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The Falcon's Children

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The Falcon's Children

I wrote a fantasy novel. What should I do with it?

Dec 23, 2022
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The Falcon's Children

douthat.substack.com

This Substack has been essentially inactive since last winter — my apologies for that — and now it’s been superseded by my newsletter for the Times; if you’re a subscriber here you should become a subscriber there (even if, yes, I know, it’s not as free). But this still seems like the right place to drop part of a project that doesn’t belong with my usual lines of writing — a rather fat, overly ambitious, probably-undercooked attempt at the first novel of a fantasy trilogy.

I say probably-undercooked because so far that’s verdict of the world: Over the last year a reasonable list of reputable publishing houses have politely passed on the manuscript, and it’s quite possible that the book needs to be set aside for a long while, or just treated as training for a better novel down the road.

But that down the road seems awfully distant at the moment; the pace of my professional writing life doesn’t leave much time for long experiments. So before I put it away I thought I’d let a few more readers have a look at it — meaning people on the internet, people like you.

So for anyone who might be interested, you can read the prologue and first chapter of The Falcon’s Children right here:

Falconsexcerpt
275KB ∙ PDF File
Download
Download

Maybe I’ll post another chapter or two at some later date but sixty pages seems like enough to start. If you have any thoughts, reactions or strong feelings at what I should do with the book — burn it, bury it, self-publish it, tweet the entire thing out, line by line, until my follower count drops to zero — consider shooting me an email at falconschildren@gmail.com. Like King Elon running a Twitter poll, I promise to take all your votes seriously, if not necessarily literally.

And have a Merry Christmas.

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The Falcon's Children

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