Funny, this has just been a generic thing for awhile, this first post.
Welcome to STEED, by me, Eric Westerlind. Writer, editor, designer.
Politely, Substack, you populated it well. It certainly said all it could say as a robotic default thing. It said:
And:
In the meantime, tell your friends!
But now for a bit of something else. Something to make it mine, properly, and to set some sort of framework for what’s to come.
STEED, as a project or -vehicle-, is a smashup, you guessed it, of ‘story’ and ‘seed’, which happily came together as a real word, and a real word that fit neatly in the metaphor of ‘something which moves beneath us at a rate faster than we could hope to move ourselves’ and also just ‘something that moves us’. It also happens that the stories on STEED will seat themselves in the sf/fantasy category, so it being called STEED neatly ties to the brand by being fantasy-oriented. Thus the logo, which is a griffon, the rarely-stood-on steed of the most vaunted heroes.
Ugh the ego. Aspirations eh? Let’s ride griffons?
Regardless, as promised: a framework.
In Orbit 20, Gene Wolfe (my favorite writer) introduced three rather simple questions as means for developing stories.
Each weekend, I’ll post a story, along with the driving answers to one of or all of those question (the seeds, let’s say). This has something of the ‘sketch’ practice to it; something of the rider’s practice: to take the horse out every day for a ride is to get better at riding though it doesn’t mean you’ll head for the hills to slay the wyrm.
To write a story, thus, each week is to do the same. If the story explodes, and the steed takes off into the woods of its own accord; if we really ‘go on a tear’, then huzzah. Then huzzah, indeed. Otherwise, sometimes these will be small, an ambulation about the circ — keep the legs loose, baby.
Let’s see how long I last alone, and then I’ll reach out for help. There are plenty of people writing good stories, and who knows, knowing you, I’ll probably lean your way first.
See you this weekend.
-ew