Hello to my first, darling, indispensable readers. As 2021 dawns, I enter a new, exciting chapter in my writing life, in the form of a weekly sci fi original story feed and newsletter. I hereby invite all who dare to follow me, through these electronic pages, to worlds yet unimagined. Please do as the button indicates and SUBSCRIBE NOW…
If you are already subscribed, please do me the favor of…
I’m not totally sure what options will be available to share, but you can also forward this email to people individually, or send them to ogwiseman.substack.com.
The rest of this is a test post to find the right formatting, which will start with a preamble like this, and then move onto a…
STORY TITLE
This is where the story will go. It will be a good story. Except twice a month, when it will not be a story, but instead some kind of essay, review, recommendation, or list of links that’s related to science fiction.
Now I’m going to write a test story paragraph. This section tests whether I can bring formatting over from a Word document (the asterisks below to divide story sections) even though it’s not actually a part of Substack’s limited formatting tools.
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Now I need some more text here to complete the formatting test. This sort of very basic technical-skill-building is an underrated part of almost any creative endeavor. It’s easy to see with something like guitar, where it’s obvious that just transitioning between basic chords thousands of times is a precursor to playing the songs one loves, but there are analogies in almost all artistic pursuits. Now I want to try a list:
Lists are one of a small number of formatting features Substack provides for its writers. Hopefully I can compose in Word and the formatting transfers!
I don’t yet know how I would use a list in a story, but it’s possible I will.
My first thought is that, since I’m writing sci fi, I could do something like make an A.I. character that speaks in lists.
It’s likely that in some way, lists will become a part of the project, because they seem to be a natural feature of the medium.
There are a few features of the formatting that I’m sure sure how they’ll look on the page, so I want to try them out in this test email.
This is called a “wrap-in block quote”. I have some idea of how this might look, but the devil is in the details, which is why I made sure to extend this quote to take up three lines, in case a single line doesn’t explore the quote-format’s full possibilities.
After the block-quote, we return to our regularly formatted text so I can see what that looks like. That will be the end of this test email. I will be back next Sunday with another plea to share this with interested friends and colleagues.