As per my last post...

[fencerm2]

Ladies and Gentlemen, my Lords and Ladies, friends, etc, etc...

It is with a small sense of pride and great pleasure I present to you a sneak peak at The Source Chronicles, and Book 1 - Seeker:

www.sourcechronicles.com

Please feel free to take a read - and let me know what you think, good or bad.  

Thank you!

Comments

[forsair.livejournal.com]

This is from the Official Gaiman feed, but includes the name of an agent. Thought I might pass it along.

"I didn't know Octavia Butler well -- we met at the Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Florida and we ate together and talked, and she was incredibly tall and wise and imposing. We shared an agent, Merrilee Heifetz, but I loved her books and somehow thought of her as a permanent presence, although nobody ever is..."

Almost forgot...

[fencerm2.livejournal.com]

Thank you to alphaggek. Without your assistance, I could not have put up this site. Thanks, Robin!

[vg-ford.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I just read the first chapter, but it definitely drew me in.

Are you looking for agent or publisher first?

[fencerm2.livejournal.com]

Agent. I have sumitted to about 15 or more along the way, and in theory there is currently one in CA I submitted info to in early December, but not heard thing one from. I JUST sent out another query today.

[vg-ford.livejournal.com]

Cool. Good luck. I'll be starting down that road myself in about 4 or 5 months (however long it takes me to whip Dreams in shape....)

[vg-ford.livejournal.com]

Oh and my darling sister pointed you out, btw. :p Just in case you were wondering how I found you. ;)

[gogleberry.livejournal.com]

yay! now I can finally see what it's all about! :)

[marasca.livejournal.com]

Just read the first chapter. Interesting. I'll have to read the rest!

I did see a couple of places where I think the language could be tightened up a little (same word used a couple of times in the same sentence, slightly awkward sentences, etc). Do you want that kind of comment? If so, what's the best and mose useful way for you to receive them?

html hint: if you substitute all of the
tags with

tags, you'll get a blank line between paragraphs. That would make it a little easier to read. A simple Search and Replace would do the trick.

[marasca.livejournal.com]

Oh phooey. LJ ate my html tags. I was saying to replace the [br] tags with [p] tags (and make the square brackets I used into pointy ones when you do it).

[fencerm2.livejournal.com]

This whole web/html business is new to me. I did it all on Dreamweaver, and just transferred it over - so that's basically cheating, since it's not directly written in code. However - revisions can, should, and probably WILL be made along the way. Thank you for the suggested corrections.

Notes on Chapter 1

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

The opening lines are strong. Are they meant to be separate paragraph breaks, or is that only an html weirdness? If you have a pdf creation program, you might want to consider posting them that way, to avoid the html problems.

He had felt the most intense cold: most intense compared to what? A superlative needs something to compare against.

Following sentence should use past participle to parallel the rest of the sentences in the paragraph: The heat *had* seared

to illicit nothing more than a scream: you want "elicit" here. "Illicit" is the opposite of "licit."

To his mind, he was no criminal, though he had willfully broken the law: since this is the definition of a criminal, I'm finding this illogical. Maybe in his mind he's not a villain, or an evil-doer, or a sinner...but if he's broken the law, he's got to be a criminal. Sorry if you think this is hair-splitting, but it was enough to break my reading.

His thoughts did him no good,: semicolon instead of a comma.

Though that ending would be his life, more time, more chances. Do you mean "through that ending?" I'm a little confused by this sentence structure. (It's a fragment, of course, but you know that...I'm just trying to figure out what the emphasis is meant to be.)

He took in a deep breath and following sentences about smells, tastes of blood and bile, and the sound of his own heart: these seem to contradict your earlier statements about complete numbness and how he can't hear his own sigh. Are taste and smell not affected by this numbness? If he can't hear his own sigh, why can he hear is heart beating? Or feel it, if his torso is numb? Also, you've used bile twice here--once for the smell and once for the taste. Since you've got two other smells--urine and feces--I'd recommend you leave bile to the taste part.

The second section, that starts with He waited: It took me until the seventh sentence to realize that the "he" here is a different one. At first I took it for a flashback from your original character. Is there something you can do to make it clear from the first sentence that this is a new character?

ropes pulled the prisoner’s arms and legs taught: you want "taut" here. Also, "taut but not tight" makes no sense; they're synonyms.

“Leave us.” he commanded. Comma after "us."

