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The Shortest Path posted:The Wandering Inn is the only web serial I know of whose author is a woman and it’s noticeably better with respect to its depiction of women in the story than most of the others that get discussed in here. I write Into the Mire and I’m a chick! A gay chick even. So yes, I have some Opinions about how a lot of webfic handles ~the female/lesbian experience.~ I try not to get too preachy because it’s all just fiction and we’re all just here to have a good time, but you can definitely tell when a straight dude who has no clue how lady bodies work is writing that stuff, lol. Well I kept meaning to type up a post to introduce myself/my serial but I guess that’s as good an excuse as any. Thank you very much to everyone in this thread who’s recommended and read Mire over the last year and a half.  Coincidentally, I just posted the final chapter of Book 1 last week, so the first story is now totally self-contained if you’re the type of person who likes the assurance of knowing the thing they’re reading actually has an ending.
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Jul 6, 2019 09:05
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Aaaa, thanks so much for the kind words, everybody! I’m not gonna quote every single person because that’d be obnoxious, but I really appreciate it and I’m glad people are enjoying it.Chatrapati posted:I read this story the other day after giving up with Cultivation Chat Group. Really brilliant! I loved the descriptions and atmosphere of the weird bog, I’m kind of sad they left it. I found myself relating to all of the characters in different ways, even Vosk. Really just thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, it’s super impressive. Dude, first off: thanks! Second: regarding that particular scene, the ambiguity and confusion was definitely intentional. Everyone was feeling pretty hosed up after making it out of the swamp, and if you were confused and unsure that’s exactly what I was going for, lol. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with how the situation regarding the Fungal Mind Meld Trio ends up! I do think there’s something to be said about anchoring yourself to the first POV character you meet in a book. I definitely feel that way a lot when reading ensemble cast books, but I also wonder if a lot of that isn’t the author’s intent–they’re introducing this particular character first for a reason, so clearly they think this person is the focal point of the story too. In unrelated-to-my-serial news, does anyone have any recs for completed serials that would be fun for a teenage girl? She’s read most of the big popular serials and prefers magic/mysteries to superheroes but also prefers contemporary fantasy over second-world fantasy. It’s for my seventeen-year-old niece so I’d feel extremely weird sending her something with a bunch of sex in it. I figured I’d ask here because my reading tastes are very different to hers, heh.
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Jul 18, 2019 22:43
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LLSix posted:Been awhile but Threadbare is pretty fantastic. It is about a teddybear that goes on an adventure to rescue his girl/owner. This turned out to be a fantastic rec, thank you! It’s pretty far outside my usual cup of tea so I probably never would have stumbled over it on my own.
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Aug 20, 2019 03:13
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GreyjoyBastard posted:I know, right? For a vaguely young adult styled (series of) webnovel(s), this is some real emotional impact. I think the length and sometimes wandering nature of webfic tends to lend itself well to emotional impact moments like these because you often have so long to get to know the characters.
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Oct 3, 2019 08:45
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Into the Mire is going to have an ebook of Book 1 up shortly as well as an audio edition (complete with goon cello on the theme song! thanks, sebmojo!).
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Oct 21, 2019 09:34
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Ghetto Prince posted:The last web serials I really enjoyed were Epilogue and Into the Mire, I think because they’re smaller stories that were doing something new and interesting, with a smaller cast and a single plot that the author was building up to. Hey, thank you! I am really glad you enjoyed Mire. I definitely think the smaller cast and close zoom focus worked well for it. I’m hoping that as I broaden up the world’s scope in Book 2 it doesn’t lose that sense of closeness to the characters. It’s always going to be a character-focused story, even if I know that sacrifices some potential popularity with the RRL-type webfic crowd. I’m happy with the niche it’s carved out.
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Jan 10, 2020 11:52
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Cicero posted:Huh, looks like Into the Mire's site is down? At least, I can't reach it, there's a message about it being suspended. I love how Lithium's server migration landing page says account suspended instead of "updating nameservers" or some poo poo. I knew the migration was happening and STILL crapped my pants. Thanks for the heads up though. I always appreciate notes about site issues because I'm in a nonstandard time zone and American readers tend to spot stuff when I'm snoozin'.
