Intermission

No chapter for today - this next section breaks us in to the back half of the story and that’s where things get spicy, so I’m holding it back under after the 1st. In the meantime, I’d like to give you a quick update.

This was originally intended to be the first in a six-part series that would follow Roderick Butler until he was over 30, with side stories and novellas to examine the lives of other characters. It’s an ambitious project, is what I’m saying - and like any ambitious project, the odds of success were always remote. As it is, I am struggling to find an audience for this story and it is hard for me to justify continuing. I started working on volume 2 in October, but it’s been idle since mid-November.

As it stands, I really can’t justify continuing with Empathy beyond what I’ve already written. I have other pursuits that have a more meaningful shot of success, and wasting my time trying to break into a cliquish publishing industry seems like a waste of time.

So I’m going to do something that I hate when it’s done by other people, something that I’ve resisted doing for years and years. I’m going to beg.

If you want to see this story continue, please spread the word about it. Tell your friends. Tell strangers on the internet. Make your own handbills and post them, if you think it will work (it won’t - believe me). And if you aren’t following now, then do that too.

Is this shameless? Oh yes, and hypocritical to boot. This kind of remorseless pressure is endemic to the internet these days, it’s one of the things that makes it so unpleasant, and the fact that I’m not partaking is probably why I don’t have a bigger audience.

And while you’re here, let me know if you like the way I’ve been presenting this, because if this continues I’ll probably change platforms. Substack is garbage if you aren’t a Twitter god to start with, the features it provides are obviously inadequate for what I’m doing, and I think it would work better to just put a hypothetical volume 2 on an ordinary blog. But again, I would like your feedback on that.

With that out of the way, I will see you on January 2nd with the first entry in Part IX: Shit Gets Real.