Billionaires are launching rockets to new worlds, I'm launching a new series.

I'm trying something new in 2025. What it is and why I hope you'll join me.

Have you ever had an idea you just can’t shake? It sort of takes over?

I’m in that creative pocket right now. It’s wonderful and a bit miserable at the same time. (Wonderful because it’s so exciting and interesting to pull on all the threads of ideas that come and to discover a story. Miserable because I can’t just stop everything and write it).

I’ve been tinkering and outlining and ruminating a concept in the background for some time. It’s a political thriller set in the not-so-distant future. I’m calling it The 49.

Here’s the quick concept pitch:

Forty-Nine.

The last President inaugurated in the United States.

The span of terrible days after the global comms black out when the world was reshaped.

The number of strange supernatural phenomena that appear around the globe.

You can scroll to the end of this post for an excerpt.

I hope the series will be thrilling to read. It will be a character-driven, suspenseful story ripped from tomorrow’s headlines. Part of the excitement (for me at least) is that I will write it in real time.

Wait, did you just say “real time”?

Yes. Yes I did.

And this is where it gets thrilling (and nerve wracking) for me as a writer. I feel sort of obsessed with the idea of discovering the story alongside the audience: releasing it week-over-week as the story unfolds. As a reader I’d love that.

One of my favourite novels, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, was released serially, week over week, in the newspaper of his day. I love that story. And I think the release strategy is so awesome. So I’m gonna try it! I am no Dickens, but Substack (the platform I’m writing on right now and how you’re reading this) allows writers to release in the same way.

Because it’s out of scope of the content I write here on Things I Wrote Down, I’ll be launching it as a new Substack called The 49.

My plan is to release the first few portions online so people can get a sense of the world, what’s at stake, what the story is like. This will give people a chance to see if they want to subscribe.

The story content will be free and available to everyone (released on Fridays). But I will provide a paid option with a bit more content and paid readers will get the content first (Mondays).

If you’re already a paid reader of TIWD, I want to gift the subscription to The 49 as a thank you for your support. So I’ll send you a private note soon.

The way I want to pitch it to paying readers is that it’s like getting a special edition hard cover as it’s released over time (and supporting an indie writer to develop something truly unique).

And by offering the content for free, I hope to build trust and relationship with new readers.

We’ll see where it goes! With excitement and some trembling,

~ AK

An excerpt from The 49

She hadn’t been outside the wall in months. Recently, it wasn’t worth the risk. Or the hassle. First she’d been summoned. Now she was being sent.

One still had to marvel at the speed they built it. All those decades fighting about the wall on the southern border before Paris. When there were 50 States and a sovereign border between them and Mexico.

Is it humane? Who can come in and out?

As Boyer drove toward the eastern edge of Corridor West, the loud but almost forgotten voices of the recent past played in her mind. The Bishop mocked the bi-polar nature of the pundits, when there was still a thing called broadcast news. He told her how everyone who bickered and argued against enforcing borders, especially the ones who advocated for unlimited hospitality, didn’t raise a single objection when they erected this wall.

Maybe they all were dead. Maybe they had a change of heart.

The border crisis. The housing crisis. The inflation crisis. Problems that seem almost luxurious. Wiped away, almost instantly, because of Paris.

The hand-wringing over who comes in, who stays out stopped. The gaslighting stopped. People shut their doors. Reached for guns. Welcomed the walls.

If you time traveled back to the turn of the century, the Bishop had said, and asked someone where they expected the biggest wall to be built, surely they would have said between the US and Mexico along the natural barrier of the Rio Grande. But they wouldn't have imagined Corridor West.

Developments in concrete 3D printing accelerated the ability to build big structures quickly, and that one wall so long the focus and crucible of political power, was now a corridor that shut out the rest of the world. A marvel to rival—perhaps even exceed—the wonders of the world ancient and the pre-Paris world which once had the Great Wall of China.

The size of it was staggering.

Boyer had only seen pictures online of the progress made from what used to be southern California up to the north of Canada. The dramatic line that shot straight up from San Diego and curved, an extended parenthesis carved as though by the finger of God in the stony tablet of the new world. With it an entire new law and set of rules for humanity.

That parentheses, half of a whole, reflected but also dwarfed a similar line in the East, if you zoomed out on the map of New North. The unfinished line of Corridor East that cut up from the eastern port of New York through Toronto and shot up north. The Great Lakes formed the natural, west-most barrier of the energy sector.

From that satellite view it all looked so simple, factual. The walls grew longer every day as concrete sections replaced the hovering drones which didn’t move, just floated higher above the new structures, their multiple lenses pointed in every direction.

From space, it all looked so neat. As though the map were a casual afterthought, completing a long sentence in history. Between order, darkness. Before progress, chaos. An explanation to the passengers who launched off world. What was the message? This is where it all ends up.

Boyer checked the gauge on her dashboard. She would reach Maskwacis by dusk. There was enough charge. The road was carefully protected from the air, but she couldn’t help but double check every few miles.

Soon she’d be outside the wall. And a stone's throw from the Phos.