Question About Serials

[kailhofer]

Does Rob's & Jeff's and McCamy's stories signal a shift (or more emphasis) from more novella/series to more serial versions of stories? When I was reading the back stacks to nominate serials for the 'best of the best of' issues (sadly, none of which were picked :'(), I saw that serials used to run practically every issue. Sometimes a nearly half dozen of them at a time. Or was this just the way it happened to work out?

I've never tried to make a serial, so the concept intrigues me. Does one just write a really long story & then spots are picked to split it, or do you deliberately try to write it with cliffhangers as a serial?


Nate

[doc]

There were several editorial changes that were made when Jeff and I took over serials some while ago. One was that we were going to let longer fiction run in larger chunks. Rather than taking a 20,000 word story and running it in 4 5,000 word chunks, we'd run it as a whole. And rather than running a 80,000 word novel in 15 or 20 parts (which was lunacy), we'd run it in 3-4 parts.

The other change we made was not accepting stories that were not complete. There are several serials from the Early Days that just....end. They end because the author stopped sending us the next chapter. This was reinforced by our own writing of Galaxy and Fifth where my...flexible attitude towards deadlines was often a source of friction. *sheepish grin*

Many of the so-called serials weren't written as serials, as such. They're just novel length fiction that we carefully broke into pieces. I think this has largely been a success, although long fiction doesn't get nearly as many comments in the lettercol as I'd like, myself.

Hope that helps answer some of your questions.