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I have a Mass Effect 2 post percolating, but I had to take it off the boil, so I could work on something else.

For you see, I have written a fantasy novel, the first in a series, and in an effort to build some interest in it, I’ve built a site for it and started posting chapters online. I put the first seven chapters up, and will post more every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as a means to promote the book.

http://www.mattcolville.com/category/the-book/

I take the craft of writing pretty seriously, as you might be able to tell from this site, and I think I have produced a work of some substance, although that may not be evident from just the excerpt. Stick with it. Shit happens.

I subjected the book, the whole thing in various drafts, to friends and strangers as part of what I called the Beta Reader program and I got a lot of really good feedback. In spite of much work and revision, I feel the book is still basically unedited and will remain so until an actual editor gets their hands on it. Getting an agent or an editor is a laborious process and the more I learn about it the more just unlikely to work the process seems.

These people, agents and editors, especially in the electronic age, are just swamped with a ridiculous amount of crap and to first wind their way through it all and find my book, and then for everything to go well and end up on a bookshelf seems so unlikely, quality aside, that it seemed better to just go play the lotto in the hopes of someday buying a publisher.

Better, I thought, to put the book up chapter by chapter and let it speak for itself. It’s a risk, I realize this, but I thought if it held up, if people responded to it and I was able to build an audience, I might be able to attract the attention of someone in the industry and demonstrate that my work is not as much of a risk as some others.

In a certain sense, this is ridiculous. I realize this. There’s a whole process, an elaborate one, with many thousands upon thousands of people going through it at any given moment. Meanwhile I am trying to subvert the entire thing. But it’s my hope that thinking outside the box a little, relying on the Web, which I understand pretty well, might yield some results. Sure, it’s a longshot. But so is the normal method of going about getting published.

What’s it About?

The book is called Priest, and it’s what I think of as a Hard-boiled kind of novel, with breezy, tough-guy dialog and generally a quick read. Things move. Stuff happens. I think the page count comes out to 350 pages, so it’s pretty far afield from the Fat Fantasy that’s dominated the shelves for the past 20 years, and more like the stuff I grew up with in the ’80s. Though I take heart that other authors are having success with shorter work in the genre.

My goal with the series is to take the tropes of Fantasy and do with them what Heroes did with superheroes. Make them more universal, more accessible. This first book, though, is something of a downer. Things pick up after I put the main character through the wringer here.

I didn’t want to begin the process of writing a book in this genre, one I’ve read all my life, unless I thought I had something to contribute. Something to say, and if you read this book I think you’ll see my answer.

So please come by, check it out, and if you like it, or even if you don’t, if you have any thoughts, post a comment and let me know what you think! I have pretty thick skin…so far!

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