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Jan 21, 2020 10:00
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Hey so uh I feel weird posting this but Hieronymous and The Shortest Path are both chill with it so I guess I might as well. Into the Mire has been officially longlisted for my country's highest literary honour for fantasy:   This is, to put it mildly, extremely cool. I have also since been informed that at least one SFWA member has nominated Mire for a loving Nebula too, holy balls. The email goes on to say that if too many works are nominated in a category, the final ballot may be chosen by number of total nominations. With Shortest Path's blessing, I'm linking the nominations form here if anyone wanted to chuck in a vote for me. Since it's an awards committee, the nominations form is of course a slightly outdated google form. You don't need to be a member to vote and all you need to do is provide some really simple answers: title (Into the Mire), category (Best Collected Work), author pen name (Casey Lucas), publisher (Self), and contact (https://www.intothemire.com). If you felt like chucking in a nom for my short story as well, you can read it here and input the publisher as Sponge Magazine and the contact url as https://www.sponge.nz. But wait! There's more! The Sir James Vogel awards are being held at the same ceremony as the Hugo Awards this year, at WorldCon. This means the SJV awards panel will be the same judges as the Hugo awards' judges and it means that the "nominee information pack" gets sent to all those people as well. This year ol' Gamer Thrones himself George RR Martin is emceeing and there will be a whole slew of serious literary agents and authors there, and if I'm a nominee they'll literally have to read my terrible webfic. Thank you so much to all you goons who have supported Mire and read it over the last couple years. This is leaps and bounds beyond anything I ever imagined when I started it. I find out if I've made the shortlist in April and you can get your dog, your dad, your wife, and your landlord to nominate me until the end of March!
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Feb 10, 2020 03:14
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The Shortest Path posted:This is incredible and I wish you success in winning! I'll go ahead and stick all this in the OP too if that's okay with you. Dude yeah that's absolutely fine! Thank you so much to everybody who posted to say congrats, I am phone posting or else I'd reply to all of you individually but it's giving me an extreme case of the warm fuzzies to read your posts in this extremely humid airport lounge while I sweat my organs out through my pores.
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Feb 11, 2020 07:38
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Omi no Kami posted:Maintaining a web serial can be horrifyingly stressful and time-consuming, never apologize for taking time off! I really needed to see this, thank you. I've been beating myself up a little for missing Mire updates when my tablet was lost/stolen by an airline while traveling. Your post has gently reminded me that it's okay to take breaks even in situations where your posting device hasn't been yoinked off a plane.
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Feb 20, 2020 10:15
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Omi no Kami posted:I think serials kinda co-occupy this weird space with the manga industry where you're often put in the position of producing content on the regular, week-in and week-out, rain, shine, or zombie apocalypse. I work in the manga industry as my day job lmao 
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Feb 21, 2020 00:12
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Unfortunately the webfic world has quite a few of those. I really enjoyed some novellas that were serialised by an author I found as a "friends of x" on WFG. His work was entertaining, well written, said a lot of thoughtful things about capitalism, internet culture, etc and then when I looked at his Twitter he declared the culprit for all the stuff he'd written about fairly astutely was... the mixing of the races!  I suppose a genre packed full of power/leveling and revenge fantasies is probably a fertile breeding ground for Bad Opinions the longer I think on it.
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Feb 24, 2020 18:23
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Schneider Heim posted:Do people just host their own novel on Wordpress.com? I looked at a few web serial/novel aggregate sites and they all look... not my thing. Authors, do you use those? I host mine on my own site via a WordPress install because I wanted to have complete control over the CSS.
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Mar 29, 2020 05:56
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Eyyy, only time I'm gonna bump this because it feels weird shilling but there's two days left to get your votes in. Into the Mire got longlisted for a major literary prize and they're counting votes/noms to create the shortlist now. If you've enjoyed Mire or just wanna help a goon out, there's two days left to fill out that form. I've even written a handy guide to filling out their confusing form.Anomalous Blowout posted:Hey so uh I feel weird posting this but Hieronymous and The Shortest Path are both chill with it so I guess I might as well. On a side note, after a moving house/trapped sick in another country/quarantine related delay, Mire is now updating again.  I've also made a complete epub of the first book available on Patreon which will also be going public soon. But if you want a copy and aren't on my Patreon please feel free to just PM me.
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Mar 29, 2020 23:37
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Affi posted:Okay just because its been jarringly no talk for the last couple of weeks except rapechat I will now list my top ten favorite web serials with extremely short notices on why I like em. Also maybe almost all of the webserials i've ever read? Aw man hey after absolutely falling apart with illness the last couple months, coming back to this thread and seeing this as the first post since I'd last checked it was like drinking a cool beer on a hot day. Thanks so much. I needed that. 
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May 19, 2020 12:23
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I feel compelled to share that someone illustrated the arm amputation scene from Into the Mire in the style of like Titan A.E.??? And it owns harder than any piece of art I've ever received. Spoilers up to Book 1 Chapter 30 and warning for very mild gore if you're for some reason browsing a forum called Something Awful at work.
