Help me write a serial (please).

Here's what I've got so far.

I mentioned last week that I’m on a mission to stop spending so much time mindlessly scrolling online. This week was a success in that department. I’ve used the “don’t recommend channel” feature on YouTube more in the last five days than I have in the last five years and the result is not only a much less anxiety-inducing homepage, but that I just don’t spend as much time on the platform as I did before.

I also said I wanted to spend a lot of that time working on my thriller and my serial (two different projects). To be clear, I’m not trying to replace my relax (ie YouTube) time with work. A lot of it was replaced with reading (two books! it’s been awhile since I’ve read one book in a week, much less two) and also watching a movie.

The serial was tough to get back into because it’s an idea that I’ve developed in terms of the cast and the world, but not in terms of plot/structure, and I was suffering from that “this mountain is so huge I’m not sure how to get up it” thing writers do before we remember the ONLY way up is to take a step, and then another, etc. So I took a few small steps this week.

First, because I’m new to this (plotting a serial) and wanted to break my mind free from plotting a novel, I decided to treat it more like developing a TV show, or a mini-series. Ironically, I ended up on YouTube (but with intention! Not mindlessly!) because I absolutely love the Studiobinder channel and I’d had their “How to Make a TV Show” playlist in my queue for months. I went through it video by video (they aren’t long) and took notes in Scrivener. Their tips on writing a pilot (using the brilliant Breaking Bad as an example) was especially helpful. It got me thinking what I saw my first “episode” looking like, and I think I found a nice shape to it. Their videos on loglines and pitches were also great. I had a few pitches already, but this helped me hone in on one and revise it a bit.

I also made a mock-up of a cover. Kind of going for that 90s Stephen King/Dean Koontz vibe. But I do think at some point I’ll hire an illustrator to do a proper job.

A supernatural sci-fi story set in the fall of 1995.

Dawn Langley, a 911 dispatcher on the verge of losing her job (and her mind) due to undiagnosed chronic pain, sees a lost boy straight out of an urban legend in her trailer park during a blackout. When her attempt to help awakens a sinister force that begins infecting locals one by one, Dawn must learn to trust her gut as her small Texas town loses its grip on reality.

I also think it’s important to have a succinct one-sentence pitch, so here’s that:

A 911 dispatcher on the verge of losing her job (and her mind) must learn to trust her gut when a sinister force causes her small town to lose its grip on reality.

This is far from the final version. I’m not joking when I say I have dozens of pitches for this story, some of which don’t even mention Dawn! In fact, now that I’m looking at this, I’m worried the pitch doesn’t “match” the cover, because the cover shows a house and the pitch says the main character lives in a trailer park. The house belongs to the titular Kith family. Yes, I’ve got some pitches that revolve around them, but they aren’t clicking for me. The problem is that none of the Kiths are POV characters. Dawn and the other POV characters are in the family’s orbit. The lost boy mentioned in the pitch does have a tie to the family and their house. The “sinister force” and supernatural/sci-fi stuff is all related to the Kiths. There’s a lot of mystery around them as a family unit and the house they live in that we learn about from Dawn (and a few other characters’) perspective.

Sigh. Clearly, I still have a lot of work to do!

Does this pitch give you a decent idea of what the story is about? What the target audience might be? Is anything confusing? Let me have it! I’ve got thick skin when it comes to criticism. (Famous last words, eh?)

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The posts I publish here will remain free. But I have a new series called Ask the Editor, which publishes every Friday. The short pitch: Dear Abby for writers.

The longer pitch: paid subscribers ($5/month or $50/year, cancel anytime) will receive a link to a form where they can submit pretty much anything within a two page limit. Things like…

• Queries

• Synopses

• Pages from their novel

• Questions about writing or traditional publishing

• A current problem or situation in their writing journey (ie: trying to decide if an agent is a schmagent, disagreeing with beta feedback, etc)

• A rant about this whole “trying to get published” endeavor to a sympathetic ear

Every Friday, I’ll respond to/critique as many submissions as I can and publish them together in one post. Because they’ll be behind a paywall, there’s some privacy—your query, pages, or rant about that one really horrible rejection won’t be online for editors to discover when they Google you.

Hope to see you there!

Michelle