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

[allessindra.livejournal.com]

The reason I dislike 'different story' is that it woudl come *instead* of Sythyry. I'd definitely like to see different POV characters, and the mention above of 'some of these adventures from a different POV' sounds interesting to read -- I don't know how interesting it would be to write, especially as you'd be revisiting the same events and thus constrained in the writing. (Tho telling of the same event from a POV character for whom the result was emphatically self-referentially different in tone than the POV we have already read might be intriguing.)

I think the next thing that Syth *should* do, when getting back from vacation, is to found zir own city. It would be interesting, to me, to see who among those who know Sythyry would move to said city, and how the .... internal economics of setting up that preferentially self-contained situation would work. It would definitely be a new take on the 'random group of people brought together on a space ship to go and colonize a new planet' trope. It would also give an ending to this that isn't "and then they all went home" while setting up something to fast-forward *to* -- and since Syth would then be much more involved in the governing, that woudl a) be more boring for zir and possibly create more story take-off points, and b) give more reason to tell some of said stories from other POV characters.

or am I completely off-base on these writerly things?