Hi everyone,
Usually when you get an email from me it’s one of my odd little stories, but not this time. Instead, the topic is one of my odd large stories: an experimental novel titled Faster on My Own. It follows Steven Williams, a revolutionary who’s tired of watching people shrink away from action and stumbles upon a brutal and simple equation: if conditions get worse, the probability of revolution rises. So he reconnects with his rich family to try and achieve exactly that. To the degree that he succeeds in plunging society into chaos, the structure of the book mirrors that degradation. Chapters warp and characters change in ways that I won’t describe here– that should be left for the reading.
Starting on Wednesday, June 22nd, I’ll be sending out one chapter a week on this Substack, for a total of 44 weeks. For those of you more interested in my short fiction, don’t worry. I’ll still publish that too on my current inscrutable schedule. But I’m excited to share this novel with you, a labor of four years off-and-on and I think the most ambitious project of mine to date.
Why serialize it on Substack? Traditional publishing is in dire straits, stultified by a shrunken market into chasing easy money and safe bets. There are still incredible novels which make it through, but there are just as many that never make it out of the gate, which end up on the shelf gathering dust for lack of a suitable place to put it. I’m not going to pretend that this is some great principled stand, that I’m forgoing the traditional route of my own volition. Though I do think publishing is a grotesque industry, I only arrived at this point after failing to tempt any agents to take a risk on this experiment. But lots of writers have come to this point too, and I think it’s tragedy to let great books sit unread just because some businesspeople decided there wasn’t a market for it. I believe Faster on My Own is one such great book, and I’m excited to share it with you. I hope you enjoy it, and share it with others.
It will be posted for free in its entirety over these 44 weeks, but for those who want to read it faster, there will be a paid subscription for $5 a month that will post an extra chapter a week, allowing you to finish in merely 22.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the first chapter of Faster on My Own this Wednesday.