Lightning in a Bottle, Passion in the Stars
Apparently serialization is not for me ...
This is another entry in my ongoing “My Filthy Hobby” series, in which I offer some thoughts on the stories I’ve published. This week, a look at Lightning in a Bottle, Passion in the Stars, my experiment in serialization under the Laz Larue pen name.
I grew up on big horror novels — Stephen King, of course (“The Shining”, “The Stand,” “Pet Semetary,” and “It”), but also Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story” (that one left a mark on my young mind …), Dean Koontz’s “Whispers,” and Tom Tryon’s “Harvest Home.” My mother tended to leave horror and true crime books lying around the house, and was an incredibly lax supervisor when it came to her children’s reading habits. In my non-erotica writing career I tended toward shorter, weirder stories, but I always had a soft spot in my heart for the sprawling spooky potboiler. And that’s what I was aiming for with “Lightning in a Bottle, Passion in the Stars.”
At about 46,000 words, this is one of my longer pieces: definitely on the longer side of the novella divide, bumping up against the short novel. (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is about 47,000 words; and I have no problem noting that those are better words in a more pleasing order, for the most part, but F. Scott and I aren’t playing the same game.) “Ghost Story” is about 170,000 words, and part of me wishes that I had spent the time to let “Lightning in a Bottle” expand to fill that kind of space. Alas, I set myself a task that wasn’t really a good fit for me or for my story, and in many ways I feel like this story fails to live up to its potential. (Which doesn’t mean I don’t think you shouldn’t read it! It’s fun and spooky and sexy and well worth a read!)
This story started with a setting: the abandoned and maze-like structure on the outskirts of Wasconaway, with a dark and troubling history. It was in part inspired by an old tuberculosis sanatorium on the edge of the town where I went to high school, that was the site of quite a few illicit parties and was rumored to be frequented by devil worshipers (this was in the 1980s at the height of the Satanic Panic, when there were imaginary devil worshipers lurking in every abandoned building). The structure, too, was an early inspiration: I wanted to tell the story in alternating timelines, letting the back story of the haunting unfold at roughly the same pace as the haunting events themselves.
The other thing that I wanted to do with this story was explore serial publication. All the cool kids seem to be doing things on Wattpad or Vella or whatnot, telling their stories in dribs and drabs to ravenous audiences waiting for the next chapter to be released, and I wanted to see if I could tap into that vibe. It appealed to my literary side, too — Dickens, Trollope, and Wilkie Collins had been serialized in magazines at the height of their popularity, and if it’s good enough for them, then surely it’s something Cornelia Quick should try.
It turns out that serialization is harder than it looks, and it’s not a good fit for every story. I had half of “Lightning in a Bottle” ready to go on the first of October, scheduled to run on several (too many …) platforms, and figured I would leisurely work through the second half as the month unfolded until a climactic conclusion as the calendar approached Halloween. Up to that point the chapters were roughly equal in length, with a strange tale of haunting and possession in 2023 alternating with a more science fiction weird tale unfolding in the 1950s and 1960s. I had it plotted out, so I figured it would be just a matter of filling in the blanks each morning to get things scheduled out far enough in advance.
Alas, I didn’t bank on the problem of characters making demands on me; at this point I should probably expect about a quarter of my characters to rise up with ideas of their own, throwing my plans into disarray. In “Lightning in a Bottle,” it was Linda, the young psychology professor who throws herself into a triad with physicist Jeremy and architect Paul, who had thoughts of her own. She started as more of a plot device, but as the chapters unfolded she became strong-willed and insistent that her story was bigger than I had planned. I had the 2023 Clarissa scenes pretty much completed, right down to the dramatic conclusion, but I struggled to keep Linda contained to the structure I insisted she fit.
In the end, I think the Clarissa story works well: it’s all about sexual compulsion and loss of self, themes that I explored in the “Mapping the Boundaries of Love” stories, and there are some genuinely scary moments as she explores the Benedict Institute. But I feel like the story of Linda, Jeremy, and Paul got short shrift because of the serialized structure. Part of me would like to revisit this story, crack the structure open, and let those chapters breathe. I locked myself into the alternating chapters structure because of the serialization experiment, and I don’t think it’s a structure that serves that part of the story.
The serialization itself was also a bit of a bust, in part because I was doing it on too many platforms without doing a lot of research into any of them. I had it running in four locations: Wattpad, Medium, Ream, and my own website. Wattpad is the only one really designed for a daily serial, but I think the Wattpad audience is looking for something different from what I was offering. I had an audience already on Medium, but Medium isn’t designed for serialized content and required a lot of manual work to keep the pieces in order. Ream is supposedly serial-friendly, but at the time the scheduling didn’t support an ad hoc publishing approach, so I had to manually push each chapter. The Wordpress site was probably the best of the four from a publishing perspective, but it doesn’t have the audience of Medium and Wattpad, so it felt a bit like shouting into the void.
I think the serial model works well for some authors, and some projects; but it wasn’t a good fit for this author, or this project. The stories I like to tell aren’t a good fit for the format; I’m glad I gave it a try, but I’m not in a rush to try it again.
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