What’s Next?

We recently announced the upcoming third season of Blood Magic, which will also be the final season, and I promised you in that post some thoughts on what might be coming next.  While there’s still more than a year before it will be time for the next thing, that’s not too early to be thinking about it.  However, please note that nothing is certain yet, and until I make a formal announcement around this time next year, all of what I say here should just be considered possibilities.

The first possibility that I’m considering is another series of short stories, similar in form, though not in content, to Blood Magic.  Back in high school, I wrote a short story called The Magician, which I still find enjoyable to read, and it lends itself well to a series format of semi-standalone episodes, again like Blood Magic.  Unlike Blood Magic, it is set on Earth, more or less in “modern times.”  It follows the adventures of a performing magician, except the card tricks are real, and if he conjures a rabbit from his hat, he actually conjures a rabbit from his hat.  I’ve starting doing some plotting for such a series, but I’m not sure if I can come up with enough good, interesting episodes.  If this happens, it might prove to be just a one or two season exercise.

There are significant advantages to doing something like this again.  Having an episodic series allows me (forces me) to consistently post new content to the site, and assures that a minimum number of brand new stories are finished each year.  Consistent, regular, and frequent content is one of the major keys to increasing the site’s visibility in search engines and attractiveness to visitors, so that is a major argument in favor of doing something like The Magician after Blood Magic is finished (hence why I’m so strict about posting a book review every Thursday and a blog post every Tuesday).

However, there are opportunity costs involved.  When I started Blood Magic, I thought I would be able to keep working steadily on my other, longer form projects simultaneously, which has proven to be a foolishly optimistic thought.  Each short story is about ten thousand words, which means that over the course of the year I’m writing the equivalent of a ~400 page novel (assuming three hundred words per page – this varies significantly depending on formatting, publication, fonts, and so forth, which is why authors and publishers will mostly communicate in terms of word counts, rather than pages).  From that perspective, I’m doing decently for a hobbyist author writing in my free time, but it does mean that if I were to start another series of short stories after Blood Magic, it would further delay work on things like Fo’Fonas.

The alternative is to not do another series of that type, and instead focus that writing time on something like Fo’Fonas.  If we did this, I would still make it a goal to publish one or two additional short stories/novellas on the site each year, and one longer novella or novel.  The problem with Fo’Fonas is that I would like to write the rough drafts of the entire series before I revise and publish any of them, so we could go as long as five years without major new content for the site.  That’s part of why I started work on Verdon’s Tragedy, which was supposed to allow me to put up some Fo’Fonas content without affecting the continuity of the main series (much).  So if we did this, 2023 could be two standalone novellas, plus Verdon’s Tragedy.  Or, I could focus my efforts on The Legend of Thorskgold the Bold, in which case it would be two standalone novellas, plus The Legend of the Thorskgold the Bold.

I’m not sure which is the better option, so it is fortunate that I have over a year to think about it.  In the meantime, if you have a preference on what I ought to be working on after Blood Magic, let me know in the comments.