He gestured to the last man beside the wheel, and he moved to the plank: which "he" is slightly unclear. How about "He gestured to the last man beside the wheel, *who* moved to the plank?" I have the same problem with "Without a word, he responded by turning the crank." You've got three male characters in a scene, and you need some better way of referring to them than "he." A bit of consideration does make it clear, but having to stop even that split second to consider bugs me. (Maybe that's just me.)

entered a town one night: past participle again, *had* entered; to clearly differentiate from the present scene, and also to parallel "had known" at the beginning of the sentence.

the final word to unleash his power had to be his own. What does this mean? It has to be a word he's made up? Or a word that he's decided on his own to add to the incantation?

The King slashed a blade upwards across the chest of the Sorcerer, which he had silently drawn from a scabbard at his back. Ouch, misplaced modifier. He drew the Sorcerer from a scabbard? :)

You cannot resist me entirely, Lad. Why the capital letter?

Tears still streaming down his face, the tortured man’s gaze sought out his captor’s face. Repitition of the word "face." How about "Tears still streaming down his cheeks?"

Huh. I don't much like either of these guys just yet, so I'm hoping the next chapter tells me which one is the good guy. I like knowing who to root for.

Sorry if this is more specific commentary than you really wanted; I just kinda wished someone had done this for me.

Re: Notes on Chapter 1

[fencerm2.livejournal.com]

No, thats perfectly ok. And I am glad that you are being nit-picky. My editor certainly was. And I've gone over this stuff too closely too many times, most likely.

Unfortunately...I do not reveal until later which is the bad guy - if, indeed, either is. The real question is - does the story catch you enough to make you want to read on?

Re: Notes on Chapter 1

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

Hrm...some yes, some no, but that's more a reflection of the kind of writing I like than of the quality of your writing. If someone doesn't come out with some clearly admirable qualities fairly early on in the story, I'll opt out. I can't bear stories where everyone is so morally ambiguous that I can't relate to the characters. (Examples: Clive Barker's Imajica, Poppy Brite's Lost Souls, some of Neil Gaiman's stuff to a certain extent, and let's not forget those gawdsawful Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever books.)

Re: Notes on Chapter 1

[fencerm2.livejournal.com]

Thank you for pointing these things out. My editor has not seen this version, so it is good to have other eyes examining the text.

Nothing related to this post at all but. . .

[forsair.livejournal.com]

My friend buddagrrl posted the following which might interest you. The energy stuff and the fact that it is don(sp) season made me leap to Don season.

"Neutral Day and Talk of Endings
A reminder for those who care...
Today's the day to clean your shrines...
If you did it yesterday you'll probably go to hell.

Okay, just kidding about that last part, but today is the neutral day in the Tibetan calendar between the last toughest day of dön season and the start of the new year (I think it's a Fire Dog year, Woof!) which means everything that was building up and unfulfilled is supposed to have gotten through being popped yesterday.

A few of us were talking this weekend about this time of year and whether there was any ultimate signifigance to these particular days or not, i.e. would someone who doesn't observe the Tibetan calendar have the same experience of the dön days as those of us that do. I shared my speculation, which seemed to go over well, which was that it's about the end of a cycle, and in our case we think of this as the end of our year, whereas in most of the rest of the country, December could be considered dön days.

That comparison seemed to make a lot of sense when we discussed it. The build up of energy is tied to things which are unfulfilled or incomplete, things that have been in process but haven't come to fruition, and the end of the year is a time of a lot of psychological buildup of expectaions and taking stock and scrambling to finish things. That is directly relevant for me and this time period, because my personal goals tend to focus on "get this done by Shambhala Day (Losar)" or "I'll be able to do this after Shambhala" but it's always the big break in my mental delineation of time. Just like XMas and the January 1st holiday rouse all kinds of energies and bring things to a head for hundreds of millions of not a few billion people, dön days are like that for a few million people, except on years when Losar coincides with Chinese New Year (ancient lunar calendars are fickle like that) in which case it's a few million of us plus another billion-ish.

All that pent up psychological arousal has an interesting effect on the world, even if you completely don't care about any spiritual or esoteric aspects of the tradition.

Anyway, later on, someone who would know better than I was describing this time period and said that the reason dön days are important and full of potent energy is that they are the end of a cycle, in this case the cycle of the year in a particular calendar.

So then I thought... The same kinds of energies are probable at play at the ends of many other cycles as well, this just happens to be a significant and commonly regarded one.

For me, dön season has always been fascinating, because of the quirks of my particular path. I like having the opportunity to acknowledge all the expectations and potentialities that are building up and inviting them in to be related with openly."