The Future of Literary Salon
Where to go from here?
How much is Literary Salon worth to you?
Substack subscriptions tend to be pricey, I know, but right now my paid subscription is discounted to just $10 a year. Better still, you keep that price for as long as you keep your subscription.
If Literary Salon is worth $10 to you, may I recommend you buy a subscription?
What if you received your paid subscription for free? What can you do to support Literary Salon then? I’m glad you asked. Give a gift subscription!
And if Literary Salon is worth more than $10 to you? The Founding-level Subscription allows you to pay any amount you want.
For $50 a more, you get a story critique.
How much is Literary Salon worth to you?
But first, let’s take care of some business—in 2 parts:
1. Grab a Free Book and Support our Promotional Efforts
2. Preview select chapters from my WIP:
Deeper Stories: a Fiction Writer’s Guide
I’m turning these essays into a book, and you can grab a draft sample when you subscribe for free. (Available to current subscribers, too.)
I’ll be announcing pre-orders for the whole book soon!
Free for new and existing subscribers. Learn more here:
Now, let’s discuss: the future.
“The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.”
— Alvin Toffler
I have a confession to make.
I’ve been working on the essay that will serve as the final chapter of the Deeper Stories book, and in it, I talk about it ending the prose technique series as well.
Luckily, it’s been a hard essay to write, and the time it’s taken has given me an opportunity to reconsider. I believe it’s the wrong move to make. People brought to the newsletter by the new book will come looking for prose techniques, and it would be foolish to say: nope, I don’t do that any more.
If you’ve been with me long enough, you know that for about four months I chronicled my studies in how to make Substack work for me as an author. I tried not to be a growth newsletter, but I knew it was (at best) growth adjacent. It’s a subject that annoys and angers people because there’s so often so little apparent worth for what they’re selling. My saving grace might have been that I wasn’t selling anything—and then I started Bookmotion. The saving grace of Bookmotion is the managed Book Funnel accounts. Those work, and they’re cheaper than managing Book Funnel for yourself. Bookmotion has its own newsletter now. You can subscribe for free, just don’t pay the $80 for an annual subscription without talking to me first. There’s not always an opening.
The time came when I knew I needed to make a change, and on November 17th, 2024, I kicked of the new era of Literary Salon by interviewing Clancy Steadwell:
Two days later, I posted the first prose technique essay:
Those posts changed everything.
The series was a frightful thing to write in the beginning. MFA graduates were saying that the subjects I covered was what they wished they’d learned in their MFA program. That’s intimidating. I don’t have an MFA.
I have / have had a psychology degree, a certificate in gemology, a pastoral ordination, a real estate broker’s license, and a master’s in human services, but not an MFA. During my Bachelor’s at USC, I studied film and screenplays, playwriting, songwriting, and animation, but that’s not really where I learned how to write. That came by getting old—and by writing the various series here.
And twenty years ago I ran a critique forum.
Knowing that I was speaking to an audience of MFA graduates scared me, and every now and then, the complaints on Notes steer toward the how-to-write newsletters. Now, often, they mean the growth newsletters. I know that, but I still stop and question what I’m doing. I think that’s what led to me writing that this is the end.
But ending isn’t what I want.
Deeper Stories
In it’s present form, the Deeper Stories book is 51,686 words long.
Why do I call it Deeper Stories: A Fiction Writer’s Guide? Why not Prose Techniques or Literary Salon?
Four years ago, I was buying custom covers for Detective, 26 AD and Steampunk Cleopatra, but my cover artist had such interesting premade covers that I bought several. I used one for my short story collection, but the others would require that I actually write a book to fill all those blank pages. Deeper Stories was one of them, and I had given up hope that I would ever write that book. I tried to repurpose the cover. It was the logo for my earliest days here at Substack, for one, but now it can finally be itself, as intended.
Pick up a sample of the work-in-progress:
But Like I Said: The Future
I’ve already asked one subscriber what more I should cover in the months to come. They said they needed to give that some consideration, to consider carefully what they had needed in their MFA.
Again, I’m sweating bullets over here.
But I’m asking you the same thing. It gets asked occasionally on Substack, and I think sometimes prematurely. I’m always left thinking, I don’t really know you yet or what you have to offer. What you should write is anything that shares that with us.
*Gestures to everything on the page.*
I don’t think it’s too soon for me to ask, but just in case, I’ve written this to share with you a little more of who I am and what I have to offer.
Book Review Coming
I’ve just received the advanced reader copy of
’s The Unmapping!Can’t wait to get started and return to you with my thoughts.
Poop butterflies,
— Thaddeus Thomas
Weekly Flash Fiction for Paid Subscribers—these won’t be emailed to you, but you’ll find the link in my regular posts. Here’s every flash so far:
Without doing my due diligence to see if it's been covered:
Misleading the reader.
I want to know more about how to utilize prose to make the reader believe one thing before revealing another.
(see: "Take Me To Church")
Hi, how can I help?
I am not writing fiction, and I write in Spanish, but maybe I can help.