OOC - the World Tree novel

[sythyry]

(Sythyry will be back in a couple days.) If all goes well, I’ll have finished a fair draft of a World Tree novel soon. (Predictably, for a gaming novel, it’s a love story, concerning three Herethroy who were married as children and have to figure out what to do about it as adults. Some other things happen too.) The setting and the style are a lot like Sythyry’s story, except that there is an actual plot and all like that. It’s a fairly low-key story: the world isn’t saved ‘cause it’s not in danger, the villain is performing her villainies for an excellent reason, and the characters sometimes go for weeks and weeks without risking any injury more serious than a scolding. It also needs a title, but that’s another matter. Anyways, now I want to know what you recommend that I do with the thing. Honest opinions this time, if you please. I’ll go back to begging for flattery later. . . [Poll #117006]

Comments

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

Send it wherever you feel it'll be best received. I'd dearly love to read the draft, but honesty forces me to admit that I make a very bad literary critic. :)

[read-alicia.livejournal.com]

Hey, you've given me some great feedback on my novel, even if it was mostly gushing ;) Don't discount yourself there!

Pay no attention to the rat's modesty, Bard.

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

*grin*

Do what you feel gives it the best chance of being published. Padwolf Press knows that you put out a quality product.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Well, if the big publishers don't take it, I'd go to Padwolf or web-pub or something anyways. But it'd be after a year or three.

[m0nkeygrl.livejournal.com]

I'd love to read the draft and comment. But unfortunately, GRE prep is eating away all my free time. However, after the first saturday in May I'm free of the albatross!!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Big-name publishers and the one you have an existing relationship with. Why limit yourself?

You could even do something like put out an illustrated edition with the smaller house, then later when a larger publisher is interested, do a non-illustrated one, so the illustrated one can be a collector's item that demands larger prices when you pull out the second half of the print run.

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

Most publishing houses frown on simultaneous submissions.

[read-alicia.livejournal.com]

Well, if more of them would start accepting email submissions to respond faster, us poor writers wouldn't have to resort to SS. However, in the case of novels, we have query letters which do cut down on response time.

[eetmewithtoast.livejournal.com]

I think you should try Padwolf first, and Self-Publish only if they reject it.

Self-publishing's damn expensive. I've looked into it.

Please let me know when you start looking for Cover Artists and/or Illustrators.

I think a compromise between No Illustrations and Many Illustrations is to have a beautiful cover and do like the Harry Potter books: a small illustration at the start of every chapter or segment.

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

lapis_lazuli, for obvious reasons, might be a good person to have a discussion with about publication venue.

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

As for reviewing the draft... I was a member of Raleigh's Revisionaries writer's group for a couple of years, so I have experience with looking critically at a manuscript, and making comments, without turning it into any kind of cruxifiction.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Commission Me!

I'm not sure how I'd do as an editor/reviewer. If it's something I like, I usually don't have much to say. If it's something I hate, oh, I can go on for a while. I'm okay at noticing typos also.

Aim high, if you're going to fail, fail big then try for the surer alternatives.

[read-alicia.livejournal.com]

Could you get sections of it published as short-stories in sci-fi magazines? It would greatly aid your query letter to bigger publishing houses if you could say that pieces of the novel have already appeared in print.

Check out with magazines like Zoetrope which publish excerpts from longer work.

I highly recommend checking out Submitting to the Black Hole which gives you an idea about what magazines are out there and how long they take to respond.

Also, pet peeve:
"It’s a fairly low-key story: the world isn’t saved ‘cause it’s not in danger, the villain is performing her villainies for an excellent reason, and the characters sometimes go for weeks and weeks without risking any injury more serious than a scolding."

I wish we didn't have to put up such disclaimers for sci-fi works. Why can't we have most epics about small personal events, abolish the concept of villains, and sigh at the naive concept of come-uppance?

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

That's a pet peeve of mine too, which is why I specifically made this story low-key and small-scale. Certainly some of the classic fantasy and SF stories were huge world-shaking ones: the very concept of a War of the Worlds or a Lord of the Rings in the first place was a major innovation, I should think. And the last fantasy book I read (A Storm of Swords) was also about huge world-shaking events, and it worked excellently.

But ... but ... F&SF seems to have taken the huge cosmic stories as the default. A quick glance at some piles of books around this room finds plots ranging from kingdom-sized to universe-sized; I had to go through more than a dozen 'til I found one that mostly concerned its characters.

My villain isn't terribly villainous. (I guess she's technically an 'antagonist', not really a villain.) For good reasons, she's opposing what the rest of the characters are doing; but there are equally good reasons for the others' side. She certainly isn't venal, sadistic, vicious, or any of the random character flaws that seem to get strapped on to villains just to make sure they're villainous; she’s brave and heroic and very devoted to her own good cause – too devoted. At one point she contemplates drastic actions to oppose the other characters, like killing one of them, but rejects them in favor of something less heinous even though it is less effective. I hope that the reader can’t tell that she’s the villain until halfway through the book, and I hope the reader has sympathy for her position (but doesn’t agree with her) all the way through.

I won’t comment on come-uppance, save to say that such justice as occurs in the story is done by the characters themselves.

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

Publish by whatever means stands the best chance of getting it out to as many people as you can! That said, I really have no idea what that is, but your existing relationship with Padwolf may prove helpful in getting them to publish it.

As far as illustrations go, it depends a lot on who you get and what they add. As tempralisis has pointed out to me, Herethroy are the hardest species to draw well, because few artists seem willing to do the requisite research into how chitinous exoskeletons actually work. That said, a moderate degree of illustration can be severely nifty - I especially liked the previously suggested idea of illustrating chapter heads. (As an aside: How do Big Publishers deal with illustration? Do authors usually provide them as a package deal?)

