Pickwickian Pickers Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers

Why’s it “pickled peppers” anyway? You can’t pickle vegetables on the vine…Or can you? she asks, turning to Google… Oh. Hmm…an entire subculture dedicated to the Crabtree effect and aerobic fermentation…BUT I DIGRESS.

So. Last week I asked for feedback on my Patreon and what could be changed or improved. Answers were varied. And thoughtful. And varied. Extremely varied.

Surprisingly (to me), you guys don’t seem to care much about ad content. This is good to know. From my point of view, I’m getting tons of requests to address problems with the ads, but maybe I should feel less guilty about them. I still want the ads stop redirecting readers to the mobile app store, though–I keep asking my ad company to resolve these redirects, they promise they will, and then? Bam! Readers are right back in the app store.

Two of the major requests were for more Disasterhouse blog and for more Joshsmut. I’m going to table the Disasterhouse blog for this post and come back to it in another.

The Joshsmut, though… There’s potential in those.

See, Josh’s stories have great innate flexibility. It’s canon that he’s been married eight times (twice to Mare), and the eight Josh novellas are his chronicle of each of these love affairs. Other than that, a Josh story is pretty open-ended. Anything can happen, as long as it’s: (a) funny; (b) sexy; and (c) doesn’t violate the rules of the AGAHF universe.

I’m thinking that Patreon supporters could Pickwick Papers the Joshsmut, where I write the first few chapters, get reader feedback, write the next few chapters based on this feedback, and so on until we’ve got a novella.

Margaret Atwood did this recently with Positron, a four-part digital series which will soon be published as the stand-alone novel, The Heart Goes Last.  I heard an interview with her in which she described the writing process, and one of the takeaways was that it was a great writing exercise. It required flexibility and massive creative leaps to work within a format that was ultimately supposed to result in a closed product with solid narrative structure and zero plotholes. (Note: I am in no way comparing my stupid wacky sex comedies to anything Margaret Atwood has written. I’m just using Positron as an example of the writing process.)

This seems like a great way to work on more Joshsmut. For me, this seems like excellent creative writing practice. For you, it’s a way to directly inform the life of a major character in AGAHF universe. I’m going to push this idea around for a little while before I commit to it, but I think it’s possible.