Simon Jones

Hopefully you’ve all seen Shane Bzdok’s excellent work on the new cover for The Mechanical Crown: It’s been a long old road to get to that cover. About twenty years, by my count. You can check out the story itself here: TMC is a project that has been rolling around inside my head since my early 20s, albeit in very different forms. It was technically the first manuscript I ever completed, way back in 2010. That version was very bad, but it was an important milestone regardless.

You’re reading my weekly serial The Mechanical Crown. Find out more here: A lost explorer. A child slave. A princess. An ancient shame to be kept secret. A society on the edge of collapse. Subscribe to receive a new chapter every Friday. A blackened finger lay in the snow, necrotic, oozing and sickly. Red on white, a puddle of blood melting into a hole, a spattered pattern as if from a flicked paintbrush, fresh from the incision. The skin was tight and swollen after days of abuse, the nail long gone.

If you’re thinking of trying to write your own serial fiction project, you’re in the right place. This is a 7-hour masterclass conversation presented in six parts from myself and S.E. Reid, discussing everything to do with the process of serialisation. We’ve been in the trenches and have worked on many serial projects, so everything we talk about comes from direct experience.