturday or a Sunday and spend time reading between the hours of 8am and 8pm. The leader would also give out optional prompts every hour, ranging from ‘Predict what happens next in your book’ to ‘Don’t forget to eat dinner’.

The most recent event took place on Saturday 24 June, with a radical difference. We would still spend 12 hours reading, but these would be spread over two days without necessarily having prompts every hour. As it was summer and unusually warm, we also arranged a meet-up in a nearby park.

Initial feedback suggests that while members didn’t manage a full 12 hours of reading, it still spurred them on to read more than they otherwise would have. Also, the slower pace seems to have been a hit with those who were working or had other difficulties being present for the usual 8am to 8pm period. For my own part, Saturday was booked solid, so it helped to have the Sunday reserved as well.

Our next readathon will be in autumn. As this is Scotland, an open-air meet-up is unlikely at that point, but there remains the possibility to congregate indoors and carry on our reading.

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Using the Correct Template

Every month, I attend a poetry circle where each member writes a piece to be discussed at the next meeting.

When I submit work, I generally place it on the same template, in Courier New font, leaving room at the top for my name, address and line count. This month, I decided to deviate from the format.

I used the confrontation between Craig Phillips and Nick Bateman in Series 1 of Big Brother as inspiration for the poem in question. As such, the piece needed to be laid out in a way that suggested a relentless pace.

The most obvious step was to write the text in a column with no more than four words per line. I then changed the typeface. Some experimentation found Bahnschrift SemiBold Condensed to be most suitable, as it’s narrow but still chunky enough to read comfortably. I don’t particularly like centred justification as it’s more difficult for the eye to follow it down. As a compromise, I adjusted the left-hand indent to around 85mm from the edge of the page, placing the text roughly down the centre line.

The two templates above are merely examples. There are countless variations available online, each with their own benefits and pitfalls. The most important factor is to decide which one is suitable for your purposes.

When sending work to a publisher, this will be dictated by the submission guidelines. Yes, these can be annoying to follow, but a consistent format ensures the editors know exactly where to look. So pick your template wisely.

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Timing is Everything

Regular readers will know it’s no secret that I don’t make a full-time living from writing. I have an office job as my main income.

When I moved to my current job, I found out there was someone who knows me through one of my writing groups, so we always chat in the canteen. After a while, I realised I only ever saw him in the canteen and never the wider office. I jokingly asked him last week, ‘Do you actually have a desk, or do you just work in here?’

He explained that he uses the Pomodoro method, which involves working on an activity for 25 minutes, then taking a five-minute break. It was developed by Francesco Cirillo, who named it after the Italian word for ‘tomato’ because that was the shape of his timer.

In the case of my colleague, he goes for a cup of tea during each break. It might work well in his role, but I don’t know how I would adapt it to mine.

Outside of the office, though, it’s a technique I use when I want to focus on a piece of writing. It must be stated that 25 minutes isn’t quite long enough for me, so I prefer the double Pomodoro method: 50 minutes of activity and a 10-minute break.

There are also plenty of alternatives to using a kitchen timer, such as a background noise generator that can simulate rainfall for as long as you like.

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Writing Outdoors

I’ve always regarded writing as a strictly indoor activity. On account of the unusually warm weather over the weekend, however, I decided to try it outside again. It did not go well.

Despite being in the shade and having my computer screen brightness set to 100%, it was difficult to see what was on the screen as I finished off a project. When the battery ran low and the screen automatically dimmed, it then became near-impossible to see the mouse and cursor.

At that point, I decided to switch to writing a letter by hand. There have been times when the wind has blown my papers all over the place, rainwater has ruined them, or it was simply been too cold to hold a pen. That said, I had more success there. The only real obstacle was the sun glaring on the white paper, so I had to wear shades.

I don’t foresee too many more sunny days over the coming weeks, but if there is, I think a better solution would be to sit inside, open the door, and let the outdoors come in.

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CSI for CSS

Until September of last year, my open-mic event would circulate bulletins using a manually-maintained Gmail list. This is not designed to send 50-plus messages at once and the system eventually refused to send certain ones. So it was time to set up a more modern self-service system, and here’s the entry about what happened at the time.

For GDPR compliance, we also needed to set up a basic website to allow members to join and leave. Our Web server would then deal with the request automatically. I found an open-source template online and stripped it down to suit our needs. Everything else on the website was initially a secondary concern, but we’ve slowly expanded the content to include event times, standards of behaviour and the latest bulletin.

While running a link check, I spotted six broken ones. They weren’t important, merely referring to fonts that weren’t in use on the site, but I wanted to understand the errors and fix them.

It transpired that our site was referencing two separate Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) documents. These are used to define the visual appearance and layout of a Web page, including the colours, fonts, spacing and positioning of elements. Worse, the two documents contained some contradictory information, so the functionality of the website could change or break depending on the order in which the instructions were executed.

Combined with a little sloppy HTML syntax, the browser was doing some heavy lifting to correct the errors silently behind the scenes. Remembering the experience of the distribution list, I didn’t want this to collapse as well.

I used to be a lot more interested in computing than I am now, so much of my coding knowledge has left me. But I spent the weekend combining the two sheets and figuring out what could and should be removed. I relied heavily on user questions from Stack Overflow, the output from code validation websites and even ChatGPT to write snippets of code or check what I’d written.

Ultimately, a total of 7,800 lines of CSS code were reduced to less than 160 lines by Sunday night. The resulting Hotchpotch website is still incredibly static and basic, but it fits the bill precisely.

I then had the impetus to revamp an existing website for a small writing class I’ve been running. This time, I used authoring software for the general look and feel, then made small revisions to the code by hand with my newfound knowledge. The Placing Your Mark website is much more dynamic than its Hotchpotch cousin, although I might one day harmonise their respective designs.

Meanwhile, with the bank holiday weekend over, I’m excited to get back to writing words and sentences rather than syntax and semicolons.