Available Darkness Season 1

part is that we believed that the digital publishing revolution offered us an opportunity to do something we’ve wanted to do for most of our lives — write a serial.
    So we got to work on our post-apocalyptic serial, Yesterday’s Gone .
    It was a tough sell at first. But in January 2012, we made an important decision — we put our everything into Our Plan.
    We’d become the self-titled “Kings of Serialized Fiction” by writing and publishing an episode (or a short story) every week in 2012. We wanted to be the AMC, HBO, or Showtime of the Kindle generation! A new “show” every week.
    The plan is crazy, ambitious, and the hours are long.
    But the gamble has paid off! We’re now making a living writing serialized fiction! We immediately followed Yesterday’s Gone with more serials — WhiteSpace and ForNevermore , so we’d always have a “show” in production to deliver to our audience.
    But we weren’t sure what to do with Available Darkness .
    It started as a serial, which it shouldn’t have been — at least not a web serial .
    When we were writing AD on the web, we were forced to work within the pacing of the web, delivering artificial cliffhangers at the ends of shorter chapters, where they shouldn’t have been. We fixed all that when we decided to write it as a book, allowing the story to flow naturally.
    Since we published AD last summer, I’ve had mixed feelings about it.
    It was our first book, and while it has a special place in our heart — as well as some readers’ hearts — it’s not up to par with our other stuff. There’s some clunky exposition, some language which doesn’t work as well as it should, and the story pacing could be better.

    QUESTIONS
    We weren’t sure what to do with the book.
    We knew we wanted to return to the world. We also knew we wanted to do the second season as a proper serial like our other stuff. But we didn’t know how to handle the first book. To have Part One as a full book and the second as six serialized books would be confusing to readers and would be unevenly presented.
    Series should be delivered consistently.
    So we were faced with questions:
    Do we rewrite the whole thing?
    Clean it up a bit?
    Or just keep going, ignoring the bad stuff in the first book?
    The problems with rewriting the whole thing is that we might be tempted to write new content and I don’t want to force people who already read the first book to have to read it again. Also, I didn’t want to change events in the first book, which would be confusing as hell to people who read it. You can’t just say to readers, “Hey, you know how that one thing happened? Ignore it, we changed our minds.”
    No.
    While the books are fiction, we strive to make our worlds as real as they are to us when we’re in them.
    If something happens, it doesn’t un-happen.
    We don’t change the “history” in a story.
    That’s one of the things I hated most about serialized fiction in comics and soap operas. Continuity is often not respected. Dead people are brought back to life seemingly at will, children are aged for story purposes, and things that happened are often ignored as if they never did.
    No.
    That’s not how a serial should work.
    If it happens — it happened.
    No take-backs.
    So we decided to REVISE the first book of AD, cleaning up the language, dialogue, and maybe changing the order of how events are presented in a few instances, but NOT changing the events.

    GETTING BACK TO THE WORLD OF AD!
    So here we are — back in the world of Available Darkness .
    It’s a story that has been in my head since I was a teenager, and which I’ve tried to perfect a million different ways over the years.
    I love the characters.
    I love the story.
    And I love what next season is going to bring.
    But maybe the reason I love this book most is that it was the start of my creative partnership with Sean.
    I never thought I’d find a writing partner so creatively in tandem with myself. We compliment each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Sean’s a happy guy who farts rainbows, while I’m a cynical bastard with a permanent storm cloud overhead.
    As different as we are, however, our paths cross in all the right places whether it be experiences, stuff we like, or stuff we’ve wanted to create.
    And there is zero ego in our relationship — with the story ALWAYS taking the driver’s seat in every decision we make.
    Available Darkness isn’t just the first book we created together. It’s the