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what i'm talking about when i talk about my novel
For some time now, I've been like, "I'm going to get back to working on my novel." Well, I am now down to 4 days a week at work, so the time is now. I've been pretty secretive about this project because I find it deeply embarrassing to talk about, but I've had this project on the backburner (and occasionally on the front) for several years now and it's time for me to get serious... but I figure it'd be worth my while to have something to link to instead of having to explain it all from scratch every time.
the short version (5 sentence summary style):
Enda, failson prince in a ?post?-apocalyptic fantasy western setting, tracks down and captures a man accused of slaying Afila, Enda's father Kathil's blood brother, but causes political uproar when Enda refuses to allow the man to be executed, believing he is innocent. At the great assembly held to settle the matter and crown Afila's heir, Enda becomes convinced that one of Kathil's political rivals, the upstart young lord Saichal, is in fact Afila's daughter, the missing princess to whom Enda was betrothed from birth before said princess vanished in suspicious circumstances that implicated Enda in her disappearance, an event that has haunted Enda ever since. After incurring the wrath of both Kathil and Saichal (whom Enda suspects of being responsible for Afila's death), Enda abandons his birthright and identity to join an order of itinerant priestesses.
Meanwhile, Timistin, an envoy from the court of a far-away mercantile city-state, proves her worth as an interpreter, negotiator, and businesswoman, while acting on behalf of her master to manipulate the political landscape of the plains in favour of the interests of faraway sedentary states; Timistin's machinations bring her into an uneasy partnership with Afila's widow Ischoi, who wants to see Kathil overthrown and replaced with one of her own children. Timistin, Saichal, and Ischoi's visions for the future converge on wanting Kathil dead but diverge on what happens in the aftermath, and Enda's attempts to disappear into her new life and focus on helping average people through the ensuing unrest are complicated by the persistence of the past...
the cauldron of vibes
this project--working title of which is Witchgrass--is a fantasy western in the vein of The Dark Tower or Vampire Hunter D--expansive, broody, magical, focused on the lives people live in the wake of cataclysm. a world that has ended before and will likely end again. littered with technological remnants from past ages that hold no power any longer. a world that's always ending somewhere.
it's also my attempt at a transfeminist riff on/response to the formative feminist fantasy fiction of the 80s and 90s that meant so much to me growing up--authors like Tamora Pierce and Welwyn Wilton Katz.
other touchpoints for genre, mood, etc: FromSoft games; Cormac McCarthy's work, particularly No Country for Old Men; the Night on Bald Mountain sequence from Fantasia; Mo Dao Zu Shi (in general) and Tian Guan Ci Fu (beefleaf specifically); classic magical girl anime of the 90s-00s; Mork Borg; the plethora of YA dark fantasy romances I read in middle school before outgrowing such things.
more than anything, it's an attempt to give my child self what I always wanted: a version of Lord of the Rings where the Rohirrim are the central characters, because I am a horse girl first and a person second.
the long version
fundamentally, i wanted to come up with a convoluted, star-crossed t4t gothic fantasy romance of my own, so that i had any hope of writing things other than beefleaf ever again. i've decided to do this here by, on the one hand, presenting a transfem heroine with the beloved wish fulfillment arc of going from unloved misfit child to a special girl with magic powers. this is just fun food for me, but i think there's also a lot of opportunity to play with or challenge gender essentialism that crops up so frequently in this brand of fantasy (esp wrt magic use, etc.)
it's also about giving a similarly tropey arc to a transmasc character, who is both foil and romantic lead, to the effect of "what if the bad boy edgy goth love interest guy was bodysharing with a demon lady and had so, so many mommy issues." this is paired with my lifelong desire for Alanna-type "girls crossdressing as boys for Reasons" stories that don't end with "but don't worry, she's straight and cis after all :)". i have a deep craving for transmasc characters with hard edges, who are objects of narrative desire, who wield power and are dangerous. i'm so tired of nice boys!!!!!!!! it's time for transmasc dark fuck princes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i was and am also very interested in secondary world fantasy where the kinds of cultures that often get flattened into antagonistic caricatures (e.g. the Dothraki in ASOIAF, for a particularly egregious example) are at the centre of the story. i'm generally quite bored by generic medievalish european fantasy settings, particularly the more D&D-brained things get, and the ongoing research project has been very rewarding. this is emphatically not a realist setting--as the Vampire Hunter D opening text proclaims, "This story is set in the distant future, where mutants and demons slither through a world of darkness"--so it's less an effort to encyclopedically replicate any specific RL cultures as challenge my own assumptions about social organizing, material culture, and other lifeways, in order to come to conclusions that suit the environment of the fiction's setting.
unchecked magic is held to blame for the world becoming Like This, so much knowledge of magic has been lost and suppressed, and there are strict rules about which people are allowed to learn how to use it. these duties are held jointly between a priestly-poet class who officiate ceremony, provide legal and spiritual council, and practice forms of sacred speech, and on the other hand an order of itinerant priestesses who are the only people socially sanctioned to engage in what you might call wilder, more visceral, more spontaneous magic, with the understanding that they belong nowhere, renounce all social ties, and cannot amass property, therefore not posing a social threat. priestess of this order are a class of the socially abject or othered--it's not a divine feminine vibe so much as having paid for access to occult knowledge through rejection of status or belonging.
the land is a steppe of sorts, though the state of the world is such that places are not as consistent as they once were, and it's not unusual to return to a place you grazed your herd a few years ago only to find a swamp in its place, or for the roving of strange creatures to change the landscape in their wake just as humans do.
i could/should add an overview of the characters, but as you may have sensed from my attempt at a five sentence summary, there are a lot of characters with a complicated relationship web of backstories and enmities, so it's a non-negligible amount of work to communicate succinctly. this is a frankly crucial element of the project to me, since this entire thing is the most concentrated self-indulgence zone ever and a lot of what i'm trying to fulfill here is my craving for trans and queer-forward plotty dark fantasy with big memorable ensemble casts and schemes in abundance.
it's for this reason that i'm trying not to be too down on myself for this project taking me some time when i've been working full-time... this is not, like, a snappy novella vibe. i'm approaching it like chewy doorstopper fantasy. the works i spend the most time thinking about are almost invariably quite long works--20+ volume manga, multi-book fantasy or historical fiction series or chunky standalones, webnovels--that give themselves time to marinate, and i want to attempt something similar, despite all the hubris involved. this was also one of the barriers to getting serious about working on it--i've dealt with a lot of self-rejection on the basis of it being pointless to try and write a t4t adult fantasy doorstopper as a debut author because literally who would publish this. however, recent events in the world have me feeling like i don't really care and i would rather write something unpublishable and serialize it online or something than not write it on the basis that it doesn't feel marketable. (which is funny because it honestly is quite commercial, but you know.)
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How does the story divide between the first and second paragraph of the 5 sentence summary? Is it half before, half after? I definitely want to read about the prince who joins an order of mystical outcast priestesses
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honestly the summary only runs about halfway through the story so i shouldn't call it a summary so much as a premise akjdghf.... i really need to figure out how to elevator pitch it better but that is a problem for later me
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Really into the concept, the characters, and everything! Really here for more messy t4t from roland, and I'm excited to hear more about this as you talk about/work on it!!
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