Sunday, November 23, 2014

New Fiction

Well, one of them is new, anyway:

In The Waste: Sequel to The Warm Lands. The trek westward from Anam brings Gregor and Laella to a surprising denizen of the Great Waste: a gigantic, magnificently vital tree whose survival amidst the surrounding desolation Gregor cannot explain. But life requires no explanation. It is its own justification...and life will always call to life.

The Common Good: Sequel to In The Waste. Gregor and Laella’s westward trek has brought them to Luzan, a prosperous and surprisingly stable oasis-community protected from the Wastes by a girdling forest of a sort Gregor’s sorcery instructors at the Scholium Arcanum had told him was no more. However, Luzan’s stability is founded on a grisly secret: a price that proves to be most unsettling.

Enjoy!

4 comments:

Backwoods Engineer said...

Fran, are these attached to any particular series/trilogy/other grouping that has come before? If so, which one?

Francis W. Porretto said...

It's a slowly-developing novel that began with The Warm Lands, a fantasy novelette set in an unspecified locale. The novel has been fighting me, so I figured I'd put out what I had ready in the hope that reader feedback would help to propel the novel to completion.

pdwalker said...

Oh happy day.

Purchased and read, (hopefully useful) comments to follow.

pdwalker said...

Ok, it's take a while to come back to you on this and for that, I apologise. I'm not nearly as good as you when it comes to putting my thoughts to words. I've had this page open in my browser for almost two months now as a reminder.

I've now read and reread your three Warm Lands short stories and I found them no less enjoyable each time. Each of the stories can stand on their own, but they hint at such a potential richer story that might be told.

Perhaps the problem with writing a larger novel in this word is you haven't been able to find find an overall story theme suitable for the protagonist in a larger larger story.

Maybe all you have is a set of loosely connected vignettes. If so, is that a bad thing? Why not write it as a collection of short stories, each detailing further some aspect of this unique world.

I'm now reminded of a series of stories written by David Drake bundled together under the name of "Old Nathan" (Baen free library copy), which tells some stories about an old man who was given the various gifts after an accident during the Revolutionary war. There is no overall "big" story, only a series stories were we learn more about his gifts and how he uses them. (If you're not familiar with the stories, I'd recommend you give them a read as I think you might like it)

Perhaps the future history of The Warm Lands could be told in a series of short stories.

Just a thought from a avid reader