Part 1 of The Amazing Adventures of Tortoise & Gecko is complete!
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