I was recently chatting with an academic friend about The Filliquian Chronicle, and I was describing how we’ve structured the narrative. “In essence,” I said, “it’s structured a bit like a television series, so that each installment is somewhat like an episode, with several of them grouped together in an arc that resembles a television season. All of the seasons will then add up into a cohesive and coherent whole.” While I expected my friend to give me at least a bit of pushback–for comparing such widely different media as the written word and television, if for nothing else–to my surprise she actually thought that made sense. And besides, she pointed out, it might make it even easier to one day convert our written story into a screenplay for a television series (isn’t that the dream?)

While I’d come up with the television metaphor sort of on the spur of…