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

[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.