For Serial, Though...

This one has a poll. Audience participation welcome.

There’s a poll at the end of this for those of you who want to vote. If there aren’t any votes, or if there’s only one, then I’m going to do what I want. Crowd participation is not required, but it is “fun”. Here’s the spiel that will explain the poll:

I did say, roughly a year ago, that I would annoy everyone with far fewer posts if I could a) find a job, or b) get stuck doing something else. As my sporadic posts may indicate, God answered someone’s prayers, and I got both a job and stuck doing something else.

The job pays me, but the something else is a book called A Vampire Bite, and it’s going to be out ideally sometime in November. Depending on how quickly I can get the manuscript finished and properly formatted, and the cover and blah de blah.

The thing I’m thinking is that it may be worth it to serialize certain chapters. Not just of VB, but also of the book it is “technically” a companion to (it’s the sequel, but it can stand alone, that’s why there are quotations), which is the book I published in 2020, How to Cure.

The plan is to hopefully have a cover for VB that I can show here to go with the serialization. I could do the whole book, but that would take a long time, and also it would be easier for you to just go and buy the book. It used to be that you could serialize whole books and that counted as publication. That could be done now, but no one is paying for my stuff now, and I would like to (with God’s help) earn a living doing this. So some things have to be put behind a paywall.

My issue with serialization is perfectionism. It may prove to be too tempting to resist post-publication edits of How to Cure, which is not justifiable by any metric. Leaving finished projects alone is part of growing as a writer, so maybe this be a form of schadenfreude for some of you. It would certainly be maturation on my part.

OR…..

I could just go back to Bloody Blue Zed. It’s been a while, and I did leave everybody with a cliff-hanger. I’ve got some additional pieces floating around in my head, but nothing put down concretely. There is an additional chapter that was left unfinished because I got to working on Vampire Bite in earnest.

BBZ is mostly an experimental project, and it probably shows. It’s the only noir thing I’ve ever done, so it’s definitely going to have some peaks and valleys in terms of quality. You guys are just along for that ride.

I may have just talked myself into this; one of the dangers of having a blog and leaving it alone for long periods of time is that your first post in months ends up being a train of thought nightmare everyone has to slog through. So however the poll goes, I may just do it anyway.

Unlike every other woman you know, however, I am incredibly indecisive. So here’s the poll, let me know what you think.