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Jun 6, 2020 01:45
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Sham bam bamina! posted:What are this thread's thoughts on Mother of Learning? It reads like fiction that began on a fanfic website a decade ago and got steadily better. If you started reading it a decade ago and didn't mind that style of writing back when it was first being posted, you'd probably have fond memories of it. If you don't mind that sort of fanfic-feeling writing (glossing over a lot of stuff, uneven pacing, characters that feel a little bit more like archetypes than fully realised characters until the author really gets a grip on what they're doing and dives in deeper, characters having kinda samey voices), it's not a bad read. The writing improves a ton over the course of its life. I think I was like 19 when it started and my tastes were a lot more forgiving back then than they are now, so I enjoyed it at the time, but when I tried to come back to it about five years ago it felt kinda juvenile and the earlier stuff was pretty rough and didn't hold my interest anymore. One of the problems with such long-running serials and long-running book series in general is that by the time you as a writer have gotten through 800,000 words of something, you will not be the same author you were when you began the project. If you aren't working with an editor, it's even harder to smooth over the gaps in quality that will grow with such a project. I find it hard to recommend a lot of the serials that began in the early 2010s because if you go into them expecting the same quality at the beginning that current readers are seeing in chapter 400, you'll end up disappointed. I haven't read up to the parts where people started saying it gets bad, so all I can say is that if you can read the first few chapters and the writing doesn't put you off, you'll probably enjoy a good chunk of the story as all it does is improve from that point.
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Dec 1, 2020 22:43
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Omi no Kami posted:Yeah, that’s the big thing I was referring to when I mentioned the general demographics. Narratively tons of stories do really neat stuff, but yeaaaah- the prose is very frequently more Metaworld Chronicles than Chaucer, and it weirds me out that it doesn’t bug more (any?) readers. I think part of it is that people tend to compare apples to apples. When I read a webfic that’s great, I tend to compare it to other webfic, not books I’ve read recently. This is total speculation on my part, but I could easily see readers forgiving a lot of basic prose sins if they were using bottom-tier webfic as their yard stick. Also, having just gone back and read a whole glut of posts in this thread, almost none of the critical posts actually read as that bad? Discussing aspects of stuff that you dislike or interrogating a piece of writing from the perspective of having not enjoyed it is still a valid way to discuss it. Unfortunately for Worm, I think it ends up a target of this type of post more than most serials simply because most people have read it and that makes it easier to discuss. I’ve read a lot of serials that had the same problems I feel Worm has, but using them as an example in a big post is a gamble because for all I know only 40 other people read it. It’s sorta like how almost every writing group on the internet has big discussions about Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings at some point–they’re big popular works more people can discuss because more people have read them, and those who haven’t have possibly at least seen the movies. If I wanted to discuss the topic of how a lot of webfic focuses too much on worldbuilding and not enough on setting scenes within their world and conveying mise en scène to readers, there’s a lot of examples that would come to mind before Worm. But if I was posting about it in a big discussion somewhere, I’d probably use an example from Worm because it’s the one most people will have read. I know it can sorta look like a bunch of people just trying to tear down a popular work, but I don’t really think that’s the always goal when Worm or Potter or HPMOR discussions come up. It’s just that critical discussions about how web serials work (in a sense of what works vs what doesn’t) would be a lot shorter if we were all using different examples that only 1 or 2 people each had read. And to go back a little further… Narmi posted:Has anyone ever done that? The closest thing I can think of is The Wandering Inn where some names get blanked, but that’s more like classified, blacked out than spoiler text. I originally had something like this planned for Mire, but I couldn’t figure out a way to make it work for readers who use screen-reader software. Accessibility is a big deal for me and I don’t like the idea of parts of my story being unavailable to blind readers, so I nixed it.
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Jan 8, 2021 23:01
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Real weird news to get to post in the Web Serial thread on a dead gay comedy forum, but thanks in part to all the awesome folks in here who read it and talked about it, Into the Mire has been acquired by a literary agency. I’m balls deep in the edits phase now and we’ll be taking it to London Book Fair this summer to get it slapped together into an old-fashioned book. Buck loving wild. Thanks to everybody on here who ever read it or recommended it to friends. I don’t intend to delete the serial version until a publisher makes me, but the novel edition is already shaping up to be quite different. Same cast of characters, just sharper and gnarlier and probably wetter.
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Feb 8, 2021 02:05
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This is me completely talking out my rear end based on anecdotal conversations I’ve had, but I do wonder if some amount of it isn’t people’s differing levels of ability to imagine stuff in their heads. I had no idea Aphantasia was a thing until I was an adult, and suddenly the amount of picky I was about my reading material made so much sense. I have a hard time imagining things visually beyond just tiny flashes and brief static images unless it’s described in a lot of detail using language that really evokes stuff in my head. Conversely, my brother, who reads a lot of extremely average superhero and Transformers fanfic and webfiction, once told me that he reads stuff “because it’s easy to just imagine the characters having beam battles and poo poo.” He said the writing doesn’t have to be great because he’s just using it as a launch pad for his own imagination about the story. Whereas I genuinely can’t conjure the visuals if the writing is clunky and awkward. It makes a certain intuitive sense to me that people who are great at visualising things and enjoying their mental visuals wouldn’t necessarily need perfect or even good writing to imagine scenes. And as long as the stuff they’re imagining is fun and interesting, awkward writing isn’t a handbrake.
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Feb 11, 2021 10:25
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