One Year on Substack
And the Future of the Château.
Ladies and gentlemen, it has been a year.
365 days since I started this Substack.
And it’s been… something.
First and foremost, I want to thank every last one of you for your continued support, and I want to thank God for keeping the dream alive. All good things come from Him, and I have been immeasurably blessed to be able to keep this stack going, however slow it’s gone, and still have prospects for the future.
And to think it all started precisely at midnight, between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, on my worn pleather $160 Amazon futon between my bed and my Lego shelf, which by the way, is still there. And the very first thing I did was post a comment completing someone’s story prompt. It was something about taking off your “skin” and running free into a moonlit forest in the dead of night. I don’t even remember what I commented exactly, only that it was about 50 words and a good bit longer than everyone else’s one-liners.
Now, granted, the one-year anniversary of the Bellevue series won’t be until the 19th, but that’s secondary information. I didn’t even start to think about Bellevue as a serious serial until the 17th, after I’d published my farce, “Wedding Day", and even then it was only going to be a quick little spy thriller. It was really just something to pass the time with every week, and now it’s grown to 37 episodes and counting, about a tremendous alternate-history storm brewing in the courts of 18th-century France.
And to get an idea of how deeply influential it’s been so far, here is a recent shoutout I am still incredibly proud of from one of my best friends on this app, Charlotte Balladine :
I mean… wow. Thank you again, a million times over, Charlotte. This kept me going. You are a phenomenal writer in your own right, and the way you engage with historical works is simply inspiring. And you reminded me exactly why I fell in love with writing the series in the first place: it’s a tight, compelling plot that these poor characters have to navigate with all their flaws and emotional issues. It’s not so much about the secrets going around themselves as it is about what these characters do with secrets once they have a hold of them.
Additional thanks to my parents for supporting me throughout all this, my friends at the Catholic Center, and my best friend IRL, who was one of the first to read the full series and give me proper feedback on it, whose name I won’t mention here for privacy reasons, though I have talked about him here before, in this post here:
(whoa, things must have changed on the app recently; I don’t remember in-text links being that big…)
Oh! And my one paid subscriber. We’ve talked in person. You know who you are. I love you, man. You’re the best.
Right. That’s the thank-yous all said and done.
Let’s get to where this series is going.
The Plan
As you know, since November 2025, I have been releasing Bellevue episodes only once a month to protect my progress on my other novel WIP, When the Earth Moves On, which predates Bellevue by about six months. Understandably, this loss of momentum has led to a substantial decrease in loyal readership. Charlotte, if you’ve gotten to this point, you are perhaps one of my only remaining loyal, visible readers, if my recent notes have been any indication, despite my somewhat large subscriber count. If anyone else has been reading, I highly recommend you make your presence known and support this charming little 75,000-word series as it continues to grow.
However, I have also stalled progress on WEMO. I want to be entirely transparent with you. Since about March, I’ve been terribly shy about posting novel updates because I’ve gotten to that infamous mid-book slog. For the past several months, the words, if they came at all, came very slowly, and I was too embarrassed about the lack of visible progress to talk about it publicly.
But the creative rhythm is finally coming back, and to celebrate this anniversary, I’m going to lay out a definitive roadmap from now until November to mark one year since grinding Bellevue momentum to a near-halt.
The Summer Grind
My primary creative energy is locked onto finishing the remaining 63,000 words of WEMO to bring it to its planned completion at 130,000 words. Bellevue will maintain its steady pace of one episode a month during this time. The upcoming episode 38 will take us entirely inside the calculating mind of Madame de Pompadur for her very first POV chapter. Many things will be revealed that I think you guys will really love.
The Early Autumn Storm
As WEMO nears completion, the domestic pressure cooker at Bellevue is going to intensify. We’re navigating the fallout of the dossier from episodes 35-37, an explanation for why Gaspard didn’t hold his meeting outside the billiard room in episode 37 (despite his intense plans for new security measures over the previous two days), a lovely day between Lucien and Anatole, and… Claude’s arrival at the Château. The archivist we’d been anticipating since episode 6, summoned by letter in episode 18, and met for the first time in episode 30 as he was taking care of his mother in Lyon with Père Émile and his troupe of lay ministers to the sick. THAT Claude.
Not the AI.
The November Relaunch
November is our finish line and our new beginning. Once WEMO is hopefully done (I’ve extended my personal deadline three times before… can you imagine there was a time when I thought I’d finish it by September 2025? 😂 Each and every time, I realize just how little I know my own writing speed) and moves into the formal publishing query phase, I am officially returning Bellevue to its originally intended, fast-paced schedule of one episode a week.
Not two episodes a week. Not a three-episode dump every Saturday. Not a near-daily rush to some finish line.
One episode a week.
We’ve got to be sustainable here.
To mark that return to weekly schedules, I am also preparing to launch the physical, print edition of Volume 1 (comprising episodes 1-16) as a beautiful collector’s book. It will be the perfect way to hold a piece of this clockwork plot in your hands, complete with a formal character directory and historical research notes on the real-world espionage of the era.
Truth be told, I have no idea how I’ll do it.
If anyone here knows a good place to send manuscripts for free printing services, I would love to know, because I am broke as all hell.
Thank you again for your patience, your loyalty, and your shared love for some good historical espionage action.
God bless.
And here’s to another year on this wonderful app.
Copyright Notice
© E. A. Morales. All rights reserved.
My absolutely pleasure, dear friend! I look forward to reading your work for the year to come 🎉🎉🎉
Congratulations on one year! Coincidentally, today is also my one-year stackiversary. I say it calls for a drink. Or perhaps something chocolate. Whatever floats your boat. Anyway, glad you're still writing, and I actually do read your work, though I guess I'm not very visible about it!