Jul 252014
An interesting thing happened earlier this week. I’d just gotten another rejection for Agent of the Relari, my YA fantasy novel. My dad mentioned that I always talk about that book and asked if there are any others I send out query letters for. The short answer was no, but I went through each of my WIPs and explained why. When I finished, I felt like I was missing something. Didn’t I have more novels?
No, not her.
A couple days later, I decided to take a break from querying about Agent of the Relari to have beta readers look at it. One of my friends offered to read it and asked if it was the same book of mine he’d read part of before.
No. That was Sunrider.
Every now and then, people will ask me about “my book,” and it always takes me a few minutes to remember that they knew Sunrider as my major project. Back when it was my only WIP, there was no need to clarify which book they meant.
Sometimes people ask me what happened to it. Why didn’t it take precedence over Agent of the Relari? Why do I forget it when I think about my novels? In short, why haven’t I edited it yet?
Here you go–the top 5 reasons why I haven’t edited Sunrider.
5. Not Enough Time
This is the simplest of the reasons. I just don’t have enough time to edit it right now. I have new stories to work on, my thesis, the rest of my graduate work, my freelance writing–there isn’t a lot of time in there to edit an old novel. Of course, that still doesn’t answer the question of why I’ve devoted so much time to other editing projects instead…
4. It’s a Monstrosity
You want to know the top reason why, back in 2009, I shelved Sunrider for a while so I could work on other novels? I read a fantasy novel called Talion: Revenant by Michael A. Stackpole. He mentioned in a note that it was actually his first novel, even though it wasn’t the first he had published. Publishers weren’t willing to take a chance on a 175,000-word novel from a new author.
I took that to mean there was a pretty good chance I couldn’t just appear out of nowhere with a massive fantasy novel. I needed to work on shorter things–short stories, and yes, shorter novels.
Since then, I’ve learned more about word counts. It feels like 80,000 is an average word count for novels, although fantasy genres tend to be longer, and veer closer to numbers like Stackpole’s 175,000.
I just checked to be sure. Sunrider sits at around 260,000 words. That isn’t as huge as I was afraid it might be, but it’s nowhere near reasonable, either. But hey, word count rules can be flexible, as long as the book is good enough…
3. I Wrote It as a Teenager
There’s a reason people tend to think of it as “my book.” I started Sunrider when I was 13 and finished it when I was 18. Yes, I basically wrote it during high school, and I know what my writing looked like back then. I’ve learned a lot through experience, classes, and especially my graduate program. I look back on my older writing… and laugh. Sunrider would probably make my professors throw things at me.
So I wouldn’t just be editing a novel. I’d be editing 260,000 words of a badly-written novel.
On the other hand, maybe the story–
2. The Main Plot is Cliché
A young man learns he’s the Chosen One and sets out to save the world from demons. It doesn’t get much more basic than that.
Every book needs to have something to make it stand out from the rest, so a generic fantasy plot isn’t a good idea. Whenever I actually decide to edit it, I’ll need to seriously ask myself, “What makes this book different than the rest?”
Oh, but maybe I do have an answer. Sunrider isn’t just about a hero fighting demons…
1. It’s About EVERYTHING!
Yes, we’ve reached the #1 reason I haven’t edited this book yet. I wrote Sunrider between the ages of 13 and 18. Just about every single thing a teenage Sam thought was cool found its way into the plot. As a result we have:
This is what you’d expect
in a fantasy novel, right?
- A prophecy and a Chosen One
- A rebellious noblewoman who wishes she was a commoner
- A comic relief emperor…
- …and the maid in love with him…
- …and his cyborg army
- Pirates!
- Demons!
- Sorcerers!
- Faeries!
- Wicked devil-worshiping tyrants…
- …and the brave rebels…
- …who happen to be a percussion ensemble
- Assassins!
- Mobsters!
- …and their laser guns
- An army of heroes who have become worse than their enemies, in a quickly-forgotten subplot
- Vaguely Judeo-Christian religions (and their antithesis, as the devil-worshipers are organized enough to be counted as a major religion)
- Heavy-handed political commentary
- Mad scientists!
- Probably even more stuff, like zombies. I can’t remember if the zombie scene made it in or not.
Let me put it this way. At one point I considered sending the hero into space to request help from elves. Even I realized that was a bit much.
One continent has medieval technology, magic, and bans anything modern/futuristic. Another continent has futuristic technology and bans magic. So of course, the emperor with the cyborg army is in charge of the magic land, and the sorcerer duke is in charge of the futuristic land. In fact, he’s decided to make it more like the other continent, but to do gradually so as not to upset people–hence the 1920s-era weapons becoming popular, as people gradually switch from laser guns to swords (“The Weapon of the Future!” as we see displayed in one scene).
By the final scene, we’ve got sword fights, gun fights, magic fights, cyborgs fighting on top of airplanes, percussionists blocking bullets with their drums, and I don’t even know what else.
Someday, I’ll edit Sunrider.
But I’m not ready to face it just yet.