Launching "About Story" Series (2025)

About the Story Thing (2025) - 01

“Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories …” (Storytelling, 2025).

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Welcome to the launch of the first thematic series on the Reality Skimming blog, sponsored by Reality Skimming Press. Pieces will appear every other Monday Jun 2 through to the end of 2025. Query us at https://facebook.com/relskim if you’d like to contribute.

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I have always been spellbound by stories. I know they live in myths, and lives, as well as the novels, plays and movies we consume. Story is a human kind of sharing, for good or ill, in powerful currents, secret pools or streams that feed niche landscapes of every kind.

This series wrestles with the whole story thing from the perspectives of people engaged in it, in 2025, amid the roar of changes beginning with the internet, in the 1990s, and flowing into challenges posed by AI, with occasional glances backwards to learn about what it all meant before books and what it might mean after they, too, are history.

I was blown away by Harari’s (2014) depiction of “fictional realities” as the superpower that raised humanity to dominate the Earth. Something as fundamental to being human as that isn’t disappearing, even if it changes.

But why do I call it “reality skimming?”

Reality Skimming is the name of the faster than light method of travel in my novel series, begun in my teens and completed in 2013 with the release of Part 10: Unholy Science, by Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy (Edge, 2013). It is also what I named the micro-press I founded after we parted ways, and it is my catch-all for the process of making sense of what a writer gleans from lived experience, associated research, and the results of fellow travelers along the way.

As for my own relationship with story, it’s been deeper and wider than my published-writer years.

As a child, my father read me British poetry, like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge, 1834) and taught me to sing story-songs with him. My favorite games were make believe, shared first with my sister Holly and later with a series of friends, culminating in my collaboration with Alison Sinclair on Part 4: Throne Price, in the Okal Rel Saga.

Like most writers of my generation, the only legitimate outlet was the holy grail of traditional publishing. I was fortunate enough to have lived that dream for 14 years, and complete the entire ten-novel series as originally conceived, from end to end. Along the way, others did the Okal Rel Universe the honour of collaborating with me, which is a tradition that continues with the slow but steady release of the 3rd edition of the Okal Rel Saga, featuring cover art by Michelle Milburn, and the sharing of the books through other means such as on the Okal Rel Universe account on Wattpad, thanks to the help of Lisa van Gool, and most recently the audio production of Book 2: Righteous Anger, on Youtube.com, by voice talent Jamie Oates (2025).

In a very real sense, I just never stopped playing. But I nearly lost the joy of it all after hitting the inevitable speed bumps in life and struggling to re-invent storytelling in my life as a non-traditional publisher.

This series is a stab at reality skimming my way through the meaning of writing in the digital world, with AI and games, streaming content everywhere, shorter attention spans, marketing madness and the shift in reading habits.

Even at my first scifi convention as an officially published author, I kept hearing the island was shrinking. I attended many professional book-selling events between 1999 and 2013 while the Okal Rel Saga, was coming out, book by book, and the feeling was always there: lurking in the doubt at the back of my mind, and coming up in conversations with people who told me it was so much easier to “make it” as a pro-writer before the 1970s when the MBA graduates took over the publishing houses, and it became expedient to drop the mid-list authors in favour of a few stars. To be fair, it cost less to promote a few stars than to maintain a stable of lesser lights and economics increasingly required all luminosity be measured in sales of books.

I suspect the new currency is fame, today. If you’re famous, you can sell books on the internet, or get the support of a publisher. But the internet is a crowded, busy space. On the other hand, self-publishing is more acceptable, today, in a way it definitely wasn’t when I first entertained dreams of being read.

And there’s also fanfic, as well as original fiction, being offered on sites where readers can read for free, and engage with the author through comments, with installments coming out in a fashion reminiscent of Charles Dickens’ serialized epics (Purcell, 2017).

And, of course, AI – the last disruption.

In this series, we’ll be featuring the perspectives of writers from SF Canada, the professional writers’ group for scifi/fantasy in Canada, academics, members of writers groups I belong to, publishers, readers, librarians and anyone else in the ecosystem, with myself filling in gaps where they occur. We’d be happy to hear from you, as well. Reality Skimming Press pays $25 per post, and will publish an installment in About the Story Thing (2025) series every other Monday starting Jun 2 and ending Dec 31.

Thanks for reading to the end and remember to fly for your own reasons!

Lynda Williams – “The Obscure Canadian Tolkien”

Publishing at Reality Skimming Press

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References

Coleridge, S.T. (1834). The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834

Edge. (c. 2013). Unholy Science by Lynda Williams. http://www.edgewebsite.com/books/unholyscience/unholyscience-catalog.html

Harari, Y.N. (2014). Sapiens: a brief history of humankind. McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, A Penguin Random House Company.

Oates, J. (2025). Righteous Anger by Lynda Williams (Okal Rel Saga #2). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpDykbzThqk&list=PL4TgFVH31Vi6TI3fbQK0zItdF4lEXMl3K

Purcell, L. (2017, Dec 27.) Dickens and the Art of Serialization. Storybits: Revitalizing Short Fiction and Poetry. https://storybits.squarespace.com/blog/2017/12/27/gd4kj4nf3qo687leznp1xvfvzdzgtf

Storytelling. (2025, May 29). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Storytelling&oldid=1292815973

Williams, L. (2006). Guide to the Okal Rel Universe. Port Orchard, WA. Fandom Press. Imprint of Windstorm Creative.