It’s been some time since I’ve updated this blog; my job has weird hours which prevent me from getting into a regular writing routine, and so I just haven’t been writing very much at all. (I’ll also admit that I have an addiction to watching movies in my free time, which isn’t helping.) But I’m slowly making progress on my next fantasy novel, tentatively titled Moonblessed. Just yesterday I finished the rough draft of the fifth chapter, bringing the overall word count to about 16,600 words. The pace of the story is certainly slower than that of Son of a Dark Wizard, but I’m having fun with it, and I hope the slower pacing won’t translate into less fun reading.

Because I’m only about a tenth of the way through my list of planned scenes, I’ve been thinking about serializing the novel, releasing it in parts of about 20K to 30K words each. Serializing a longer work of fiction of course has a rich tradition in the novel’s history, with its advantages for both readers and writers, and I’ve been wanting to try it for a while now. My hope is to price each installment at $0.99 for Kindle, but the real purpose would be to try to attract readers on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, which is a bit like Spotify for books, where subscribers could read each installment at no extra cost. (Writers are paid a small amount for each page read.) At the very least, I’m hoping it will help me stay motivated to write as I look forward to being able to release new installments much quicker than having to wait until I finish an entire novel.

So if I do this, I only have a few more scenes to finish before releasing the first installment and seeing if anyone actually checks it out, or if I only get demotivated by the sounds of crickets…