Welcome to the Hanahaki Club

fictional diseases, first loves and first serials

Dear friends,

This newsletter is one of ANNOUNCEMENTS. Specifically, FICTION ANNOUNCEMENTS.

The first announcement is regarding the new serial I’ll be starting to publish soon, and the other is to let you know that you can now find the details of my published, young adult trilogy on my Substack homepage.

I hope you’ve been enjoying The Dying Fall. If dystopian fiction isn’t really your thing though, my next project is in a totally different genre—in fact, I’ve never written in this genre before, so it’s quite exciting to dabble in something new.

I have FINALLY finished planning this new serial—all it took was a week sitting by a pool in Kefalonia, fuelled by sun, home-cooked Greek food and plenty of stray cats. It’s amazing what you can achieve when work, domestic chores and Netflix aren’t getting in your way.

Anyway, details are below.

Thanks for reading and if you think a friend, relative, neighbour, casual acquaintance, friendly rival, or local stray cat might be interested, this post (as with all my content) is free to share.

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Announcement 1:

So, the new serial—what is it?

Well… it still, technically—I guess?—comes under the speculative fiction category, but only because it’s about a fictional disease. Otherwise, it would fall more broadly under the romance category… I think. As you can tell, I’m not very good at this genre-defining game. I’m putting it under ‘speculative romance’ because I think that covers a lot of sins I’ll probably commit against the romance genre.

In fact, it would be really helpful if you could let me know what genre(s) you think would best describe the story from the description below. Have I got it right? Do you have a better suggestion? Let me know.

In short, the story is about the fictional disease hanahaki.

What is hanahaki?

Hanahaki is a fictional disease created (according to my research) by Matsuda Naoko for her manga Hanahaki Otome (The Girl Who Spits Flowers).

It’s a disease which is caused by unrequited love. The sufferer begins to grow flowers in their lungs, which will eventually kill them if left untreated. The only ways to cure hanahaki are to either have the unrequited feelings returned, or to have surgery to remove the flowers—the side effect of which is to also lose all your feelings and memories of the person you love.

It’s most popular in Japanese, Chinese and Korean work, but also in fanfiction for just about any fandom on the internet.

Why a story about hanahaki?

Honestly? I just love the concept. If you’ve ever suffered from unrequited love or an unrequited crush, as I have, you know how bitter-sweet it can be—all beauty and pain, at the same time. It certainly feels like you’re being suffocated by your feelings—like you could really die from them—and I think hanahaki is the perfect metaphor for that experience.

Romantic love is such a cultural obsession too. We love our one true loves, our soulmates, meant-for-each-other tales of triumphant love that overcomes all… but the truth is that heartbreak is probably more common for most of us and unrequited love is such a kick in the gut I just couldn’t resist writing about it. I wanted to write about the losers in love… because I think their stories are important too, and because most of us have probably been there at least once.

I promise this isn’t a dystopian story though. Promise. Promise. Promise.

Why a serial?

I usually write novels. I can’t write short stories. I’ve written three short stories in my life: the first one actually got shortlisted in a competition and published in an anthology—and I’ll squeeze in a third little announcement here… I’ll be sharing it with you in a post soon. The second turned into The Dying Fall, and the third was rubbish.

I admire anyone who can write short stories. They’re really hard to write well and my brain only has one mode, which is ‘Go Epic Or Go Home’, so… 80,000 words is really my minimum word count for story-telling. There’s a real skill to crafting a story within a word limit—even if you allow yourself 100,000 words for a full-on space opera—that’s actually not a lot of words or time to build an entire world and populate it with a diverse cast of characters, settings, plot and subplots. And I love that challenge. I really do.

But there are some projects I’m working on that just won’t work within those restrictions. They need something different, and I think serial fiction might be the way to go… so I want to give it a try.

I also just LOVE serialised storytelling. If you don’t know already, I’m a massive manga, anime and web-comic fan—all immensely successful, and creative forms of serialised storytelling—and I’m constantly inspired by the way they tell stories and play with narrative boundaries.

In recent times, episodic television dramas have become hugely popular, where films once ruled. Rather than adapting books into feature length films, there’s been a bigger shift towards adapting them into television serials. There’s some argument that this is because attention spans are shrinking and audiences don’t have the patience to sit through a two hour film anymore… we can only handle thirty minute episodes now… but I don’t think that’s true. It’s a pretty well-established fact that many of us are prone to a binge: eight or ten episodes back-to-back of our favourite programme on a Saturday night, with a pizza and a bottle of wine (or a pot of decaffeinated tea, because that’s my life now).

I don’t think attention span has anything to do with the popularity of episodic storytelling. I think it’s the opposite. I think it’s because serialising a story over ten or twelve episodes gives more time to immerse ourselves in a story; it gives us more time for detail, pacing, character development and world-building. I think it lets us linger a little longer in the fictional world than a two hour film allows. And I really like that.

Serialising a story comes with its own challenges, of course, but I find that exciting and I’m looking forward to trying it out and learning a lot in the process.

I hope you’ll enjoy the journey with me.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to The Hanahaki Club.

Hassie, Remi, Emery, Merryn and Taran have one thing in common—they’re all reluctant members of an unpopular club: The Hanahaki Club—a weekly support group for losers in love. Each member has the same rare genetic flaw that means their unrequited love is killing them—literally, slowly and beautifully—as hanahaki flowers fill up their lungs.

With all five of them under the age of twenty-one, they’re much too young to die over something so common and embarrassing; so, somehow, together, they must figure out how to go from losers in love to survivors.

The options are simple, really. Find love. Fight it. Forget it. Or fail… and fall to it.

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Announcement 2:

You can now find details of my young adult, dystopian trilogy, The Divinity Laws on my Substack homepage. It has its own section and everything.

I’ll put a link to the introduction page below, where you can find a description of each book in the trilogy, links to reading the first chapter of each book for free, as well as links for the print and ebook copies of each book.

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I’ll update you on when to expect the first episode of The Hanahaki Club, but in the meantime, I’ll continue with weekly postings of The Dying Fall.

Do feel free to let me know what you think or ask any questions about the story—or about any of my past or future projects. I’m always up for a chat, which is why I always leave the comments section of each post open.

1. What have you been reading recently? Listening to? Watching?

I watched The Influencer on Netflix recently, which is basically Physical 100 for Korean social media influencers, and I have many, many thoughts on it.

2. Do you enjoy serial or episodic storytelling? What’s your favourite?

Don’t forget… next weekend, 10.30pm, behind the theatre, for Chapter 8: The Undersound of The Dying Fall. See you there!

PJ