Alright my friends, I’m going to try something unusual with my Substack serial ISLE.
In case you’re new or haven’t been following along, since March 2026, I’ve been writing Part I of a serial fiction about a lone astronaut, Marlowe Halcott, who wakes up on an unfamiliar island. This project started as a very rough draft (more of an outline really) that I’d had floating around for years. Early this year, I made it a weekly writing exercise to flesh out that outline and see where it led.
However, I’ve now run out of draft…
I’ve scheduled the rest of Part I (5 more instalments) to release as biweekly posts until the end of September. At that point, Part I will be complete. After that however, well, I didn’t plan past that. So, here’s the unusual idea:
I’ve set up a new page on my website, ISLE Community Voting. Since ISLE is a follow-the-fun project for me, as well as a (very loose) ‘LitRPG’, I thought we might gamify even its narrative. Visiting the link above will present you with a selection of narrative events/questions/directions that I’ve teased, but left open in the writing of Part I. We, as a community, can now influence how those story beats unfold. Here’s how it works…
Each choice on the voting page has a threshold that I’ve set. When a threshold is reached, it unlocks, and I’ll incorporate that story beat somewhere in the writing of Part II.
Everyone gets exactly one vote per day. That’s it. Vote once, come back tomorrow and vote again. A very determined individual could make something significant happen in the story by voting for the same thing every day for, as an example, 100 days. With a little social co-operation, 100 people could initiate that same significant event by all voting together just once.
There are narrative choices (e.g. Marlowe finds X landmark), but there are also smaller details (e.g. a supply crate washes onto shore). It’s your choice whether to focus on the larger, overarching narrative or, like a videogame, to make Marlowe’s day-to-day survival easier (or more difficult, should you choose to usher in another bad tropical storm).
As I said above, we are winging it at this point. We’ll see how things shake out. I reserve the right to add more options, remove options, rejig things, etc. as we progress (while doing my best to honour the voting, of course). It’s a small community of readers regularly keeping up with ISLE, so I may need to adjust thresholds. Point is, I’d love to involve that community more with this experiment. We’ll figure it out together. I have ideas of where the story is going, but here’s your chance to derail some of my plans and keep me on my toes :).
We’ll try to stay a month or two ahead of the events being published on Substack (to give folks time to vote daily, and me time to write/edit). I hope to begin drafting Part II in late September. Of course, I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers on the voting page.
Let me know what you think below. I hope we can have some fun ‘unlocking’ all the secrets of the island together. If you haven’t read ISLE yet, and want to take part in this community-gamified-narrative-experiment, you can catch up from the beginning right here.
The game is afoot.
Aiyas
It worked. First vote cast. Interesting set up.
Such a cool idea!