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Hello Everyone,
You are all welcome to take part in my latest writing project. I explain the how and why I’m going the serialisation route in the video above. But the gist is this:
🕊️ The book is about collapse. That is, how the complex systems that make up our civilisation - the economic, energy, climate, population, democratic and sense-making systems - are out of whack, wobbling or already in collapse.
🕊️ But mostly it maps out how the hell a tender soul is to actually live a beautiful, human(e) life amidst it all. As Simone de Beauvoir asked in a similarly liminal time, “How do we live now?”. If you just want to get stuck in…
🕊️ The project also serves as a writing workshop, whereby I share my process as we go. Your input will also be built into the book as it evolves. The project is designed so that you join me in real time as I write. It is an agile, alive conversation.
🕊️ The first few chapters are available for free. You can check them out here.
🕊️ However the project is a paid community experience. The conversation threads are super intimate and require good, solid enrolment. I am writing this book for everyone who’s ready and aching for a brutally honest and connected conversation about this liminal, potent and reckoning time in history. It - the book and the conversation - will serve as “an island of sanity”1.
🕊️ Once completed, it will be edited and packaged into an ebook. All paid subscribers will get a copy; your subscriptions will pay for this editing process!
🕊️ There is a nifty Table of Contents you can use to navigate things. You can find it here.
My rationale for taking the serialisation route
As I explain in the video above, I reached a point in my initial tortured writing and researching process where it was dead clear:
The book needed to land immediately. We are “in” what I write about. Shit has hit fans and a lot of us are needing the bold, honest conversation now. If I published via traditional routes, the book would not hit shelves for at least another year.
Serialising - releasing chapters one at a time - felt like the right pace for this kind of subject. It allows us all to emotionally and intellectually digest things together, too. Serialisation also has a long history - Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities were serialised in magazines. Many books originally deemed “difficult” for the times also took this initial path, such as Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and, of course, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Today, authors such as
(My Beautiful Laundrette) and (Fight Club) have serialised their books on Substack. It’s a new, experimental and “of the times” thing.The boon is that a publisher may well come along and decide to package the series as a physical book (per Tolstoy, Dickens, Joyce et al) with a beautiful cover and special features that will be appropriate for people in a year or so.
To this end, if you’re a publisher, please do follow along for a bit and connect with me when and if it feels right!
I feel serialisation will allow the right publisher to come along at the right time, to bring the book to the next (broader) audience.
Doing things differently, outside of the status quo, felt fitting. I’m aware I’m bucking the system a bit doing things this way, and I could fail. I’m also taking a financial hit. But I feel strongly we must all be our message at this juncture in history. We must live out our lives how we know things need to be. For me, this means being wild and of service today.
A few ways for you to support this mad project
TBH, becoming a paid subscriber helps me out a lot. The subscriptions pay me a living wage, so I can produce the book (and pay for the money-draining Wild podcast that accompanies the conversation ). It will also pay for an editor to fact-check and tidy the copy, and the production of the final ebook.
You may also choose to click the “Founding Member” option when you subscribe and kick in some extra coin. No obligation. Only if you feel you’d like to contribute to getting this endeavour out into the world (and allow me to gift subscriptions to folk who can’t quite afford one at the moment).
Or you can gift a subscription to someone who needs to hang out on this island of sanity with us. Some folk here have asked to gift a stranger or a young person…we can arrange this for you…
Or you can “buy me a metaphorical coffee” - a $5 donation - from time to time:
Finally, you can share the project with friends. I think there are a lot of folk out there looking for better explanations, desperately wanting to be held by an attuned community. Don’t forget that when you refer three friends, you get a month’s free subscription yourself (the system will do this automatically for you!).
And if you are not flush with cash (particularly if you’re a young person), but want to be part of this journey, get in touch via the comments. 💫
Sarah xx
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Per Meg Wheatley’s concept.
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