A serialized killing of time: Introducing my Birthright

I'm going to try something different for the new year and post an old short story of mine in serialized fashion. Several of my favorite blog writers have been doing the same, and I thought I'd take their ingenuity as inspiration for a change in direction and format here.

Of course serial fiction dates back to the novels of Charles Dickens (pictured here perhaps working on one of those stories) and other writers of renown who got their start in periodicals. I think it's fitting that the form be adapted to what's becoming our modern Internet-based equivalent of popular journals: the Web log.

Below you'll find the first chapter of my story Birthright. It was first conceived in the mid-1990s and I've tinkered with the language over the years before settling on this final version. I'll keep an index of the chapters, as their posted, in this blog's sidebar.