Dear ENWorlders,
It's been a while since last you heard from me and the primary reason is because I took the year off from freelance writing and forum posting to focus on my first novel: Avery Mann's Book of Misadventures: Volume I.
This book was inspired by the work I did for the World of Nevermore campaign setting (True20 ruleset) for Expeditious Retreat Press. Over the past couple years, I've researched the characters, elements, and themes of folktales and fables, myths and legends, and classical children’s literature. Out of all this study, I fashioned a fictional world where imagination and meaning meet in a mythos akin to those found in Middle Earth and Narnia. During this time I reflected upon three guiding questions: What if the characters, places, and plots in our traditional tales existed in another dimension called the Dreamlands? What if the imaginations of writers, artists, and other individuals connected them to this otherworld and allowed them to alter our reality? What if these gifted people could travel to and from the Dreamlands and were part of an ongoing struggle between good and evil for the hearts and minds of mankind?
These questions and their answers drove me further and further into this otherworld where our imaginings live and die. Every story I read added another aspect to the setting’s overall narrative. Each author’s biography offered insights into the inner workings of the world, from the lost years of William Shakespeare to the mysterious death of Edgar Allen Poe. I coupled these literary references with musings about what they might mean and produced over two-hundred pages of background material. It took two years to complete this first step, but I cultivated the setting first because I wanted the characters, plots, and themes of my novel to grow naturally out of it.
The first fruit of this approach was Avery Mann, the narrator and main character of my envisioned series of books. He is a boy who is gifted with a potent imagination, but cursed with bad luck. I have spent much of the last year shaping this character’s thoughts, voice, and actions. I allowed him to run loose upon the page whenever I had time and along the way, he set into motion a series of misadventures involving a fiendish raven, a shape-shifting bogeyman, a luckless orphaned girl, an impish brownie named Puck, a fairy godmother masquerading as a librarian, and a number of other engaging characters.
I recently posted the first seven chapters of the book on HarperCollin's Authonomy site. A community site for writers, readers and publishers, conceived and developed by book editors at HarperCollins.
If you are interested in reading the first seven (rough-draft) chapters of my novel, you can do so at the following web page:
View Book
If you have any comments on the book, then feel free to post them here or on the Authonomy site. And if you decide to join Authonomy, then please consider shelving my book to help it move up the ranks. At the end of each month, the top five ranked books are read by editors at HarperCollins.
Here's the pitch:
A luckless boy stumbles upon his family’s secret ties to an otherworld where fictional characters exist—and unfortunately some of them are after his soul.
Avery Mann is a luckless boy with a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. At first it started out with little things like tripping over toys that hadn’t been there a moment before or running into a skunk in the park. However, every year his rotten luck gets funkier and people—like the school bully—are starting to take notice.
As the mishaps at school start to heap up, Avery begins to wonder if there is more to his bad luck than mere chance. Soon he uncovers an odd pattern to the major accidents in his life—almost all of them occurred on Friday the Thirteenth. Maybe he is cursed, like the school bully claims.
Unfortunately, nothing prepares him for the truth or the fractured fairy tale he stumbles into after releasing—by accident of course—a fiendish raven named Nevermore from its prison beneath the oak tree in his backyard.
Now Avery will have to use every ounce of courage and imagination at his disposal, if he wants to avoid an unhappily ever after for both him and his family.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post ,
Joseph
PS: I'm planning on focusing on the novel until I finish it, so I don't expect to be doing any more Nevermore products for a while, expect perhaps a 4e version since I need to convert the rules for an eventual 4e campaign I'm hoping to run.
PPS: Thank you all for your support and thank Green Ronin and Expeditious Retreat Press for giving me the opportunity to explore Nevermore with you through the Worlds of Adventure setting search... without it I'm not certain the novel I'm working on would have been possible. I wish you all the best... and may all your dreams come true (or at least the good ones)!
It's been a while since last you heard from me and the primary reason is because I took the year off from freelance writing and forum posting to focus on my first novel: Avery Mann's Book of Misadventures: Volume I.
This book was inspired by the work I did for the World of Nevermore campaign setting (True20 ruleset) for Expeditious Retreat Press. Over the past couple years, I've researched the characters, elements, and themes of folktales and fables, myths and legends, and classical children’s literature. Out of all this study, I fashioned a fictional world where imagination and meaning meet in a mythos akin to those found in Middle Earth and Narnia. During this time I reflected upon three guiding questions: What if the characters, places, and plots in our traditional tales existed in another dimension called the Dreamlands? What if the imaginations of writers, artists, and other individuals connected them to this otherworld and allowed them to alter our reality? What if these gifted people could travel to and from the Dreamlands and were part of an ongoing struggle between good and evil for the hearts and minds of mankind?
These questions and their answers drove me further and further into this otherworld where our imaginings live and die. Every story I read added another aspect to the setting’s overall narrative. Each author’s biography offered insights into the inner workings of the world, from the lost years of William Shakespeare to the mysterious death of Edgar Allen Poe. I coupled these literary references with musings about what they might mean and produced over two-hundred pages of background material. It took two years to complete this first step, but I cultivated the setting first because I wanted the characters, plots, and themes of my novel to grow naturally out of it.
The first fruit of this approach was Avery Mann, the narrator and main character of my envisioned series of books. He is a boy who is gifted with a potent imagination, but cursed with bad luck. I have spent much of the last year shaping this character’s thoughts, voice, and actions. I allowed him to run loose upon the page whenever I had time and along the way, he set into motion a series of misadventures involving a fiendish raven, a shape-shifting bogeyman, a luckless orphaned girl, an impish brownie named Puck, a fairy godmother masquerading as a librarian, and a number of other engaging characters.
I recently posted the first seven chapters of the book on HarperCollin's Authonomy site. A community site for writers, readers and publishers, conceived and developed by book editors at HarperCollins.
If you are interested in reading the first seven (rough-draft) chapters of my novel, you can do so at the following web page:
View Book
If you have any comments on the book, then feel free to post them here or on the Authonomy site. And if you decide to join Authonomy, then please consider shelving my book to help it move up the ranks. At the end of each month, the top five ranked books are read by editors at HarperCollins.
Here's the pitch:
A luckless boy stumbles upon his family’s secret ties to an otherworld where fictional characters exist—and unfortunately some of them are after his soul.
Avery Mann is a luckless boy with a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. At first it started out with little things like tripping over toys that hadn’t been there a moment before or running into a skunk in the park. However, every year his rotten luck gets funkier and people—like the school bully—are starting to take notice.
As the mishaps at school start to heap up, Avery begins to wonder if there is more to his bad luck than mere chance. Soon he uncovers an odd pattern to the major accidents in his life—almost all of them occurred on Friday the Thirteenth. Maybe he is cursed, like the school bully claims.
Unfortunately, nothing prepares him for the truth or the fractured fairy tale he stumbles into after releasing—by accident of course—a fiendish raven named Nevermore from its prison beneath the oak tree in his backyard.
Now Avery will have to use every ounce of courage and imagination at his disposal, if he wants to avoid an unhappily ever after for both him and his family.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post ,
Joseph
PS: I'm planning on focusing on the novel until I finish it, so I don't expect to be doing any more Nevermore products for a while, expect perhaps a 4e version since I need to convert the rules for an eventual 4e campaign I'm hoping to run.
PPS: Thank you all for your support and thank Green Ronin and Expeditious Retreat Press for giving me the opportunity to explore Nevermore with you through the Worlds of Adventure setting search... without it I'm not certain the novel I'm working on would have been possible. I wish you all the best... and may all your dreams come true (or at least the good ones)!
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