Retcon #9 is now available (and Movement 1 is Complete)
With Additional Information About Forthcoming Movements and Other Matters
The ninth and final story of the first movement of my mosaic story, Retcon, is now available. Those of you who subscribed to the series on my web site should already have received your stories (please email me if you haven’t!). It is also available for individual purchase at my web site, Amazon, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Smashwords. (Apple is apparently still working on it.)
If you have been following the series, you will note that there is a relationship between the covers to story #1 and story #9:
This is, of course, to emphasize the “retcon” theme: we are taking and old notion and recontextualizing it so it means something different than we thought we did.
I feel like I ought to reprint the blurb I wrote for the story here, but the honest truth of the matter is that I don’t think I’m nearly as good a blurbist as a short story writer. People excel at different genres: lots of novelists have failed at playwriting or poetry, for instance. And I think the craft of the blurb has its own demands, and I simply don’t do them well. I’ve never really been happy with any of the stories’ blurbs to date.1
So instead let me just say that, as befits a mosaic narrative which is organized into larger parts (like, say, seasons of a TV show, a practice that has now been extended to comics, prose mosaics, and really all sorts of other forms—such is the dominance of tv in our times), each movement2 will embody a shift in the nature of the story, so that each movement will have its own character and nature (just as, hopefully, each story within each movement does). So there is a sense in which the whole series to date has been leading up to this story… and another sense in which the whole series to date will follow on from this story.
I will add this. When I was first thinking of the series, I knew I wanted this story in it about a third of the way through, and I knew I wanted to call it “Retcon” (this was long before that became the title for the work as a whole, back when I was still thinking of it as “the time travel series”). But I wanted to somehow signal that this was not a last-minute decision, that the retcons within “Retcon” were long-planned.3 One of the points in favor of the title scheme I eventually chose was that it was subtly signal that the R, at least, was not an afterthought, and therefore (hopefully) suggest the “-etcon” also was not one, either.
And while I assume everyone has figured out the title scheme by now, of course people might not be paying such close mind, so I will close out by giving the titles of the first movement of Retcon:
Zero Second
Years Scattered Like Fallen Leaves
Xu Ming’s Second Time Down
While Unbeknownst to the Rest, the Woman in the Yellow Dress Was Also a Time Traveler
Very Soon and Yet Still Very Far Away
Unless Another Escape to Tell Thee
Thus in Time Are We All Devoured
Screaming in Circles
Retcon
Now you might wonder how, given this title scheme, I am going to have a twenty-seven part story and not a twenty-six part one. That will be clarified at some point in Movement Two.
The first story in Movement Two will be released on October 9, 2024; at that point I hope to maintain a monthly schedule throughout the movement. The first story of Movement Two (the tenth overall) will be called “Quartet for the End of the Beginning of the End of Time”.
I am well aware that, three months ago, when I attempted to right the ship I put myself upon a year before that, I promised three things, two of which were prompt publication of stories 8 and 9 of Retcon, which I have (as of today) achieved. But I have failed at the third promise, namely, to restart this substack properly (perhaps I should rename it Attempts 2.1?), starting again to post substantive essays. All I can say is that that (along with getting well along in Movement Two) is at the moment my intended task for the summer. I will try my best.
It’s the plan. Someone please ask God not to laugh.
Now, go order “Retcon”: my web site, Amazon, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Smashwords. (Apple is apparently still working on it.) Or, if you already have, go read it!
“Pretty silly of you to go into self-publishing then, wasn’t it, guv'nor?”
“Perhaps, but you have to realize that while I suck at marketing, going into traditional publication also involves marketing… just to publishers, not to audiences. I suck at both. There really was no help for it, either way.”
"I’ve been meaning to ask you. ‘Movement’ is a pretty pretentious word. Why did you go with that one?”
“Well, I wanted a term for the sub-parts. The problem is that the obvious term, ‘season’, really makes it sounds like I am aping the structure of a TV show. Which I can understand people thinking! But I really do feel like the mosaic narrative has its own legitimacy as a form, regardless of what medium its parts appear in, and I myself have learned as much about it from comics and story series as from TV shows. So I didn’t want to chose that one. I thought about ‘series’ (as the British term their TV seasons), but since the entirety of the work is in most respects a series, that didn’t seem to fit, either. So I went with ‘movements’.”
Obviously using “Retcon” as the overall title did it, too, but again, I hadn’t yet decided upon that.