After getting the rights back recently, I’m self-publishing my 103,000-word fantasy quest novel THE PURIST through Draft2Digital.
When his wife is outcast from humanity, the last bard of a dying race thwarts a secret war and ancient gods to rejoin her.
I made some minor revisions from the version that came out in summer 2018 from NineStar Press.
Here’s the new cover, which is really the cover art I digitally painted in 2014 when I first had a thought toward self-publishing some of my work. At that point, the book was a 16K novella.
THE PURIST is one of my Lonhra Sequence stories, a loosely organized series following various interesting people during a 120,000-year stretch of the sword & planet (morphing to) space-fantasy universe I’ve been playing in since the mid-1980s.
Yes, I am that insane, I have weird hobbies, and I am fully aware most literary agents strongly advise against writing a million words of a unpublished fantasy series on spec. I’m not seeking agent representation for this series, and I’m not querying it to trade publishers. (1)
This is a secondary-world fantasy riff on the ancient Greek legend of Orpheus…where Eurydice is very much alive and is a badass warrior woman trapped in the ‘wrong’ shape, where Orpheus is a bisexual celebrity trapped by fame and culture wars, and Hades is the genderfluid immortal sorcerer who loves both of them but is trapped by horrific politics.
There are warrior-queens, volcano goddesses, magic swords, harps, quests, true love, politics, practical love, sweet romance, a fair bit of traveling, and some subversive tropes. While this book is set in the same universe as MORO’S PRICE and BLOODSHADOW, it takes place many thousands of years earlier.
These gorgeous images from Ibuki Satsuki are *not* my characters, but do evoke similar moods. Yes, K-dramas and Wuxia have influenced me for a long time.
I’m actually a little mystified that while Eridan, the male MC in THE PURIST, got his ‘look’ and psychology back in a mid-1990s 6K short story of mine, he is nearly identical to a rather famous young North American singer/songwriter. This was so purely accidental it still blows my mind. This person wasn’t even born when I wrote the first draft.
And no, I won’t tell you who it is. You’ll figure it out.
If you like Patricia McKillip’s ‘Riddlemaster’ series, Lynn Flewelling’s ‘Nightrunners’ books, Jo Clayton’s space fantasies, and Melissa Scott’s ‘Points’ novels, you might enjoy this one. (Yes, those are older comparative titles, but the truest to this book and series.) For newer work, I’d nod toward Sherwood Smith’s excellent ‘Sartorias’ fantasy novels, both YA and adult; and THE PRIORY OF THE ORANGE TREE by Samantha Shannon.
I will add buy links and ISBNs when I get them.
(1) Timing is *everything* in publishing, alas. Read on if you want to see just how much I messed up, as a cautionary tale to younger writers.
Agent #1 in 1992-1999 couldn’t sell my writing because I still sucked. (He was awesome.)
By the time I was querying MORO’S PRICE in 2011-2012, graphic M/M erotic romance was gaining strength as a genre, but many reputable agents still weren’t interested.
Agent #2 (2012-2016) helped me double-check the contract from Loose Id when that erotic romance epub expressed interest in MORO’S PRICE, but she really wanted me to can the graphic LGBTQ stuff and focus on mainstream cis fantasy romance.
While THE PURIST is fairly ‘clean’, a lot of my work isn’t; to focus otherwise would be lying to readers.
(Agent #2 is awesome, too, and does well for the people she represents.)
By the time she and I began querying THE PURIST, agents and markets were beginning to shift views toward non-cis romance in fantasy & science fiction. We had some initial nibbles from two major publishers, but they rejected the mms for length & pacing. They wanted to see some serious revisions, without an actual Revise & Resubmit letter.
They were right. I made the revisions, while Agent #2 and I amicably parted ways over other issues.
Ace was an agent-only publisher. Tor was open to slushpile submissions.
I could not find another agent, after querying, Twitter pitch contests, and networking from 2016-2018.
(I suck at queries. Between three manuscripts, I’ve racked up 653 rejection letters or no-replies since 2010.)
Around 2017, Tor Books’ slushpile was taking around 2 years to resolve. Tor is legendary in SFF. I’ve been reading their books since the late 1970s.
The agents I really *liked* were not accepting rep on outside contracts they didn’t initiate. Even with Tor, I didn’t want to go unagented into large commercial publishing, even if they made an offer in, say, 2020.
So THE PURIST was swiftly published in 2018 by a lovely LGBTQIA-friendly small publisher called NineStar Press, which I still recommend for folks interested in small-press experiences.
Because those two books have been published, (and I am an absolute nobody), the whole series is now pretty much fried for agent representation to larger publishers, or direct querying to said publishers. Covid19 and publishing-industry consolidation haven’t helped, either.
However, we are going into a new trade-publishing golden age of more-honest LGBTQIA representation in fantasy and science-fiction, led by some amazing authors and daring new agents. I suspect that if I hadn’t epubbed MORO and PURIST earlier, the Lonhra books might be easier to commercially sell now.
For me, self-publishing is my best outlet for these stories. I have a *good* day job, so I’m not that worried about living off publishing. I might query another non-Lonhra series at some point.
It’s another adventure.