To my astonishment, to say nothing of crogglement, confustication, and gobsmackosity, I have sold an essay to Sci Phi Journal: and for actual money, too. With a speed hitherto unknown to magazine-kind, it has been scheduled for publication in the upcoming issue.
Look for Sci Phi Journal #2, containing ‘The Making of the Fellowship: Concepts of the Good in The Lord of the Rings’, coming soon to an ebook store near you.
In other news, I am still filled with doubt and concern about Where Angels Die. The first chapter seemed to be a rousing success, but the second has met with dead silence so far, and frankly, I don’t know what to make of that. Are my 3.6 Loyal Readers still waiting for more? Or have I done something dreadful, on a par with the infamous Klingon practice of farting in airlocks? Please advise.
I just read chapter two today, and found it – well, captivating. More, please!
Thank you!
The toils of daily living have conspired to divert me from being able to partake of your longer fare. I get on a plane tomorrow and will have blissful hours to while away, and am eagerly looking forward to reading Chapter 2.
And of course congratulations on the sale of the essay, I will be purchasing that edition.
O frabjous day!
The second chapter is better than the first, actually. I suspected most people who commented on the first thought it redundant to comment on the second; and those us who forgot to comment on the first simply continued to lurk by inertia >_>
I wasn’t quite clear on this – is it going to be serialised only on your website, or do you have some other venues lined up? (Before publishing it as a collection, that is.)
Congratulations on the sale! I have a friend who wrote a Master’s thesis on LoTR and good and evil therein and his take on the matter made it sound pretty interesting; though I gather his English Lit professors didn’t know what to make of his choice of material (or what to make of him, but that’s another story).
I wasn’t quite clear on this – is it going to be serialised only on your website, or do you have some other venues lined up?
You’re not the first to ask about this, and I see I am going to have to write a post about it. The short answer is that I shall be posting several chapters of the first episode here, and then putting the individual episodes up for sale on Amazon (and possibly other vendors). Each episode will run about 15,000 words. Eight episodes will make up the first series, which will eventually be made available as a fixup novel. If that series sells enough to pay its costs, I shall keep writing more.
I tried to post a positive comment, but it was rejected due to my confusion of the name and email boxes. I didn’t have the sense to make things work until now.
I do like it, and am interested in seeing more.
Relax, I don’t come by here that often as new posts are somewhat rare.
The second chapter was appropriately grim. I definitely feel that I know the characters better – especially Revel. For all his smartassery, he clearly really does care.
Relax, I don’t come by here that often as new posts are somewhat rare.
Aha! You must be a fraction of a Loyal Reader, then. People keep asking me how the number can have a .6 in it. Now we know.
*silly grin*
Thanks very much for the comment. Revel is going to be an interesting character to write. I hope he’ll be as interesting to read about.
I’m a bit curious about the religion. It seems Trinitarian in some sense; is that ‘color’ or do you intend it to be an alternate revelation in the imagined world? I suppose there’s no practical difference at the level of the story, but I wonder about these things. (And sometimes my wonderings bear fruit; John C. Wright responded to my question about the survival of the Church and Israel in his far future ‘Count to a Trillion’ series with a fascinating post.)
I trust all (or at least most) will be revealed in later installments?
It is, in fact, intended as an alternate revelation. I am actually playing here with an idea suggested by G. K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man: that we could truly see Christianity if it were something as remote from us as Confucianism. In Chinese folk religion, the idea of the deity almost disappears behind a kind of bureaucratic formalism; God is replaced by a seemingly impersonal Heaven. Yet that Heaven has its Emperor, just as the hierarchy of the Middle Kingdom has. In the religion of the ‘Commonwealth’ in my tale, the ‘Ram of Heaven’ is viewed partly as a sort of high imperial official who came to this remote province to set its affairs in order, when the Mandate of Heaven had been withdrawn from the established authorities. The details are quite different from the narrative of the New Testament, and not fully worked out. I expect to reveal it in bits and pieces, to ‘Heinlein’ the religion as it were, feeding just such details as will move the story along at any given point.
(Edit: I have just posted the relevant bit from Chesterton, in case you’re curious.)
Very interesting! Thank you for the detailed reply. I’m intimately familiar with _The Everlasting Man_, but a refresher never hurts!
An intriguing notion.
Regarding Chapter 2, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the need for an exorcism but I was. The detail was well done and moved the story and characters along nicely. I am eager to follow these characters in their efforts to save their world from darkness.
Eh, I wouldn’t worry too much about lack of comments on the serial. If you check out Monster Hunter Nation and scroll down to the most recent entry in his nearly weekly Rokugan serial, you’ll see 2 comments, compared to 40 immediately below and 7 and 12 on the two above, and all three of those posts are basically just announcements. Other entries in it generally show very similar patterns. Granted, Correia’s only one example, and I’m sure you could find counter examples, but it’s certainly not unusual to get fewer comments on this kind of thing.
Thanks, and I do try to bear that in mind. It’s just that I am feeling my way through the early stages of this project, and at the moment I have only one reliable alpha reader. It gives me a kind of Kojotenschmerz, which is defined as the discomfort of not knowing whether you have run off the edge of a cliff, and the only reason you’re not falling is because you have not yet looked down.
Heh. Had to run that one through Google Translate; Dad speaks German, but I’m afraid I don’t know more than a few scattered words. Good one, though.
That’s appropriate, because I had to use Google Translate to find out how to spell Kojoten.
(Everything I know about life, I learned from Wile E. Well, not actually, but some days it feels like it.)