OOC - Next volume for Sythyry

[sythyry]

OOC: Sythyry's Vacation isn't new and small any more. I've been writing it for two years now, and, since I've kept myself to a stricter schedule, it's gotten to nearly three hundred thousand words. That would make a thick paperback novel, comparable to one of the books in Wheel of Time or Song of Ice and Fire (for two that I found wordcounts on line).

So maybe it's time to do something else with Sythyry and friends. My goal is to establish a new storyline which new readers could read and enjoy without having to go back and glomp through all of Sythyry's Vacation. Which is what I did when I started Sythyry's Vacation --- two years ago it was easy to get started without having to glomp through the even larger wordglurd of Sythyry's Journal!

(This is not an urgent matter. I've got over a month of Sythyry in the queue: a whole new plot arc in Hanija, and one which barely mentions the word 'tofyof'. But sometime in the next few months I will need to make this change, if I do it at all, and so I'd like to be thinking about it.)

Here are a few ideas:

Code	Explanation
KeepGoing	Continue Sythyry's Vacation. New readers who don't feel like reading backstory can muddle along, or indulge themselves carnally with some elfimel, or whatever, as they please.
Part2	Continue Sythyry's Vacation, but with a break that lets me kind of restart it as a separate storyline. (E.g., a return to Barency and Vheshrame to drop off many of the current chars, and then going somewhere else with, probably, a reduced crew.) This would keep many of the characters and situations on Strayway, but go off to different places, and not rely on previous history much.
NewTown	Sythyry returns to Vheshrame and starts constructing a new town. This would come right after Sythyry's Vacation. It would have some of the same characters, but a fairly different structure and set of plots.
FastForward	Pop another century or so into the future, kill off all the mortal characters, and do a radically different plotline. If Sythyry goes to found a new city-state, this is probably how I'd do it.
BroadFocus	Enough Sythyry. Imortal super-powerful wizard with immortal super-powerful friends is not that interesting a point of view. Tell stories about Sythyrys' crewmembers, but from various points of view, or third-person.
DifferentStory	Really, enough Sythyry. Tell other stories.

[Poll #1707310]

Comments

[foomf.livejournal.com]

I really like Sythyry's situation. It's fun.

I would LOVE to see other characters with that much depth of focus, and have to some extent with the story of the city-sleeth in another journal, and so forth.

Sythyry is a (young) wizard, though. Wizards end up ridiculously powerful or dead. The comments about how it's hard to identify with such a powerful being, well, I'm rather mixed on this one. It CAN be hard to identify with a person who has a sentient tactical nuclear explosion that is sometimes set to burning away the filth on a prison floor, but then I think that we have something equally ridiculous: the labors of literally hundreds of thousands of people and the hundred-million-year-old corpses of plants and animals long vanished and buried deep as ROCK grew over those corpses, pressing them into coal and oil ... and that's pulled from the depths of the earth, cracked and shaped into plastic shells, and burned to generate the power of the lightning, while the compressed hearts of exploding giant stars a billion years in the past have been swept up (as metal) and dug from the rock, purified and made into the wire and circuits that clever people have designed to make a small autonomous thing slightly larger than Sythyry but cylindrical, disk-like, that can be set to run around the floor gathering up crumbs and clutter so the human doesn't have to sweep it up by hand.

So. Thinking about it, not that much more ridiculous.

I'd love to hear stories of others, but I have to confess a personal preference to Sleeth and Zi-Ri, and maybe Gormoror if they're sufficiently heroic, over Orren (too tiring and far too likely to be shallow) or Rassimel (obsessive) or Cani (authoritarian pack beasts at heart) or Herethroy (Big bugs.) I'm so-so about the shoggies. They might or might not be fun; I personally dislike thugs for the sake of thuggism, but the element of coarse and earthy makes them refreshing.

And I might be interested to hear more about the monster side of things. I thoroughly agree with many of them that it's profoundly unfair and rather rude that the gods seem to have created so many of them solely to act as Dramatic Fodder for the Primes. This creates a sense of entitlement for the Primes who somehow think that being "gifted" with a complete orrery means that they're somehow higher in the esteem of the gods. Frankly, it appears to mean that they're the ones that the gods want to torture the most.