An Invitation

Dearest Reader,

I am here to deliver an invitation…

Go on… take it! 🙂

While the primary goal of this newsletter is to share my writing with you, a secondary goal is to share the love of short fiction and all its writers. For the next few months, that will take the shape of The Great Substack Story Challenge.

Credit: Mark Starlin

This summer, thirteen of us Substack writers will be working on a story. Each chapter will be short enough to read within your 15-minute break. The catch is, there’s no outline or pre-planning. We’re not even tying anyone down to a specific genre! Every week a writer will create an entry for the story, and then the next writer will have a week to read and continue it, no matter how farfetched the ending to the previous entry was.

Every entry will be a free post on the respective writer’s Substack. Think of it as a guided tour of our community. A pub crawl. A thirteen-course progressive dinner party (hope you’re hungry!).

For those of us participating, it’s a relay race and a demand for entertainment from the muses. It’s going to be fun, and it’s going to be chaotic.

Here is the official announcement of the project. Please take a look and subscribe early to everyone you think is of interest. You can always unsubscribe later if their content doesn’t fit your tastes. My regular issues will keep you up to date on where you can catch the latest entry. I’m excited to be working with so many talented folks!

If you want to subscribe to everyone but fear the impact that may have on your inbox, then I invite you to try the Substack app. Within it, you’ll have access to settings that will let you control whether you get emails or app notifications. I’m told it’s great if you’re looking for a more structured reading experience outside of your inbox. Currently, it’s only for iOS, but we Android users can join the waitlist to be notified once it’s available to us.

I will see you next week, and you can look forward to the week of June 9th, where I’ll post my regular issue on the preceding Tuesday, and on Thursday, you’ll see my attempt to unknot whatever fresh torment G.M. Baker sends my way!

*Envelope image by Erica Steeves