Author: Erica Drayton Writes

What I’m Writing this November and into 2024

Dear Reader,

I can’t believe it’s already November. Halloween has come and gone. And I’ve hand written 31 stories in 31 days! I wasn’t the only one! There were countless others who joined me and for that I am eternally grateful and proud to be counted among them. The fun of Pentober will continue in 2024 so if you didn’t get to join us in October, fret not!

In the spirit of the Spooky Season coming to a close. Here is our 12’ Skelly and his two pooches! A real conversation piece for the neighborhood, for sure.

Now, onto what’s next for Pentober:

Pentober Camp – Two additional months out of the year (apart from October) where the entire month will encourage handwriting stories! These months will be different as it will involve more prompts to get your creative juices flowing. The proposed months for Camp are: February and June 2024 (save the dates!)

Pentober52 – You will need to opt IN to receive these emails. They will go out weekly, every Wednesday, starting on January 3rd. Keep reading for more details.

MY 100 WORD STORY JOURNEY CONTINUES

November will bring two 100 word story themes: Literary Tarot and Substack Publication Name. While many of you will be working on NaNoWriMo, I will be toiling away on adding another 30 stories, bringing me to my 200th story on November 16th.

December will bring a change of pace for writing journey. I will be participating in Advent, creating my own “calendar of short stories” that will run from Sunday, December 3rd – Sunday, December 24. The other days of the month will a mash-up of Holiday Cheer with a sprinkle of left-over Halloween Scare! The final suit for the Literary Tarot will conclude in February 2024.

100 WORD STORIES ARCHIVE

Upgrade to Paid for access to a library of 175+ stories!

31 May 2023 Stories | 30 June 2023 Stories | 31 July 2023 Stories | 31 August 2023 Stories | 30 September 2023 Stories | 31 October 2023 Stories

EDITORIALS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED

---

HEARD ROUND THE STACKS

I want to shout out Mark for his excellence in fiction but also for his amazing participation in the first annual Pentober 2023! He showed up every day for 31 days of great storytelling and I hope you will read them as well as give him a well deserved subscribe! Till 2024 Mark, I look forward to it. And. I hope to see you when Pentober52 rolls around as well 😉…

No Margins Left

A home for exploration. Expect lots of words.

By Mark Engelsson

---

WHAT I’M READING

Okay, I’m technically not reading it now but I’m getting myself ready for a 19 month read through, and literary learning, of The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. It is known as the first ever serialized fiction novel of the nineteenth century and seeing as I’ll be finally throwing my hat in the ring with other amazing serials being written here on Substack, I could think of no better literary work to read. Want to join me? The serial will begin in March. Sign-up now and let’s read this great work together. It can be found in the public domain.

WARNING: This book is just shy of 300k words! We begin reading March 2024 and finish October 2025! Yes, that’s quite a commitment.

The Pickwick Club

Kick-starting the serial novel craze during the Victorian era (1836).

By Erica Drayton

November 1, 2023

and why maybe we all need to take a chill pill

This might be considered a bit of a “hot take” but (and I’m just as guilty of this as the next person) Substack is not strictly a fiction community. What I mean by that is, it helps sometimes to take a step back and try to realize we are just a small microcosm of the full depth and breath that Substack has to offer to all who visit. I’ve noticed of late (and in the past) many of us (again, myself included) will hem and haw about the lack of fiction representation within the posts that Substack themselves push out there in their weekly and monthly round-ups. Sure, they will mention notables like and or even , but the little guys look up and think, “they don’t really need any shout outs to grow their audience” and wish we were mentioned instead. As I’ve said (and won’t mention again) I feel the same way and there are some days I echo this sentiment publicly and the rest of the time I hold that envy inside.

But then I decided to exercise a little perspective with Substack as a whole to try and understand if my feelings of abandonment are valid. Here are a few things I discovered:

1. Substack started in 2017. Just 6 years ago.

2. In the last 6 years they have grown to have thousands of Substack writers sending out emails regularly.

3. Many of those users of Substack (myself included) brought with them lists from other platforms that number in the thousands and hundreds of thousands and these emails have zero clue what Substack is, let alone how to navigate it should they choose to find out.

4. Substack claims there are over 500,000 paid subscribers across all of the writers on Substack and millions of visitors to the site.

So, when I see numbers like that my brain starts to calculate immediately. As some of you may know, I’ve been on a mission to uncover and track every single fiction Substack that exists. This includes poetry, artists, and musicians. It has not been an easy task to undertake but in about 2 months I managed to find 300 (so far)! That might seem like a hell of a lot until you use some perspective to realize that 300 is a small percentage of the whole pie that makes up the different categories of Substack.

Is it safe to say that Substack might look a lot like Medium, in that there is a larger proportion of non-fiction/journalists using the platform than fiction? Maybe. But the level of community that Substack instills and puts into their community as a whole is what makes all the difference in the world.

In fact, I place the blame for why so many of us feel so jilted by Substack squarely on Substack’s shoulders! If not for their amazing algorithm that puts us all together in Notes so that we can connect easily with each other, we probably would realize just how many “other” users there are. We are, by design, living in a bubble and when that happens we can become blind to the obvious.

Sure, fiction is a HUGE presence on Substack but I wouldn’t expect it to be included in every single shout out post that they make or to be a priority because there are far more other categories with bigger audiences.

Could Substack do more to make us feel less left out? Sure. What that solution is, I cannot say at this time. Perhaps they could extend an olive branch to some lesser known fiction writers and provide a bit of a hand up as opposed to a hand out?

We all appreciate the rapid fire updates but what we really need is more visible assistance for the little guy and less coddling of the big fish. We know the big fish pay your bills, keep the lights on, all that good stuff, but think how many more big fish you’d have to draw from if you focused more on us. They don’t need your help or support or guidance. The big fish have done a pretty good job of proving just how well they know how to do their thing.