Filing the Serial Numbers
In fandom, someone “files the serial numbers off” when they have the crazy idea to revise their fanfic into original fiction—original characters, settings, themes, and motifs, all in the hopes of bringing their story to the masses through publication. The process is more than changing names. It’s a journey, long and winding, and I’d love to have you along for the ride.
I get dibs on the radio though.
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The Pitch
The Places We Call Sacred is (slated to be) a 92,000 (ish)-word stand-alone adult literary novel where death brings three young people to Novochetroisk, a small mining town in the middle of the Russian steppe.
Artemiy is trapped by obligation and refuses to face a future already planned. A mysterious inheritance forces Lyosha to face a past he’d rather forget. Maks just wants to take care of his people on his own terms.
As they work to rebuild the abandoned, cursed Cafe Guiding Voice, decades’ old secrets come out, tying their lives and their futures together.
Chong-Sara-Oy, where this picture was taken, is a village in Kyrgyzstan, not Russia. However, there are aesthetic similarities in this slice of the world, and these images that I captured in December 2019 are what I keep coming back to when thinking about the fictional town of Novochetroisk.
commissioned art by seefasterdraws
artemiy
maks
lyosha
commissioned art of by meiri | Click the image to read more about them!
About The Blog
Welcome to “Filing Off the Serial Numbers”!
My name is Sarah. I’ve been writing fic since I was nine years old, watching the adventures of Ash and Misty and Brock (and Pikachu too!) and thinking, Okay, but what if those events I just watched were different? In high school I started taking those what if scenarios and putting them up on The Pit (fanfiction.net for those playing at home).
In 2024, I wrote a Pathologic fic, a 2005 video game that takes place in a fictional Siberian town on the brink of a plague outbreak. The fic is called The Places We Call Sacred,and it was the longest, most complete, and most coherent narrative I’d written. I liked it a lot, thought I said a lot through it, and wanted to make it an original manuscript—file the serial numbers off. Because it was an “alternate universe” fic, meaning I took the characters and put them in my own universe, I presumed the process would be relatively quick and easy. Ha!
This blog/newsletter/slice of the internet is going to be a place for me to record my process, share drafts, reflect on craft, and maybe add some context to why the heck I’m writing this story and why I’m writing it now.
There’s a lot to learn, and I’m so excited to have you here with me.
—Sarah
