Hey everyone, and welcome back to the world of Fishflies, my current ongoing project. I can honestly say that creating Fishflies has been an experience, unlike any other book I’ve ever done. I normally work on a book for at least a year before I make its existence public in any way. But the launch of this platform changed that. It meant that I would be announcing and showing Fishflies as I create it, not afterward. Normally, if I ran into creative dead ends I would take the time to rework things long before anyone saw anything. But in this case, I don’t have that luxury. So that brings us to where we are with the next chapter of Fishflies…
I have already made some very significant changes to where the story is headed, and I am still very much working on these. As I get deeper into the story, I have started to see that some story ideas I had been working towards were not working and new ideas began to present themselves. As a result, I scrapped about 30 pages worth of fully drawn material and have restructured the story significantly. I am still tinkering and changing things, but I do think the next chapter is pretty much ready to roll here each week.
But I feel like, for my sanity, I need to give a little disclaimer here. The version of Fishflies that you are reading here may very well not be the final version. This is very much still a work in progress, and when I do eventually start putting the book into print at Image, it may have changed further from the version you’ll read here.
Letting you know this frees me up from the feeling that what I post here is “carved in stone” and gives me the time and creative freedom I need to keep exploring this story fully and making it the best it can be.
So, this version of Fishflies is very much a draft and you will be the only people who will ever read it and be able to compare it to whatever shape the final story takes. And, I will eventually post any of the pages I have already cut from the story too so that you can see them. But I’ll wait a bit on that so as not to confuse the ongoing serialization.
Okay, so I guess we are in this together, warts and all. So, on that note here we go with the beginning of the next chapter…
-Jeff
