The Argument:
A stranger pushes, ends up with a fistful of husks.
Fences go beyond mending.
A crow agrees.
Episode 6.3 of Vengeance, My Heart (episode link), my serialized Sepulchral-Gothic Western novel, is now live at ravensweald.art.
Subscribe to the serial via email
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(more…)The Argument:
Things are on the Turn or on the Twist.
A landscape in cards.
Everything æsces on the wræclast.
Episode 6.2 of Vengeance, My Heart (episode link), my serialized Sepulchral-Gothic Western novel, is now live at ravensweald.art.
Subscribe to the serial via email
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(more…)The Argument:
A Stranger in a strange landing.
Dovetailing memory and reality.
Now not so fast, y’hear?
Episode 6.1 of Vengeance, My Heart (episode link), my serialized Sepulchral-Gothic Western novel, is now live at ravensweald.art.
Subscribe to the serial via email
❧
(more…)The Argument:
…flutter…
Episode 5.4 of Vengeance, My Heart (episode link), my serialized Sepulchral-Gothic Western novel, is now live at ravensweald.art.
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The site is designed with reader-modifiable typographic elements so that you can adjust the experience to suit your needs. Click the sliders to the right of the content to adjust.
If the sliders do not appear, be sure to “share” with a native browser or click the compass icon in WordPress Reader’s browser (which does not support the required JavaScript). If you prefer to not let scripts run in your browser, you are welcome to read it with the default settings.
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WordPress has elected to make it a manual process to subscribe to a site in WordPress Reader if the site is not running the Jetpack Plugin. Navigate here on how best to add this series to Reader, according to your favorite platform:
Something I learned today. The old (ancient) method of letting people subscribe to your blog on WordPress Reader has been killed entirely by the Jetpack team. It was unsupported, but still worked as recently as a year ago. I tried to make it a simple process of subscribing to my RSS feed at ravensweald.art (which is attempting to remove the social elements from that blog), but that workaround no longer works around.
So, I modified the site to include instructions on how you can add the story feeds to Reader manually. I wish they would not make it a multistep process, but alas, I’m not sure they really want you to follow a site operating outside of the WordPress.com/Jetpack ecosystem — which is a little silly when you think about it, if my suspicions are true.
If you have been enjoying Vengeance, My Heart, please consider following the steps outlined on this page to add it to your feed.
Failing that, consider bookmarking the site in your browser and swinging by a couple times a week: currently M/W/F — I may take a break this Friday to polish Episode 6.1 over the weekend. The episode is mostly ready, but I think I want to make another pass at edits before publishing.
Hope y’all are doing swell. Let me know if you encounter any issues with my instructions.
The Argument:
Pointed questions asked.
Answers delivered in lead.
Another spent returned to the deck.
Episode 5.3 of Vengeance, My Heart (episode link), my serialized Sepulchral-Gothic Western novel, has now gone live at ravensweald.art.
❧
The site is designed with reader-modifiable typographic elements so that you can adjust the experience to suit your needs. Click the sliders to the right of the content to adjust.
If the sliders do not appear, be sure to “share” with a native browser or click the compass icon in WordPress Reader’s browser (which does not support the required JavaScript).
As the story in Vengeance, My Heart shifts from setting tone and atmosphere to character evolution and development — and quite possibly as a result of changing focus from short, snappy bite sized pieces of the story and shifting over to giving the story more room to breathe — I’ve discovered more tolerance as the writer for longer episode fragments.
My goal up through the end of Episode 5, was to make sure there was a targeted max word count for each fragment/part/sub-episode to finding in Episode 6 that character development doesn’t work so well with those kinds of metrics. I don’t think it is a significant spoiler to say it is about time to move to that tone/color-setting of the early episodes to dig down into the motivations and explain, in drip-feed fashion, the previously unexplained.
(more…)In case you missed the fanfare, I have created a heavily modified installation of WordPress to host my longer, serialized fiction instead of posting it here.
The site is part proof of concept, part hypothesis test, and mostly designed around giving the reader a better experience than normally available via standard themes and via community plug-ins.
I really encourage you to give it a spin, even if you don’t care for my brand of fiction. It is designed to give the reader some element of control over the reading experience itself (typography, paragraph spacing and layout, font size, line width, night/day appearances), and to test just how important it is (for me, at least) to receive immediate, conversational feedback via “likes” and interactive comments — or are those things a distraction from the reading/writing experience. On the backend, I have also focused on privacy-forward elements: removing stats and tracking cookies (that I can control), not maintaining a database of email addresses and comments (the guestbook should be one-and-done, no database entries other than, maybe, an IP address to put a cooldown on guestbook spam attacks; Cloudflare is part of the security and content delivery, but should not pose too many privacy issues). And it is zippy (rating >90 for mobile on speed tests, ~100 for desktop).
Anyway, I’ve done rambled enough. Come on by and let me know how it went for you.
Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction.
Jump to the new table of contents to read earlier content.
After this episodic post for Vengeance, My Heart, the serial gothic western novel is migrating to a new home on the companion site at ravensweald.art. That site is designed for a distraction-free reading experience, with reader-focused improvements to enhance the reading experience with you, the reader, in mind. The series will read more like a book and less like it was shoehorned into a series of blog posts. In fact, this post is live over there as soon as you can see this one, and you might want to give it a gander for an improved experience. For best results, be sure to view it through your preferred browser. It will render just nicely in the mobile Jetpack browser, but you’ll miss out on the typographic modifications I’ve embedded in the site to let you read the fiction in a way that best suits your whims and preferences.
To repeat: The series will continue over at it’s new home at ravensweald.art. I have not abandoned it.
Now, on with the story…
My boots needed resoling. I’d been telling myself that since Harrow’s Creek and had done nothing about it, which was either laziness or a quiet faith that the road would end before the leather did. Too bad the road was winning the battle.
(more…)Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
The Dusk hit her like a hand — the perpetual bruised light of the wastes pressing against her eyes after the cave’s absolute dark. She blinked heavy eyes against the light and groaned as she lifted her head to look at who had spoken.
Above her, on a flat stone at the mesa’s edge…
Dee.
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