Other than that - yes, I'm quite willing to read, if you want me to, though I have no idea what sort of useful commentary I can provide. I promise I'll try, though!

[elthionesse.livejournal.com]

I'd give it a shot at a larger house; it may take some time (believe me, I KNOW...), but you'll never say to yourself, "I wonder what would have happened if only I'd sent it to a larger house."

I wouldn't be too certain it would be destined to fail, either. Because World Tree already exists and has certain advertising placements, you already have a certain measure of a fan base, and thus, potential sales...something if you include in your cover letter will possibly make your work seem like more of an acceptible risk than the average new writer. It would be worth trying in my mind. You can always fall back on Padwolf later, like you said.

You could also try to get an agent, and let them do the leg work for you.

[aynjel.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure I've babbled my thoughts about publishing (start at the top, work your way down) more than once. I'll spare you again...

As far as illustrated.... Feh. Gorgeous cover with an interior illustration at the start of chapter is always nice. If you want something fancier than that, you'd almost definately need to go small(er) press and make it a collectible run.

As far as "how fast".... Write it until you think it's done. Then wait a little while for distance and go back to it, tweak it, and then send it out. If it means working on other projects inbetween to *get* distance, then by all means, do something else. Do not, however, let those projects become an excuse to keep from going back to it.

And as far as reading goes ... I would love to. But things are pretty upheaved at this point in my life and I'm not sure I'd have the time to read, let alone the time to give it the consideration it deserves.

[rowyn]

On publishing house:
I'd have to see the manuscript to give anything like good advice on this question. I would lean towards "Try a big publishing house", though I wouldn't recommend Baen. (I like Baen a lot, actually, but they have one of the longer turnaround times AND they're not really a fantasy-publishing house; I think most of their fantasy catalogue is written by authors whose SF they'd published previously. Their submission guidelines say something to the effect of 'we publish mostly sf and don't really like fantasy', IIRC.)

I guess it depends on how patient you're willing to be, really. For myself, I'd keep trying at big publishing houses for a few years, then go to Padwolf. I probably wouldn't self-publish or web-pub it at all; I'd just keep circulating it among publishing houses until I ran out of ones to try. :)

On speed: Make yourself happy.

On reading and commenting: I have a master's degree in literatrue, and I taught writing 101 courses for a couple of years. So I have more than the usual level of experience with providing feedback on writing. However, I've never read and commented on an entire novel before. I will, however, volunteer to give it a shot. :)

pictures

[tempralisis.livejournal.com]

This may be intuitively obvious, but anyone not familiar with World Tree is unlikely to know what a Herethroy looks like. This doesn’t mean that the novel must be filled with pictures. All it means is that some thought should be put into the cover (especially if the work has few other pictures).
-Tau

[vik_thor]

«g»
Yes, this is a late comment.
I'm reading all of Sythyry's enteries chronologically, and came across this.

1) Do y'all have an agent? Did WorldTree originally go through an agent, or just directly to Padwolf? I don't know exactly how this type of stuff normally goes, if the big publishers prefer it go through agents or not. While you would probably (maybe?) get better pay/distribution through the large publishers, it would also probably take longer, since it would have to work it's way through slush piles...
Maybe a medium sized one like WhiteWolf?
(I had a hard time getting the WorldTree book in the first place...)
Self publishing/web only should only be very last resort.
As others have mentioned, maybe try short stories set on the WorldTree to some of the magazines?

2)Illustrations: obviously, your not planning on doing this as a comic book. I don't know how much say you as author would have in illustrations, esp. cover illustration, even more esp. if done through one of the big publishers.
Chapter or section illustrations would be good, since you would have better input into them.

3) I read almost constantly, in one form or another. Fairly good at picking up inconsistencies, misspellings etc. I HATE it when I come across problems in books from major publishers. Not all that often, but you would think with as many ppl. as would have read it, something like their instead of there would get caught before publishing. (I don't remember what book, or if it was specifically that homonym grouping...)

Have you ever read Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin?

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

No agent. Padwolf is very small; I don't need an agent there. I doubt that it would do well in slush piles: furry gaming fiction has two strikes against it to start with.

(Sorry about any trouble getting World Tree -- in fact, what kind of trouble? Not that we can currently do very much about any troubles, really.)

I have just finished my first World Tree short story, and I will sling it around shortly.

Authors in big presses have next to no say about illustrations. With Padwolf, I could surely get furry artist friends to illustrate it.

I'll keep you in mind next time I think about getting readers... which had best be soon.

I've read Always Coming Home, and in some ways it was inspirational for World Tree. (Not for the stories set there, which are just fiction.)

[vik_thor]

I doubt that it would do well in slush piles: furry gaming fiction has two strikes against it to start with.
«nods» That's why I thought of WhiteWolf. Course, since you've already known to Padwolf...

(Sorry about any trouble getting World Tree -- in fact, what kind of trouble? Not that we can currently do very much about any troubles, really.)
«shrugs» Had originally ordered it through Amazon.com, they said 1week first, then 1 month, then 2 months, then they cancelled the order.
Ended up getting it through RabbitValley.
Got it in time for MFF2k1.

I have just finished my first World Tree short story, and I will sling it around shortly.
Wheee!!!
You'll let us know when accepted and where, I assume?

I've read Always Coming Home, and in some ways it was inspirational for World Tree. (Not for the stories set there, which are just fiction.)
«nods» Has a similar feel.
I've only played one game of WorldTree, at MFF, but reread the book a few times. I really like the setting.