Here’s a collection of links to the actual Sci-Fi I’ve posted here thus far:
Tales from the Galactic Commonwealth
El’Sha’s Blog
I knew when I started this that 1500-3000 words each week would be difficult.
I knew that it might be years before my views took off. I knew that, in addition to being a creative outlet, maintaining a Substack was a marketing decision. I had always intended to advertise this blog on other sites, but my distaste for social media lead me to procrastinate, and when the school year began and my workload doubled, I found I barely had time to get a post together each week, let alone compose tweets or Facebook posts or Reddit posts. I fell into a holding pattern, starting each week’s post on Monday, adding a few hundred words each day, and then powering through on Saturday.
This took a toll on the quality of my work and ate into the already scant time I had with my family each week, but I pressed onward. I knew that the secret to internet success was consistency. I knew that if I stuck with it, the line would go up. I knew that forcing myself outside my comfort zone, forcing myself to share my writing with others, was a necessary step in the patch I had chosen. I knew that posting something, anything, each week was good for me.
Ultimately, none of that matters.
I started writing because I wanted to write, not because I wanted to make money. The dream of getting published and establishing a real way to monetize my writing was only ever a means to an end: a way to free up more of my time for writing—but crucially, writing what I want to write. That’s obviously what I’ve been doing here; no one told me to write a bunch of opinion pieces and then a couple of serialized sci-fi stories. The thing is, I still have a novel in my head, and I haven’t thought about it in months. The last ten-or-so weeks of pulp could easily be made to fit in the bigger story I want to tell, but the tone and the pacing and the polish aren’t where they need to be. I can’t do the writing I really want to in this format.
So, with all that said, Robert Roanoke is going to disappear for a while.
If I come up with something worth sharing here I’ll share it, and anyone subscribed will of course get a notification, but don’t expect a weekly offering moving forward. I appreciate everyone that dutifully clicked that email each week, but I hope none of you felt obligated. This was an experiment, and I would say a highly successful one. I learned a lot about my craft, presentation, meeting deadlines, and the compromises that result, so I don’t see this as a failure or a surrender, but a tactical pivot: writing still fills me with joy and I’m no less passionate about it than I was when I started. Moving forward, I’ll be able to focus all my creative energy and the extremely limited writing time I have each day on the long-term projects that really inspire me.
Thanks for reading,
Robert Roanoke