text: It’s been such a treat to watch people evolve their flash fiction serials with us and bring arcs to a close that for some have been with us for quite a while. For a good handful of writers on Serial Saturday, their stories are continuations of serials started on Theme Thursday weekly threads. One such story comes from /u/Mobaisle_writing, a regular from /r/writingprompts. Here at we thoroughly enjoyed /u/Mobaisle_writing’s story of the Witch and her “apprentice”, aka a random teenager she kidnapped who happened to be able to stomach her potions. Mobaisle’s tackling of SerSat covers just a couple of days in-world, but shows us an adventure with stakes that only get higher, you’ll definitely want more by the end! But don't take my word for it! Here's a small teaser: >*The Crossroads are returning. Scouts make contact from other planes. A Beast Tide threatens the Church Protectorate of Leadenford. Secular and religious forces clash and a Witch arrives at the dusty border town of Edgefall, changing Ernst’s life forever.* For our first run of Serial Saturday at it was important for us to get author impressions of how their experience went with us, and give readers a peek at the "behind the scenes" of creating a flash fiction serial. Here's Mobaisle’s take on that: >Lots of people have now written on the specifics of their story’s journey. To shake things up a bit I thought I’d outline why I believe the Serial Saturday programme has been important, particularly in the context of writing on Reddit. > >It’s fairly easy to start writing micro or short fiction. With some work, it’s not too hard to find places to receive feedback and hone your skills. However, how do you make the shift to writing longer works? > >Jumping right in with a novel, is - not to put too fine a point on it - fucking daunting for most people. The change in requirements from writing a 500 word short to writing a novella or a novel is not insubstantial. An awful lot of things to worry about; from character progression, to B plots, to thematic handling, to world building and coherence. And they *all* suddenly start crawling out of the woodwork. > >In tackling a longer work, most of the support systems and feedback networks geared toward short or micro fiction are no longer of use. Hopefully over the course of interacting with others during attending campfires or being an active part of a writing community you would have developed some friends or confidants with whom you more regularly share and compare work, but suddenly dropping an entire novel on someone is neither polite nor useful. > >For a start, the critiquing skills gap between short fiction and longer works is *significant*. > >So how do you bridge that gap? > >Writing a serial is definitely one way to go about that. If you complete 15-40 episodes of a serial, at 750 - 1k words each, you’ve built yourself the framework for a novella. With any luck, and assuming you’ve managed to find an audience, you might have built yourself interest in the world you’re writing as well. > >But is it really that easy? > >To put it entirely bluntly, Reddit has an awful lot of serials, spread across a wide number of subreddits, but the vast majority of them do not elicit all that much feedback or even necessarily viewers. A majority will remain unfinished. > >Finding regular feedback and skills help for writing serials is not easy, despite them being ostensibly the logical next step toward writing longform fiction. The serial programme aimed to change that. > >And it succeeded. > >Over the 16 weeks of Serial Saturday it’s been fantastic to see people’s writing styles evolve. The participants not only developed their stories, themes, and skills, but became more adept at helping each other and critiquing across longer form works. The mutual progress everyone made was incredible. We’ve seen a great variety of worlds and genres displayed from a group of writers who had widely divergent starting points. Judging by the NaNoWriMo posts on the /r/WritingPrompts discord server, many of the writers involved took the programme as a jumping off point to start tackling novels directly. > >To me, that’s been the greatest success of Serial Saturday. It’s built up a mutually beneficial and positive community on a sub that, let’s be honest, doesn’t have one. With the tale of *The Witch* at an end (for now) there is only one thing left to do: show off this newly finished story for obligatory bragging rights here on . Let the bragging begin! Without further ado, here's Mobaisle’s Table of Contents. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ ## Table of Contents * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *\~Switch to* /r/ShortStories*\~* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ You can check out more of Mob's work by going to their subreddit, /r/The_Crossroads. Congrats on finishing your serial, Mob, and we can’t wait to see what you do next. <3 from the team at , , and Serial Saturday. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ *For more information on the Serial Saturday program feel free to check out our* *.* We have members from all around the world and who have all kinds of schedules, so there’s usually someone awake to talk to. We also have scheduled readings, oration critiques, spur-of-the-moment story time, or even just random hangouts over voice chat.