The South Downs Way: What Next?

Since 2019, I’ve been working on a series of stories set along the South Downs Way. At almost 40,000 words, this is the largest thing I’ve published, and it’s still expanding. The work consists of six print zines and a few dozen stories shared on my mailing list. I’ve now created a website to gather these stories together and help me to trace the work’s structure. The obvious inspiration for this project is Geoff Ryman’s 253 – but my story is so complicated I’ve got lost in it myself. If I can’t find the paths through, what hope do any readers have? Hopefully, working through the site will help me make this clearer for everyone, including me. The original plan for The South Downs Way was to do 150 stories, then 200, and it somehow grew to releasing 20 zines throughout the decade, but I’m fine with falling behind on that. I don’t mind if it takes thirty years before this is ‘finished’ (whatever that means). There are several elements of this book that never happened. I started in 2019,…