Welcome to My World: A Guide to Michael's Musings
Hello, all:
As an intro note, I’ve always liked that greeting, as opposed to “Greetings!” or “Hey” or “Hi!”. I heard it on Frasier, one of my favorite shows, quite often, usually said in a friendly or cheery way. So that’s how we’ll start: this Substack is a place for my stories, mostly superhero-themed but occasionally otherwise, posts about my writing, and observations about life. Interested? Want to know what to expect? Read on:
The Basics
The Tales of Edison City - Superhero story serials, new episodes every Sunday afternoon
The Weekly Muse - writing updates and life observations
Ask the Captain - an advice column answered in-character as Edison City’s own Captain Happily Married, with assistance from Super Soccer Mom
All newsletters and posts are free: at a future time I will likely make archived posts paid, but that’s TBD currently. In any event, if you subscribe now, you get to read everything free up front; no paywalls partway through the middle of the post.
In-Depth: What It’s All About
The Tales of Edison City
This is where you’ll find my superhero-themed serial stories, which are primarily centered around the fictional Edison City, which is protected by Captain Happily Married, Gaseous Girl, Natalia and Audrey, and other various capes against villains like Crudmuffin and Behemoth Bob. The serial in progress is Gaseous Girl and the Winds of Time; you can find the first episode below. New chapters are released weekly, usually every Sunday afternoon.
The Weekly Muse
In this weekly newsletter I discuss my progress in writing off-Substack novels, pass along other writing updates, and also write about general things I’ve noticed. For example, in the below edition I briefly discuss my theory about why the Zooks in The Butter Battle Book were so easily able to keep up with the Yooks in weapons development (spoiler: they had a Zook on the inside).
As the title says, this also comes out weekly, usually on Saturday.
Ask the Captain
A bit of a unique feature, “Ask the Captain” is an in-character advice column written by Captain Happily Married, one of the superheroes residing in Edison City. Other characters, such as Super Soccer Mom, or maybe even one of the villains, may join in from time to time, but mostly it’s the good captain responding to questions about evil, injustice, and inter-personal conflicts and offering his own inimitable perspective (with plenty of exclamation points!). The initial questions are my own, but reader submissions are encouraged, even welcomed, and can be left in the comments of each post. ATC columns come out every week, most often on Friday.
Last Call: What You Can Do
So, if you’ve read all this and you like what you find, I’d take it as a kindness if you’d subscribe or recommend to a friend, or family, or even casual acquaintance. The more the merrier, as the saying goes.
You can also like, comment, and share any particular post that particularly amuses you; I’d love to hear your thoughts or suggestions. If you want to contribute a question to “Ask the Captain”, in character or even out of it, feel free to do so. (Please note I’m only a writer and not a professional advice-giver or anything like that).
Finally, all posts as noted above are free; eventually I do plan to move to archive some older posts and at that point the archive will be paywalled; if you’d like to get a jump on that and upgrade your subscription to a paid one in order to access the archive, you’re welcome to do so. If you don’t feel up to subscribing and just want to throw something my way as a show of appreciation for a post you particularly liked, you can click the “Buy Me a Soda” below! (I know some people have a '“Buy me a Coffee” button, but I’m not much of a coffee fella. Soft drinks are my jam).
Happy reading!
-Michael