Back in 1996, I started writing a novella based on the song, 38 Years Old (Never Kissed a Girl) by the Canadian band, The Tragically Hip. I worked on it, off and on, for a few years, but didn’t finish the first draft until January 2009. The completed story follows the song fairly closely and is about 20000 words long, which is about 1/4 of the length of one of my traditional novels.

I wrote it mainly for fun and my own amusement (which is as good a reason as any) and because I loved the song. But I’ve secretly harbored hopes that I’d be able to do something more with it eventually. I mean, writers do write stuff to be read, right? But because it’s fan-fic (fiction based on, or derived from another person’s original work), I can’t publish it in any way where I’d make any money off it, or even as a free e-book. I’ve tried to contact the band multiple times over the years, to get their thoughts on fan-fic, but I haven’t received any replies.

I had some spare time over the last few weeks, so I decided to dive back into the story. After a fair amount of work, I believe it’s now ready to be read by the public. But how? What medium could I possibly use to allow people to read this? Hmmm. If only I had some way of publishing it as a free serial, on line…some site people could come to to read what I have to say… wait, I know just where I can do this!

Starting tomorrow (March 5th, 2013), I will be releasing a chapter per day of this novella on this blog as a serial. They should be up first thing in the morning each day, so you can read them with your morning coffee and serial cereal. Some of the chapters are pretty short. Some are a little longer, but I’ve tried to keep them all under 3000 words so they won’t take too long to read each day. Or you can wait until the whole series is published and read them all in a single shot. It’s up to you.

A few notes:

1. The story is fiction. The song is not based on real events either. Any similarity to people living or dead, is purely coincidental.
2. If you like the story, please pass the word to your friends. If this approach to publishing stories via my blog works, I will do it again in the future.
3. If you find any mistakes or typos, please let me know in the comments, and I will fix them as soon as I can.
4. If there is something about the presentation (font / format / whatever) that makes the story hard to read, or if you have a suggestion on how to make the experience better, please let me know. I’ll see what I can do.
5. If you like the story / or don’t like it, again, feel free to comment.
6. While I am publishing this on the internet for the readers of my blog, I still hold the rights to the material (such as it is as fan-fic). Republishing, in whole, or in part, on any other media (for profit or not) without my permission is not allowed.
7. Here is the release schedule for the chapters. I’ll update this list with links to the chapters as they are published, as a sort of table of contents.

Again, I hope you enjoy the story.

There’s no official video for the song, but if you want to listen to the song before (or after if you don’t want any spoilers) you read the story, you can listen to it here: