For the last eighteen years, a 500-600 word section of the Denver Cereal is published via a blog and email, every night at 12-midnight Mountain Time.
Every night for the last eighteen years, B has set her alarm to read the story.
Some people get up before anyone else to read the Denver Cereal in peace before their family is awake.
Other men and women read it on Saturday when it comes out in chapter form and have done so every single day for eighteen years.
Why would anyone do that?
K gave up on romantic relationships while she was raising her children. Then, they left. She credits the Denver Cereal for encouraging her to increase her friend group which is where she found love.
That sounds absurd until you understand what eighteen years of reading the same characters, six days a week, actually does to a person.
In times of extreme stress, people don't need solutions. They need to be met where they are — overwhelmed, afraid, hopeless. They need to see someone else struggling with the same thing and surviving it anyway.
Year after year, the serial does exactly that. And somewhere in that process, readers stop feeling so alone with their problems.
These parasocial relationships with the serial's fictional characters function like real community for people who have complicated relationships.
K wasn't the only one. Readers have left abusive relationships, become sober from alcohol or drugs, reforged relationships with estranged family members, or moved to their dream cities.
Serial fiction doesn’t fix your life. It just gives you a reason to stay in it a little longer.
Every day, around the world, people wake up to their pressures and problems, read the Denver Cereal, and decide to stay – if only to see how Sissy is ever going to survive as an 18 year old widow with baby twins and an empire trying to kill her? Will Tanesha and Jeraine stay together or will they finally break up forever? Now that Tink is pregnant, will she be able to overcome the last of her issues from her years as a homeless teen?
No advice. No self-help. No power struggles. Just characters living their lives in the same manner the rest of us do.
Step by step, we persevere until the world rights itself again.
