The Falcon's Children
The Falcon's Children
I wrote a fantasy novel. What should I do with it?
This Substack has been essentially inactive since last winter — my apologies for that — and now it’s been superseded by my newsletter for the Times; if you’re a subscriber here you should become a subscriber there (even if, yes, I know, it’s not as free).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:
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.