May Update
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The Monthly Update! Check out past updates HERE
The State of Gibberish
May represents the conclusion of a bit of a whirlwind of two months. Things seem to be leveling out, such as they can, which means I have had enough mental space to turn my attention to writing again. This is a newsy newsletter, so I’ll let you get right into the good stuff!
What You Missed
A little more to report this month!
LIVESTREAMS
TODAY at 5pm I am hosting a livestream to discuss Pope Francis and the coming conclave. The video for this will eventually end up with The Peasant Times-Dispatch, but because Gibberish is my primary publication there’s a little awkwardness trying to navigate how that works. I reserve the right, at the end, to talk about what else is coming to substack from Scoot!
FLASH FICTION FRIDAY
Weekly prompts keep dropping and yall keep producing great stories! Check the prompts out at the Prompt Index page here! If you write with the prompts, don’t forget to drop a link to the stories in the subscriber chat so I can find them easily to highlight and others can find them easily to read!
FICTION
Monthly Writing Exercises continue with a return to Substack HQ in Substack HQ, Revisited. Paid subscribers get access to a special chat thread to discuss craftsmanship elements associated with this story!
Keith Long wrote a review for Sandbox Earth and in honor of the occasion I took Sandbox Earth out of the paywall until 5/11/25! Time is limited, check out the launchpad for my Science Fiction universe while you can!
ESSAYS
I wrote about Subversion in Fiction, and in the process of deciding that I was going to write it I have a few other writing-about-writing essays planned. No promises about timeline, but they’re in the hopper.
What Is Coming?
Flash Fiction Friday has kept up, and you all have been phenomenal. The background collab is still on pause while I navigate being laptopless1. A new collab was proposed with Leigh Parrish which—I gotta say, we’ve started talking, whenever this thing gets off the ground it’ll be very exciting.
I can still write in my substack drafts and so I’ve been organizing my writing time and started working on a serial which I intend to start posting in June. Consider this a soft announcement: You are finally getting a Byron the Blackpage Serial. If you’d like to get a taste for it, check out the Byron the Blackpage stories I’ve experimented with so far. This is a good month to do it, as you’ll see below many of them are going behind a paywall on June 1st.
Working Synopsis: 20 years ago, Byron the Blackpage was exiled from the Order of Authors for the crimes of creation and murder. Now, when the man who exiled him recants on his deathbed, the race is on to find Byron and find out what really happened.
What I’ve been calling The Blackpage Setting is a fantasy world I’ve been chewing on for a long time. You know me, most likely, for Sandbox Earth and my science fiction writing. But from my writing exercises and Flash Fiction, perhaps you also know I like stepping across genres. This will be my first serious foray into the world of Fantasy, and I hope to serve up the Scoot-flavored style you all have come to know and love: innovative perspectives, interesting twists, pushing conventions, relatable and real-feeling characters. Fans of my sci-fi will find lots to enjoy in this series; fans of fantasy will find a new entry-point to my writing. I hope there’s a little something for everyone in this.
The Paywallening
The inexorable icewall of paid content marches forward through time! Everything from July 2023 and earlier has already gone behind a paywall as of publication of this post. Check out the previous update to see the stories that have gone behind the wall!
On June 1st, everything from August 2023 and earlier will go behind a paywall. The next stories to go under are these:
Writing Exercises
Crunch: The Headquarters (Substack HQ Satire)
Stretch: The Backyard Battle (Month of Byron the Blackpage)
Stretch: The Ever-Folk (Month of Byron the Blackpage)
Stretch: The Authors (Month of Byron the Blackpage)
Prompt: The Fire (Month of Byron the Blackpage)
Flash Fiction
Serials
No serials going behind the paywall this month!
Essays
No essays going behind the paywall this month!
This is your last chance to read these stories for free! Check them out now!
If a paid subscription is not something you can manage right now—never fear! Using the Referral program, you can earn a paid subscription by referring someone else to subscribe using your custom link!
By sharing this link with a friend or family, when they subscribe you will get credit for referring the subscription, and starting at 2 new subscribers, you will earn 6 months or more of paid access!2
Thank you for reading!
Thank you for another great month of reading and writing here at Gibberish. I appreciate you all for sticking with me—here’s to another great month ahead!
God bless you all!
- Scoot
If you’d like to help this along, consider a paid subscription? I can’t impress upon you how valuable the financial support from paid subscribers is right now—you all are real blessings in my life in ways I can’t adequately explain just yet. Otherwise, thank you for your patience while I save up for a new laptop!
If you are interested in this, I recently changed the referral perks to make them a little more worth-while. Referring 2 subscribers gets you a 6 months comp, and that’s the minimum tier!
Oh, I am so in for a Byron serial. That just sounds cool.