Thanks for reading along, or dropping by, and for the reactions and feedback.

So far, serialising online has felt like the right choice. In terms of numbers, subscribers have risen over the year while readership has fallen—not a complete surprise. But it’s helped me stay focused on drafting the rest of the book, with an allowance for a few edits each week before posting an episode. I added a little more text here and there, but the total word count for Part 1 remains just under 50,000 words—a long novella or a short novel depending on your definition.

The book could easily be much longer—certainly if it was told in a more straightforward way, with missing action and more traditional narration included, and would perhaps find more readers that way. But The Amazing Adventures of Tortoise and Gecko is a novel of four parts rather than a four-part series, and Part 1 is in most ways the simplest and least ambitious of the four. I’ve tried to keep it as short as possible while still establishing the characters and introducing some of the themes and formal elements the novel will be wrestling with in the remaining parts—as well as (hopefully!) telling a fun story.

By some measures Part 1 is a rough draft; one of the challenges of the rest of the book will be to show that different criteria could be applied. I’ll no doubt also (re)discover things that don’t work; my plan is to fully revise the book after all four parts have been published, and then find an editor.

Part 2 of The Amazing Adventures of Tortoise and Gecko, ‘The Temple of Silence’, will continue the story in a different register. If Part 1 was Winter (presto), Part 2 will be Summer (adagio). I don’t know if everyone will make the leap from Part 1 to Part 2 (and to Parts 3 and 4), but I hope so—I’m looking forward to sharing it with you. My secret hope is that the book will spawn six kinds of readers.

Partly to let ‘The Pegasus’ sit and breathe for a while, but also because I want to finish drafting all of Part 2’s episodes before I start posting them, the weekly posts will pause until July 2026, when regular transmission will resume for another year. For those subscribers who took out a paid subscription this year, thank you! Your contribution helps support the website, including the cost of commissioning new artwork to add to Yana Smolinska’s wonderful Pegasus figurehead. Feel free to pause your paid subscription until Part 2—I’ll send another update before the serial picks up again.

My marketing skills and inclination being what they are, subscribers have mostly come through emails to friends and family, so if you enjoyed what you read, please let other people know. The complete Part 1 is now available for free as an e-reader friendly PDF on the website and can be downloaded and forwarded to anyone. It’s suitable for older tweens, teens, and adults—I’ve told parents who’ve asked that if they think the first 13 episodes are suitable, then the rest of Part 1 will be too. I’ve been cross-posting on two younger demographic sites for original and fan fiction: Royal Road (with 3 subscribers, but higher pageviews than Substack, I suspect because Royal Road has better discovery) and Wattpad (where T&G has consistently ranked in the top 50 on the site for talking animals and fable, and 80% of its readers are under 35s in Nigeria).

Well, so long to 2025. Thanks again for your support—to find room for Tortoise and Gecko in your inbox is no small thing. I hope you had a good year, or planted some seeds for this year. All the best for Planet Earth 2026.

Take care, take risk,

Chris

The novel has got a little stranger the last few weeks, so it was lovely to have Episode 25, The Boat, featured this week in Substack’s Top in Fiction, the fourth time so far that T&G has been featured. Erica Drayton, the Editor-in-Chief, is a tireless supporter of fiction writers on Substack, and Top in Fiction’s a great place to sample the range of fiction being written on Substack, most of it free.

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If this week’s episode of Tortoise & Gecko, ‘On High Seas’, feels and sounds quite different from the episodes so far, that’s because the text is taken and adapted from one of my favourite adventure books, South. Written by Ernest Shackleton, it tells the true story of the Endurance expedition to Antarctica in 1914-1916.

The infusion of Shackleton was the first of a number of unplanned changes to the rather straightforward novel I’d originally conceived back in 2009, and it’s influenced the shape of the book in unexpected ways. I’ve almost always planned my stories, but T&G is proving to be an unruly book. I’m now in the middle of writing Part 2 and, despite having already written the end of Part 4, I’m still discovering what the book wants to be. I’m not sure what Shackleton would make of Tortoise and Gecko, or my pilfering of his text; I like to think he would take it all in his stride.

The text of South is public domain, like other texts that may or may not appear later in the book, but my use of it is one reason I’ve released this version of the novel under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence, which allows other people to share and adapt the novel as long as it’s released under the same licence. You can find acknowledgements for South, and any future adaptations, on the website About page.

Royal Geographical Society, Public Domain. Alas, a grim fate awaits these dogs!

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A bonus e-book! A few subscribers have said they’d prefer to read the book as a e-book, rather than as a weekly online serial. If that’s you, you can download a PDF of Episodes 1-26 now. I’ve been crunched by deadlines lately—as I write I’m winging my way to some time off in Darwin with a folder of marking in my bag—so the fancier EPUB will have to wait until sometime in July. But the PDF will hopefully look alright on your favourite e-reader or tablet. It’s about 20,000 words.

Rightio—back to normal transmission and the new lands of episodes 27-52. Thanks again for reading, and all the best for the rest of the year.

Take care,

Chris

p.s. You can turn off occasional emails like this one by going to the website and clicking on your username on the top right, then ‘Manage my subscription’, then ‘News’ under Notifications.

Progress has also been slow because the book will be a long one, with a structure and form that has taken a lot of time to figure out. I say “will be” because, while I finished part one of the book early this year, I still have most of part two and nearly all of parts three and four to go. At the rate I’m going, it’s going to take me another five to ten years to finish.

So I’ve decided to serialise part one online (and, all going well, the other parts too). For a few reasons. One, I think (hope) that with the first part done, the final pages of every other part drafted, and a reduction in my teaching load, the rest of the book will come easier and faster, and that a regular publishing schedule will help keep me moving forward. I tend to spend a lot of time tinkering.

Two, I’ve realised that due to the book’s slightly unusual form, and its total length, publishing online first will produce a manuscript more likely to find a print publisher, for reasons that will hopefully become apparent further down the track.

And three, given that I’m essentially writing three linked novellas and something else over the course of 20-30 years, it would be good to get some encouragement along the way from anyone who enjoys what they read. Or, for that matter, feedback from those who don’t.

Episodes are mostly very short, often less than twice the length of this post, and will arrive in subscribers’ inbox once a week. The story begins with Episode 1 on 1st January 2025, and part one of Tortoise and Gecko’s adventures will conclude with Episode 52 at the end of the year. Perhaps you’ll sign up or drop by from time to time and enjoy the story being told—I hope so.

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