Shady Palms 4: Free serialized fiction online from Palm Beach newspaper columnist

Slightly edited—from Frank Cerabino, a columnist with the Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Fla.

I have serialized five novels through the newspaper, and its Web site. They are comedic soap opera sorts of stories set in our readership area. The first series, Shady Palms, is about the lives of the older residents in a fictional condo in Boynton Beach, Fla. The second series, Pelican Park, is about a soon-to-be-divorced middle-aged mother who reinvents her life as a real estate agent in this fictional West Palm Beach neighborhood.

The point of this email is to say that the fourth story in my Shady Palms series, Shady Palms 4: Republicans in Love, began running Sunday, March 30, and will be unfolding, a chapter a day, through the month of April.

The TeleRead take: Via the above link, you can also catch up with earlier chapters. What’s more, you can even hear Palms 4—or buy paper editions of some of Cerabino’s writings. Now let’s think at a more cosmic level: When will newspapers wake up? Certain cities are swarming with would-be novelists. Perhaps savvy newspapers in some cases could turn them into published ones—writing stories set in local settings.

Readers seem to enjoy Cerabino. Meanwhile I notice that a British author is talking about “salaried” writers. If Cerabino’s bosses are letting him write some fiction on company time, that model already applies in part to him even if he isn’t a member of a formal “academy.” Time for supermarket tabloids and certain big-city newspapers to publish acknowledged fiction? They could even publish novels and story collections as e-books—easily readable on cellphones, PDAs or tablets, whether or not wireless was around. – D.R.

Detail: Of course newspaper serializations of fiction go back to Dickens and probably earlier. Armistead Maupin and two San Francisco newspapers that published him didn’t do too badly with Tales of the City.