Been working hard at my first dark fantasy novel, The Fallen. Haven’t really addressed it here (I don’t think) but am excited about it, so I will now.
The Fallen had two origins actually. A friend, and former player in one my D&D games (2e), asked me to come up with a group of big bads for a game he was running. He asked me, because he always loved my big bads. The reason? My bads always had a cool backstory, personalities and were unique combat wise. For example, a minotaur with a polearm makes the reach/attack of opportunity combo an actual nightmare, in any edition.
So I started to create a group of death knights (more or less) with an interesting backstory. At the time it was just simply they chose to go down a dark path to defeat a greater evil. Ends justify the means, and get cursed for it. The more I put their story down on paper (yeah that was a thing once…lol) the more I liked the story. Much too much to just give it away. So I created a group of bounty hunters called the Marauders to my friend, and kept the Fallen Ones to myself.
I wrote a short story based on it. Three times. The first was on loose leaf paper, around twelve pages front to back. When I got access to a computer a year or so later I began to rewrite it. And by access I mean I paid to use the computer, at Kinkos mostly, but sometimes an internet cafe. Back when I suffered insomnia, I used a 24 hour cafe. For $10 I could write from 1am to around 6am. It had a unique pay rate I was able to take advantage of. By the time I finished (after losing the story once or twice to floppy disk and usb drive failures) it was about 6k words. I let it sit for a few years before I looked at it again. Then I just intended to edit it but ended up rewriting a lot of it. A year later it was 15k words and around 58 pages.
All my beta readers loved it. What I found most intriguing about the feedback is that each of the betas felt something for a different specific character. There are six protagonists, but 3 main. And technically 1 antagonist. Only 2 of the protagonists were duplicated out of the dozen or so beta readers. One even loved a character I had added just for the rewrite, intending him to be a minor but important character. Made me feel real good about myself. It was my masterpiece.
It was this version I chose to query to get published traditionally. I shopped it to several publishers and even went “for broke” and sent it to Tor (never heard from them). I got a few rejection letters. It bummed me out. For two reasons. One I thought I wasn’t good enough. And two, I really didn’t understand the market. I didn’t know how the publishing thing worked.
I received one rejection letter, that was more of a “hey, not bad, do better” letter. By this I mean she told me that it was a good short story. Not great, but good. Shorts are harder to sell she told me, and they had no openings in any anthology scheduled out a few years. However, she said the story itself was too good for a short story. Too many characters, not enough character development. I did pretty good for the main 3 and the villain but the others were kind of left hanging. A novel (or two) would treat them better.
Not gonna lie. It hurt. In a good and bad. Since I was in a negative mindset then I focused on the I’m not good enough portion.
Fast forward and I’m researching self-publishing. The writing bug is itching. I’m looking for reasons to not do it. Just so I can be happy writing notes in the massive DM-folio I have that no player will probably ever see. I’m finding self publishing more and more attractive. Everything about it says, yes I can do this. I read. I research. I decide.
So the Fallen is coming along nicely. The core story is staying the same. And I’m excited to do proper justice to the other half of the heroes. The villain turned out to have some new tricks up his sleeve for me too. As of now, I working on making it a self-contained novel. Thoughts of a 2 or 3 book version of my original Fallen dances around my head sometimes. It may happen. At the moment I’m at 12k words, and I haven’t even introduced half the players yet. For now, I’m just trying to write the story. The masterpiece deserves a masterpiece performance.
A Darkness Rising 