A New Year, A New (Newsletter) Schedule

With 2022 coming to a close, it’s time for a moment of reflection about the Toasted Fiction newsletter, and a look ahead at the new look Toasted Fiction going into the New Year with our new schedule and format!

Our newsletter only started in April this year and it’s the first time I’ve consistently used one of these writing websites - I love it! It feels like a natural home for writers and readers to connect with writing (and writers) they enjoy. I’m grateful to the community of readers we have started to build here at Toasted Fiction and look forward to seeing it continue to grow.

This year, we created a launched a monthly schedule with four regular newsletters, The One-Shot Stories, The Screenwriter’s Studio, The Draft Diaries and The Next Chapter (exclusive serialisation of my novels for paid subscribers). I then added another few semi-regular newsletters, Conversations By The Clyde and The Sketch Show That Never Was. It’s been a good reflection of myself as a writer, one that thrives in variety and writing in different genre as well as formats.

Having looked back at what readers seem to enjoy the most and also what type of stories I’ve enjoyed using this platform to write the most, I’ve found the short fiction to be the winner - and the shorter the better! So, with that in mind, I’m going to shake up the schedule and strip Toasted Fiction back to basics. Toasted Fiction was originally created as a platform to write and share my short stories and nano stories (50-Word Fiction). I then started to write Six-Word stories on top of this. These short blasts of fiction, mixed with the traditional short stories are what Toasted Fiction will feature going forward, with The Next Chapter continuing for paid subscribers - where I will be debuting my new novel in a serialised format next year (exciting!) - with the occasional Conversations By The Clyde.

Without further ado, here are the three regular short story collections you will receive in the newsletter as a free subscriber of Toasted Fiction: Six-String Stories, Five-Bar Fifties and One-Track Tales.

With Six-String Stories, these will be six words only, Five-Bar Fifties will be 50 word stories and One-Track Tales will be traditional short stories of varying lengths.

You may be wondering, why the references to music? Are all your short stories going forward going to be about music or bands? Well, no. Nearly all of them won’t - maybe a few will. I’ve named the collections these for a few reasons. 1) With these short pieces of fiction, they should be like the story equivalent of a song - telling a tale in a short space of time. 2) I love music (particularly the guitar which I dabble in) and some of my favourite writers are musicians (particular shout-out to Tom Petty, Luke Morley and Lennon/McCartney) so this is an ode to my love of music and songwriters. 3) It’s always my aim when writing a story - in any length of format - that there should be at least a line or two in the story that feels like a lost lyric to a forgotten song that, a song that nobody’s heard or a reminder of your favourite song.

So, that’s all! The new schedule will start properly in January, with Six-String Stories at the start of the month, building to One-Track Tales and ending with The Next Chapter. Likely, it’ll be one story each week to make it manageable, rotating each story type.

Thanks for subscribing, sharing and spreading the word!