About

About this Project:

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I have been working on The Gilded Saga: Sutton for the past 2.5 years, and this website is my opportunity to feature four specific stories I've written in public. My planned novel format is episodic, a bit like a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where some episodes are related to an overarching plot while others can be consumed on their own. Have any of you ever flipped around on TV, stumbled across some episode in the middle of some show's season, and got super interested despite not having all the information? That is the purpose of the excerpts: snippets of a larger story hopefully interesting enough to get people to read more.

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The excerpts are potential 'episodes' or chapters to add to the book, intended to be read in chronological order. I consider only one of the excerpts as plot-relevant. Can you guess which one?

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A theme I hope to achieve with my writing is an appreciation of the mundane, the stories between stories. The roadtrips, the emergency Halloween costumes, the weird holiday traditions. There is an overarching plot and a duo of dastardly main villains, but they are Ms. and Ms. Not-Appearing-in-These-Excerpts! There's beauty, hilarity, and heartache to be found in the 'meaningless' moments of life, even when they don't build to a greater goal. And when things do get serious for the intrepid characters, we're more invested because we know them as our neighbors who keep their Halloween decorations up in winter instead of distant heroes saving the world every two weeks. 

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The lack of mundanity or 'filler' episodes annoys me about the current TV landscape. One of the greatest benefits of the TV medium or any sort of long-form storytelling is the opportunity to spend more time with the characters or world. This era of 8-episode TV series or miniseries has forced a blinding-fast pace on TV storytelling. Audiences cannot sit and digest plot points anymore, nor can they spend time with characters at their most mundane and normal. Even the most mundane or tangential story world or character points allow for greater immersion into a lovingly crafted world. Goodbye, holiday and musical episodes, we only have room for plot, plot, and more plot.

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I planned these excerpts as a throwback to the 22-episode TV season. By showing off everyone's 7/11 habits, they become more relatable; the audience gets more attached to them. This added attachment makes it all the more heartbreaking when the plot-relevant stuff (or in this case, the single plot-relevant excerpt) does happen, and I slowly prod apart everything the characters worked so hard for apart. Simon and company can't hide behind filler forever.

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I think I achieved mixed success with these excerpts. Something life-threatening happens in almost all of them. But most of the time, death is invalidated, there's still a focus on the simpler parts of life, and there are no dangling plot threads. I can remove 3/4 of the stories from the book without impacting the greater plot. Still, I hope you consider all the stories valuable in making the characters, world, and story all the more three-dimensional.