Hello to the four or five of you who have been reading along with me as I have been serially publishing installments of The Saragossa Bottling Company. I have pushed myself since October of 2022 to have a chapter ready by Sunday at 11 a.m. every week, and have only missed a few deadlines so far. But that is about to change.
I write this post to announce that I am forced to take a break from the story for a while, possibly for the remainder of the year. School starts in three days, and, as most of you know, I have taken on what amounts to a full-time job teaching sections of English composition and rhetoric at St. Edwards University and Concordia University.
While I enjoy teaching (most of the time,) it does require a lot of my resources for preparation and grading, and I fear that I will not have sufficient time or mental space to continue Saragossa at the rate of a chapter per week, if at all. Optomistically I may be able to post a chapter on occasion throughout the semester. Hopefully I will not be as pressed all semester long as I am today as I prepare for class Monday.
Frankly, writing Saragossa serially has become increasingly difficult week by week even when I have plenty of time. With a serialized endeavor like this, there is no turning back. If I discover I have written myself into a corner, I cannot go back a few chapters and fix it lest I risk confusing my readers. I simply have to forge a way forward with some new revelation, a new character, or even the imposition of some new magic. Admittedly, this does have the salutary effect of forcing me to juice my imagination like a summer lime to come up with the current week’s literary margarita.
But I now know the story needs serious rewriting at many places and I want it to be so much more than it currently is. It is tempting to become perfunctory in taking the story forward when I know that this will all probably go in the scrap bucket anyway. We’ll see. A few weeks of hiatus may give it some new life.
Thank you to those of you, you happy few, who have continued to read with me this far.
