I love serialized novels. Even at their most literary, serials deliver guilty pleasure of the just-five-more-minutes-mom, reading-under-the-covers variety. When I was a kid my mom and stepdad moved us to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, light years from most of the extended family in New England. Those were the oil-crisis years, years of visiting once a year if we were lucky. Long-distance calls were expensive, but even kids like me whose parents didn’t believe in weekly allowances could get their hands on postage stamps. I wrote short, desperate letters to my maternal grandfather: “Write me a story!” And he did: rapturous, silly adventures featuring a protagonist called Fat Ivan and doled out in half-ounce doses via air mail. Born in 1914, as a kid my granddad had spent the nickels he earned delivering ice in movie houses where newsreels, cartoons, and yes, serials, preceded the feature. I didn’t realize until years later that my granddad’s stories had a lot (a really awful lot) in common with C.S. Lewis’ Narnia tales. Back then I didn’t care. I lived for those letters, but I didn’t fall in love with the epistolary form. Nor did I develop an affinity for telenovelas, soaps, or series TV. Nope. I fell in love with serialization.
I delight in the narrative hooks that cannot be denied. I barrel toward each cliffhanger with no plan B, no parachute, nothing but the delirious faith the storyteller will catch me before I hit bottom. I wonder about the reckless abandon with which I embrace serialized fiction, and after a bout of navel-gazing I have an answer of sorts. In the decades since my granddad’s Fat Ivan stories I’ve learned a lot about myself.
I’m queer, and I’m kinky.
I’m a bisexual (who’s discovering pansexual leanings) with strong submissive tendencies, a masochist streak, and more than a dollop of the size queen about me.
These traits influence my reading choices, of course, but why serials? Here’s what I came up with:
Authors of serials control the scene. They’re the literary version of a skilled mind-fuck Dominant. They draw me in with their seductive hooks, ramp me up with a tightly paced arc, and then – divine monsters! – edge me for installment after installment. My newly installed goddess among author Dommes is Cecilia Tan, whose incomparable The Prince’s Boy is now complete and available serialized at the Circlet Press site, in two ebook volumes, or in a collector’s edition. The Prince’s Boy is a fantasy quest romance fueled by sex magic and wonderfully fluid, affecting prose. It’s not to be missed, and I’m still mourning the end of almost two years of faithful weekly updates.
Something about genre fiction lends itself particularly well to the serial format; science fiction, fantasy, horror, sure, but also romance (think Dickens if you want the long view). M/m favorite Jordan Castillo Price offers serials through her monthly newsletter and web sites, and in very 21st century fashion has invited reader involvement in the development of new plots and characters. Her completed Zero Hour is a masterpiece of dystopian-futurism, a cracking good adventure yarn, and a moving romance all at once. Reading her new installments (now also available as an ebook) and knowing I’ll have to wait a month for the next one is the cognitive equivalent of orgasm denial, and my mental masochist adores the pain.
Then there’s the readerly size queen in me. I cut my teeth on queer serials with Trewin Greenaway’s four-fat-volume Cronnex series about a pair of horny and confused demigods. (Sadly The Cronnex is no longer available but you can read my review of it on the GLBT Bookshelf.) I have a subscription to Matthew Haldeman-Time’s fantasy soap opera In This Land which is still going strong at over 250 chapters. Gimme more! (Another in this category is Maculate Giraffe’s hurts-so-good Slave Breakers series which includes three novels and numerous side stories. Long and wide, if you get me.)
So there it is: devotion to serial fiction for the submissive pain-slut size queen. Reading as kink. It’s not an original idea, but the connections tickled me. What about you? Are there queer serials you’re following? What keeps you coming back for more?
OMG, you flatter me. But yes, I took a very toppish view of my masochistic readers. You have to love suffering to love a serial, but fortunately for me, so many of my readers do love that exquisite torture. And those who hate the waiting, well, I’m dominant enough that it only spurs me on! (As the comments on The Prince’s Boy reveal — the worse the cliffhanger, the more comments of people screaming in anguish! Comments are food for a serial-writer’s soul and the best kind of positive feedback. So of course that meant I tried to make the next cliffhanger EVEN WORSE. Insert villainous laugh here. Muahaha.)
Thank you for this. Serials really ought to make a comeback now that the web makes them publishable again. Have you looked at The Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom? By MeiLin Miranda. I started it and have it bookmarked to continue! Another one I’m partway through is Tales of Magisterium University by Alexandra Erin. Both are fantasy (the former high fantasy, the latter kind of modern alternate universe) and both are queer.
Glad to know I wasn’t the only pain slut reading Jorin and Kenet’s story!! Your execution of TPB was gloriously toppy! ::grins:: You were cruel (to your poor marvelous characters and to us sluttish, slavish readers) but so modulated that you could probably map the intensity of the cliffhangers on some kind of master’s histogram or something. Plus, like a really skilled Top you were super-predictable where it counted — always a new episode at the same time every Wednesday. By the time you posted the Epilogue it felt like loving aftercare. I know readers will adore TPB when they read the whole thing now that it’s released, but I’ll pity them just the teensiest bit for not having read it week by week. I do hope you’re considering another serial!
Thanks so much for your recs! The trailer for the Miranda book has me hooked already! And Erin’s description of her project is wonderful too. I will definitely check those out (and HB Kurtzwilde’s Chocolatiers of the High Winds at Circlet on Mondays!).
I have a total love/hate with serials. I love the arcs, and the length, and it’s like the good old days of serialized TV shows — Dr. Who when I was a kid used to have some cracking cliff-hangers. BUT I am far too much of a control freak, so if I can, I tend to wait until a series is done and then GORGE on the whole thing. A control freak with no self-control!
I shall have to gallop off and get Cecilia’s book!
Super post, Lee.
Oh, yeah, you definitely need The Prince’s Boy. It’s huge and delicious and finished, so you can gorge.
If I know a story’s done and will post on a schedule, I can handle ceding control to the author — but I’m a pretty abject subby reader. 
There is delicious frustration in a really well-executed cliffhanger — what I can’t stand is when serials or series just…end. Argh! It’s like landing hard without ever feeling the thrill of falling!
Sharing this comment from author ID Locke from where this blog mirrors my LiveJournal (someday I’ll figure out how to mirror comments too!). This definitely sounds like an imaginative serial!
“ Balancing Karma:
There are 55 chapters and an epilogue as well as some one-shots. What is posted is what I consider raw and is straight from my brain to the page (so to speak).
Be advised that Karma is an mpreg. I realize that is not something most people will give a shot, but I swear there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for how it happens. It’s also more a story of 2 people falling in love with each other than focused exclusively on the pregnancy part.
And I haven’t made up the Master List page yet for Enchanted Shadows, but here is the first chapter I posted this morning:
http://id-locke.livejournal.com/2011/08/12/
ES is a spin-off of Karma, but you don’t have to have read Karma to understand ES. They are completely stand alone.
I’m also a guest author at Yaoifix.com where my novel Dreaming Of the Void is being posted monthly. There is a tie-in between all 3 above stories as Tyhlian, one of the mains of Dreaming is the half-brother of Moswen, one of the mains of Karma and Jaiseki’s (one of the mains in ES) uncle.”
Another serial that garnered several comments, and that I’m really looking forward to, is Ginn Hale’s The Rifter, which is serialized by subscription. Find out more here: http://blindeyebooks.com/rifter.html