Adapting Shackleton
An update and a free copy of the book so far
Halfway through Part 1 of The Amazing Adventures of Tortoise & Gecko! Thanks for reading along—hope you’re enjoying the tale so far.
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.
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!
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
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