The Tower, XVI in the tarot card deck, is a solid structure. However, it has been built on shaky foundations representing false premises. The lightning represents sudden energy and insight. Change is inevitable, destroying illusions and leading to a purer life. In the United States, slavery became acceptable because of the slaveowners’ narrative that said that not only would your slave(s) become, in effect, your 401(k) retirement fund (Miss Watson’s runaway slave, Jim, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), slavery also would benefit the slaves, who were black and, therefore, inferior. Lightning strikes!
Pirating Slavery, my novel about buccaneers liberating slave ships, will be published in 16 installments twice a week for four months. The 16th chapter and the epilogue appears here:
Books, published as installments, make the story more manageable while heightening the experience of reading. The book becomes a companion and a commentary on your day-to-day life as you read it over the course of a few months. Between chapters, readers have the time to share, talk and speculate about the book.
Try it!
Book serials first appeared in 1836, when a French newspaper published Honore de Balzac. At the same time, in England, Charles Dickens published The Pickwick Papers and ignited a trend. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1851 in 40 installments. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was published in Russia from 1873 to 1877.