November is National Novel Writing Month (#NaNoWriMo) in which thousands of aspiring novelists commit to writing 50,000 words of their attempt at the next Great American Novel. I am one of those aspiring thousands.

The problem is that I have been aspiring to do this for years and have a manuscript for a science fiction novel that I have been working on for over a decade. I joined NaNoWriMo last year and was fairly productive—I went to write-ins at a local bookstore and even wrote in my spare time. I’ve been similarly productive this year, too. However, once last NaNoWriMo was over, my productivity plummeted and my long-awaited novel sat idle for the bulk of the intervening eleven months.

So, this year, I am trying something new. I am taking a page from the likes of Andy Weir and John Scalzi who began their careers by publishing what would become their breakout novels (The Martian and Old Man’s War, respectively) on their personal blogs. I am publishing my long-awaited (mostly by me) novel Delivering the Commonwealth on my blog.

Now, the catch is—it’s not this blog. As this blog has the largest number of followers, it would seem logical to use this platform, but try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what a space opera had to do with a blog about faith, theology, and language. And so, it felt like I’d be shoehorning my creative writing project into a space that isn’t necessarily looking for such a thing.

But, on the off chance that there are those among you who would be interested, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to let you know. So, you can go over to my other site—markschaefer.net—where the novel is being serialized. If you like it, you can even subscribe to receive notifications when the next installment is published.

I don’t expect that this will launch me to sci-fi stardom or that this guarantees it’ll ever get published, but at least this way it’ll get out there and the fact that people might be looking for the next installment is a good motivator to finish.

In any event, thank you for following this blog and for your support over the years.

Grace and peace (and live long and prosper),