My friends who are successfully e-published authors encouraged me to do what I did back in high school, but more seriously this time – they invited me to publish some stories for free via websites that have replaced FictionPress in the decades since. These are Wattpad, Royal Road, and Tapas (the last one is for web comics, however).
They gave me factors for which stories will succeed in web novel format versus traditional publishing, and how to monetize it through Patreon or Kindle while also delivering on promises to paying readers (I don’t have a Patreon yet, but soon!)
For now, its up to me to choose which of my many, many stories I will prepare for web novel format. Some that have more progress are 1001 Way to Destroy the World and Twenty-Eight. One that is still in concept stage branches out from my animation script, SCRAMBLE. It would be the narrator’s journal in the year prior to SCRAMBLE. Bonni’s Journal.
One Thousand and One Ways to Destroy the World is supposed to be 60 chapters long, originally. Twenty chapters per part of a three part story. I finished ten chapters at frightening speed in 2006 and then stopped abruptly as world events rolled out scary developments like a recession, wars in different regions, and whatnot else. I completed two chapters from Part two later on. The world though, is gloomy enough as it is. We don’t need more of this, do we?
Twenty-Eight is the story of a seventeen-year-old girl who carries twenty-eight knives and works for a secret alien Group. This is set around the mid ’90s, while I was little. It was fun, what I published back in high school, but perhaps a little tone deaf. A single narrator, Twenty-Eight, makes this suitable for web novel publishing. So there’s that. But I need to refer to old notes on where exactly she fits in the timeline, and so on…
Bonni’s Journal, still in concept stage, is about the narrator of SCRAMBLE, the ever-irritable Bonni. What happened to Clyde? How did she get her mechanical umbrella? What happened in her first missions for the Group before the events of SCRAMBLE? This is not one of my stories that I wrote chunks of in high school. It’s SCRAMBLE that I wrote in the summer between Junior and Senior year, meant to be filmed by my barkada (group of friends) but things never quite worked out despite costumes and props and script all prepared… I still hope to animate this someday, but that requires funding. Funding that I may be able to get via Patreon – IF my web novel sells well enough online (when I finally post it and launch my Patreon). Alternatively, Chimera Anamnesis could also potentially fund SCRAMBLE, if taken on by a publisher.
We’ll see where this leads.