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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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I'm a big fan of serial novels, and I've previously written (fanfiction) serially before. But as an art form, it's like comparing a TV show to a movie-- for all the things that are similar, there's still plenty of things that change. For example, I'm committed to polishing to book to a mirror finish, which means obsessing over line-level prose, snipping dangling plot threads, and cutting out fat like I'm sculping a character from greek myth. But all of that goes directly against the grain of serial fiction, which favors expansive plots, slower development, excessive-- almost extraneous-- detail, and update rate over polish.

I'm not going to rule out publishing serially in the future, but this book specifically would only work as a traditionally published work