Ruminations on decades spent writing stories that run more than 1,000,000 words

Charlie Stross (previously) has spent most of his career writing two very long-running series: The Laundry Files, a Cthulhu-tinged series of spy procedurals, like HP Lovecraft writing James Bond, except Bond is a sysadmin; and The Merchant Princes, a tricksy medieval high-fantasy story that's actually an alternate worlds story that's actually a primer on economics, totalitarianism, mercantalism, and theories of technological progress.

Both series have been going for more than a decade, both run to more than a million worlds, and both have been periodically interrupted while Stross managed both the writing process and personal drama and trauma.

Writing this kind of longrunning tale is a rather extraordinary thing to do -- though it may seem like the world is full of longrunning series, the commercial reality of this kind of thing means that a large number of trilogies (or more) die after the second book, because the normal trajectory of a series to lose readers with every installment, leading to a death spiral.

Stross has been at this long enough, and is also reflective enough, that he has come up with some really fascinating insights on this process, of going from being a young writer to a middle-aged writer while telling a single story, for years and years and years, and having the story, the writer, and the world all change under you while you're at it.

One observation about something that's missing from Stross's otherwise excellent piece: for critics and reviewers, series can be really hard sledding. Read the rest