Notes on fiction serials

Since its birth last September, Dead End Follies has been in a perpetual state of improvement. This blog has changed purposes so many times before getting its identity that my product has suffered some inconsequencies here & there. Let me make a little bit of history here, in order to reintroduce the cornerstone of Dead End Follies, the weekly fiction serials.

I started this whole adventure eight months ago, after a "recruitement reunion" @ Ubisoft Montreal. What I thought was a formal interview for a game designer job ended up being a screening made by a human ressources employee to see what was I made of. Knowing my long story with HR, my resume was most probably thrown in the garbage as soon as I passed the door. That, they didn't tell me. They told me to send some samples of my work in order to get some feedback from game designers, so I could adjust and present a better product to the official interview.

That's how I created Dead End Follies. At first, it was an online portfolio. I started writing Law Of The Gun in order to give an evolutive perspective on what I was doing. That serial was wrong on so many levels, but as writer Claude Lalumière told in a conference, every writer has a lot of crap to get out of his system. Every writer that starts to mass produce has a period of experimentation to go through before he finds a style of his own. I'm still in this period, but not as intensely as last Fall.

I started reading about the craft. Everytime I bumped into a problem with my writing (mostly with my novel), I stopped and read a book on the subject, which opened a new world of possibilities every time. With that constant aquisition of skills and knowledge, my spectrum got broader and broader, so I started writing other things. Aftershock was the second serial. My mistake with this one is that I shouldn't have pursued episodic fiction with it. The first chapter Burning Ashes was one of my best pieces of work, but it should've stayed a short story. The post-apocalyptic adventures of the Whitmore brothers asked for a level of dedication I didn't had to give them.

Then came Black Sun, which is still ongoing(will end next week). This serial came from my desire to experiment with noir. The mistake with Black Sun is that it wasn't planned enough. I created it out of enthusiasm from reading Prayer For The Rain by Dennis Lehane. The story turned out to be better than the first two I wrote. More cohesive and with more lively characters. It's far from being perfect, but it's more enjoyable than the two first.

I consider these three stories as "the first wave". They have been incredibly useful to "Solace" and to my whole process of evolution as a writer, but they are an abandonned construction field. I moved on to better things. Versus is the first story of the second wave. I experiment a lot with the themes still, but the structure is way more solid. Six dual chapters where two characters face off. Twelve chapters in all. Two points of view. The challenge in this story is to write from a third person point of view without implementing emotional data that goes overboard. Third person is a very powerful narrative technique, but it's easy to invalidate.

Fiction lovers, bored artists, bored workers, passionate bloggers, I invite you to read my things and leave comments. "Versus" particularly, has 1000 words episodes(two and a half pages) and is still ongoing for the next two months, every Fridays. You'll be able to discover the characters and will have the fun to anticipate every now episode each week. If the answer is good enough, I might serialize it like a TV show and make a second season of twelve episodes. The theme is broad and I already have a lot of ideas.

But what will follow "Versus" this summer? No clear idea yet, but I've been preparing myself since the birth of the last serial. It's going to be experimentation with dark science-fiction themes. It's not up my alley, but that's what Dead End Follies is for now, experimentation. Evolution of one's writing process. When I'll publish "Solace" you'll be glad to say: "Huh, I've been following this guy's blog since like hum...forever?"