My Novel, Again

Friday, May 28th, 2010 @ 3:16 pm | Uncategorized

I’ve posted the entire thing now, in PDF form, and at some point soon I hope to have a Kindle version available, but you might have to pay a couple of bucks for that one.

http://www.mattcolville.com/download-priest/

I’ve had two long Squaremans posts percolating for a while, one on Mass Effect 2 and one on Harlan Ellison, which I should now be able to finish. The Harlan Ellison one is going to be good, stay tuned!

If you’re keen to know what the novel is about, here’s the excerpt from the web page.

What’s it About?

A reasonable question!

It’s about a man who lead the typical Fantasy Hero life for a long time, and the damage that life did to him. A man who, when we meet him, is incapable of living up to the standards he sets for himself. It’s about the awful choices life forces us to make. It’s about how for some people, before things can get better, they must first get worse. There’s a lot of action, some of it epic, a large cast of characters, and hopefully some little humor.

Our hero is lured out of the inn he bought but never opened, and sent into a dark forest to solve a murder no one wants him to solve.

It’s short, compared to most fantasy novels these days, more akin to the typical fantasy novel from the 1980s when books were about 350 pages. There’s a lot of dialog, and I hope it reads fast.

It’s the first book of what I intend to be a series about camaraderie. All my favorite movies are about camaraderie, and I felt there was no point writing anything personal, anything that spoke to me, if I didn’t build it on a foundation of camaraderie.

But this first book only hints at that. It’s not about a group, it’s about one man. I rewound the series back to before the heroes get together to show the reader that you can have the bad-ass Fantasy Hero, but there is a price. The things that happen in this book give the rest of the series a much-needed sense of gravitas.

Part of my inspiration was Heroes, which takes all the tropes from comic books, and reskins them to make them universal and appeal to a wide audience. So a fan of fantasy fiction will recognize many of the tropes of the genre in Priest, but someone new to should, I hope, also find it accessible.

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