work in progress

[Image: a product of the Bing AI image-generation tool. This is the image which heads the so-called “reader’s guide” to my current work in progress; it’s a mashup of the science fiction and mystery genres, inspired by the 1930s Thin Man films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy.]

Longtime RAMH readers may or may not know of my shadow “Running After My Hat” presence (such as it is) over on the Substack platform. (It hasn’t been a secret, really; I added a link to it, some time ago, to the section of the right sidebar headed “RAMH Elsewhere…”) But I wanted explicitly to let you know about it because of an offer I’ve made to followers there, which I now extend to you.

Here’s the deal: as of this moment, everything on my Substack is free to read. But on January 1, a paywall will go up around a portion of it: future installments of a novel-in-progress called 23kpc. All the stuff regarding that novel through Chapter 7 — background and actual contents — will remain freely, publicly accessible. (Note that what’s actually available to read now, without a paid subscription, goes through Chapter 23; after 1/1/2025, all of the novel from Chapter 8 on will go behind the paywall.)

In addition, anyone who’s a free subscriber to the Substack as of January 1 will automatically receive, gratis, a three-month “paid” subscription to allow them to continue reading 23kpc… after which they, too, will need to switch to an actual “paid subscriber” plan. You can read the details of the plans, and some other information, in this post from last night.

Anyhow, to you loyal visitors to my site here, I offer the same deal: if you subscribe to my Substack by January 1, I’ll give you a three-month “paid” subscription to see if you’d like to continue reading there.

Note: you don’t need a Substack account to read publicly available posts there — mine or anyone else’s. But in order to follow/subscribe to specific Substacks, yeah, you’ve got to create an account. That’s also free, by default; you pay for only those publications you want to pay for.

One of these days I may explain here what moved me to try out Substack in the first place, and what I think of it so far. This isn’t that day. In the meantime, if you find yourself interested enough in 23kpc (or, for that matter, whatever else I’m posting over there), I hope you’ll join me there, too.

Thank you sincerely, as always, for supporting what I do here and/or on Substack!

[Image: one of 23kpc’s inspirations — science-fiction illustrator Frank R. Paul‘s rendering, from the mid-20th century, of an asteroid repurposed as a spaceship.]

For a couple of months now, over on Substack, I’ve been building an ongoing work-in-progress — a (sort of) science fiction novel, called 23kpc. I thought long-time RAMH readers might want to check it out, especially if you’re at all interested in — or at least willing to try — science fiction.

Now, I use the term “science fiction” advisedly. 23kpc is not serious science fiction, and will quite possibly offer few satisfactions to fans of that sort. The first-person protagonist, Guy Landis, is a private eye aboard a twenty-Nth-century spaceship: a retrofitted asteroid, now a luxury liner, dubbed the ISS Tascheter. The “vibe” falls roughly into the subgenre of something called Decopunk: science fiction with a mid-20th-century sensibility straight out of 1930s Hollywood. Guy’s not at all techno-savvy and must rely on others to explain the ship’s workings, as needed. There’s a lot of so-called “handwaving,” in other words: stuff just sorta-kinda works, without explanation. If you insist on knowing the mechanics of how the ship is moving, or how the passengers and crew live to survive what will likely be a centuries-long trip to the other side of the galaxy… well, save us both the distress at quite possibly never knowing, and just move along.

Otherwise, you might try out the first installment, called “Reviving an Inert Narrative,” posted in early September. (Each posted installment includes a link to the next installment, when the latter becomes available.) While I welcome subscribers, a subscription — or even a Substack account — shouldn’t be necessary (for now) to read that post and the subsequent ones. It’s up to 18 chapters so far, with a new post every Friday/Saturday.

(There’s also a reader’s guide available, but it won’t be of much use to you unless you’ve been following the story all along.)

A Novel-in-Progress Elsewhere: ’23kpc’

Introducing a New Science-Fiction Story