People don’t read big books of fiction any longer. How many times have we heard that over the years? People don’t read anymore. How many times have we also heard that? Today’s era of inundation of unlimited television has destroyed the future of serious fiction? Yeah yeah yeah, we’ve heard that one as well.

Many years ago, I was driving through San Francisco and was listening to an interview with a then hot on the scene novelist who said that if fiction writers don’t start changing the way books are written people will stop reading them. Instead of the literary community lambasting the fact that the average person reads less and watches more television these days, perhaps writers should ask why instead of lamenting that the only people who might read their work are other writers while even their family members simply put their books out on coffee tables to collect dust while the spines are not even cracked.

The truth is that the vast majority of fiction writers today came of age as artists in the rise of long-form narrative television. From Northern Exposure to others, you name it. These are visual narratives often of great substance and complexity that rely on one essential thing in common. While they may have a central character whose journey we follow, there are episodes that show the perspective of characters that are part of the overall narrative’s greater world, providing a richer fictional perspective. Most fiction writers today can name shows they love that do this, ones that general audiences also embrace. So, if that audience embraces this type of long-form narrative television, why haven’t fiction writers providing the literary equivalent of it? Perhaps readers have not abandoned contemporary fiction. Instead, perhaps fiction writers have refused to change the way a contemporary audience absorbs narrative.

I have taught a course I designed called The Cinematic Approach to Fiction. One of the things that is notable is not just how much our daily lives have changed in the past few decades because of technology, but how that has changed how we digest fictional narratives. People can access visual narrative at will and have the ability to take a few weeks off from watching when busy and then return and have no problem knowing where they are. Yet if you ask anyone reading a novel they will say that if they stop reading for two weeks, they will almost certainly have to start over from page one.

The Tails Side of Love aims to remedy that. People desperately still want to read long-form literary narrative. It is now the job of writers to rethink how they present that on the page in a satisfying why. I believe my book does that. I don’t want my story to simply reach and impress my peers in the literary community. I want this story to reach the widest audience possible.