Dear jounral,
I’m having more fun writing Woodgate than I’ve had with any creative project in recent memory—maybe ever.
This is the first time I’ve tried to write something like this: not just a story, but a world. A long-form, serialized narrative with its own characters, currency, sacred relics, feasts, and ghosts. I didn’t expect to love it as much as I do. And truthfully, I didn’t know I had it in me. Each act, each episode, feels like both an excavation and an invention. I find myself somewhere between historian and dreamer, hammering iron and breathing life into what was once only the barest sketch in my mind.
What’s been surprising is how alive the process feels. Writing Woodgate is not like writing an essay or even a short story. It’s like walking into a dark forest with a lantern and discovering, one step at a time, that the path is already there—it’s just been waiting for someone to walk it. And in that way, I’ve found myself unexpectedly in conversation with a long tradition of serialized storytelling, stretching back to the 19th century.
Writers like Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Wilkie Collins didn’t publish novels in bound volumes. They wrote in installments, printing chapters in journals and newspapers, sometimes week by week, sometimes monthly. Readers devoured them as they were released, writing letters, discussing plot twists, and waiting eagerly for the next issue. As Robert Patten notes in Charles Dickens and His Publishers, “Dickens revolutionized the novel by taking it off the shelf and putting it into the street. He made the novel a public event.” His David Copperfield, perhaps my favorite of his works, wasn’t just a book—it was a living serial, a shared experience.
There’s something profoundly human about that model. The story unfolds at the pace of real life. And as a writer, I’ve come to appreciate what that pacing does to the process: it allows you to live with the work, to reflect, revise, and slowly build momentum. Serialization invites a different kind of patience. It teaches you to value rhythm over rush.
And so, in that spirit, I’ve decided to slow my own process. Going forward, I’ll be posting just one new installment of Woodgate each week. Not because I’m losing energy—if anything, I’m brimming with ideas—but because I want this story to grow organically, the way Dickens or Hardy might have let theirs grow. There is a satisfaction in returning to the bench, the gatehouse, the forest, again and again. I want to savor this.
This kind of creative writing is entirely new to me. I’ve written reflections, essays, even poetry, but never a serialized historical fiction, never something that might span a hundred episodes or more. And yet, each time I return to Woodgate, I find more than I expected—more character, more plot, more meaning. It’s teaching me as much as I am shaping it.
Eudora Welty once wrote, “Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else.” That’s what Woodgate feels like to me—something rooted in place, in tone, in time. I know these woods. I know the stone chapel. I can hear the distant cries at the city gate. And though it’s fiction, it feels inhabited.
So I’ll keep writing. Slowly. Faithfully. One post at a time.
Always,
Dave