What do I do next?

Sigh. Well, Tortured is off being bound and printed, and hopefully a proof will arrive in my post office box Monday or Tuesday. Looks like I just have a few more ducks to herd into rows before The Jason and Azazel Trilogy officially needs very little of my time anymore besides popping a new chapter up on the screen every Monday and Thursday.

Which means it's time to figure out what to do next.

I've got an outline and the first ten pages of Poisonlands, my intended next project, a serial that's intended to function like a serial, with twelve episodes (published in biweekly in four 10-page chunks). The plan with Poisonlands is to post the first part of the episode and then allow people to "read it first" by paying .99 for the whole thing (about 40 pages-ish of text) via smashwords or kindle. Of course, it will be free for the reading for everyone who doesn't mind waiting.

This seems like a good plan. Only problem is that I've got about as much interest in writing Poisonlands as I have in writing lesson plans, which is to say, not much. I'm not sure why. I dig the idea, which is a kind of remix of Matheson's I Am Legend with some teen romance thrown in for fun and a dollop of Lost Boys atmosphere.

Truth is, I don't know if I still want to be writing young adult fiction. I like young adult fiction, but I'm not sure how many times I can write about some different character losing her virginity before I start parodying myself. On top of that, I was just starting to kind of get good at writing sex scenes, and I'd like to write one again at some point. One with actual of-age people who aren't having awkward, weird sex.

On the one hand, I know that my current audience is made up of a lot of teenagers. So I feel a little bad about suddenly dropping something else on them. I'm afraid of losing them. On the other hand, I'm afraid of writing young adult fiction forever because I'm afraid that I'll never get any adult readers. And, let's face it, teenagers grow out of the books they read when they were teenagers. And maybe the authors too...

The truth of the matter is, all that's bunk. Really, I wouldn't care what I was posting as long it was something that I was really enjoying writing. If I love it, then I believe in it, hands down. And I don't know what to write about. I want an idea that makes my fingers itch to be typing it. And I don't have one.

So the current plan is to serialize Mischief, starting in 2010. Hopefully, that will buy me enough time to figure out what to do next. Plus, it will get some more people to buy Mischief, and hopefully sell some copies. I think Mischief has sold like 5 copies all told.

Not that it really matters, because you can't write for other people, you have to write for yourself, but what do you want to read? If I could write something just for you, what would it be? You never know, maybe it'll spark something.