Ponderment.

[RobJ]

Hi Fel,
Before any answers can be given, there are a few questions that must be asked.
1. Is the new book to be written for your current audience or are you going to write with the view to publishing?
2. If the answer is the former then your options are less controling in that you have a faithful following who will read just about anything you do. If on the other hand publishing is your aim then you have more constricting parameters in which you have to work. This of course is dependent on your own view of what is success on a personal and business level. Taking this further you have the following things to address.
a. Audience participation. Translated I mean how wide an age group are you going to target?
b. Content. General or adult content. Obviously the widest reading audience is with a general classification.
c. Appeal. How will the reader react to the content through the following criteria. ( Story line, believability, personal relationship, under lying message, continuity of story line, reality v fantasy, relation to real life.. etc)
d. Progression. Does the story lend itself to more than one adventure ie. more than one book, a series is more appealing from a publishing and commercial view point.
e.Market Appeal. How will the reading audience be drawn into the side products that the book would generate and what are they.
3. Do you as an author have the ability to work to a set time frame in a commercial environment and do you want to? The creative juices for want of a better description may not always flow when one is under pressure from strict time/production lines. To facilitate this problem it would be advisable to keep the story simple and contiguous which is what you have achieved with the Tarin Kael Series.
There are many more points which derive from just the few I've mentioned, however I will stop there and give you my own view of what I think is the appropriate direction to take
The Tarin Kael Series is commercial even now and I have no hesitation in saying that. Your audience as it stands is nothing as compared to a world wide reading audience and that statement should not detract from your achievements to date which I find truley remarkable. The downloads per chapter are approx 450 to 500 which is nothing with an audience of 2billion.
The fact that you have put the series on the internet should be used as a guide and a marketing tool, not as a reason not to publish it. The series will appeal to a wide reading base from 8 to 80yrs with just a few editing adjustments. This fact on its own puts it in the same category as The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter both of which have the widest possible audience and have similar messages as does the Tarin Kael Series. My view is that you should expand on what you already have for it is shown by your ability to produce the chapters and story line that you enjoy writing it and this is the major ingredient to it being a commercial success. The series also leads to other opportunities which I won't elaborate on here.
What ever you decide I wish you well and thank you for the pleasure you have given me and my son ages 53 and 15. If you wish I am more than happy to help in other ways which I feel would be of value, if interested let me know.
There I've had my say shoot me down in flames folks but it's what I believe and I'm putting it up front!!
Regards,
RobJ

[MISER]

Hello Fel

I am with the consensus here, I believe. I say keep Sennadar.

There are so many stories waiting to be told with friends we already have it would be a shame to waste it, or them.

It does allow crossovers.

And while you may be tired of them, unless I miss my guess you love them as much as we do. You may well want to come back and revisit your friends and loves. We will want you to.

Write on my friend.

John [/b]

[Wingsolution]

keep it on sennadar, you sound like you may burn yourself out if you work on creating a new world, worlds should be born and evolved with creativity, not work. that's not to say work isn't involved, but if you take the fun out of writing, there's less fun to read from it...
well, that's my take on it anyways, but I have the ability to lose myself in any good story, experiencing a great one, like the Terrin novels is on the same level as chocolate cake... to me anyways...

[Hallmist]

I think I'm in the minority here, but I would argue against using Sennadar. Its not that I disagree with any of the above points: it would be cool to have cameos, it would be cool to still have some of the old characters/plotlines, it would be neat to carryover some of our love of the Sennadar universe.

But, at the same time, I think that a new setting opens up possibilities. Fel, you are one of the most creative/imaginative people that I know. But I think a new world would give you even more freedom to stretch your imagination than the Sennadar world.

I must admit, I'm basing this off of previous experience. My favorite authors aren't my favorite because of one series they wrote, they are my favorite because they consistantly write intriguing stories. Every one of their stories has new ideas, and forces me consider life in a slightly different way. As a reader, it is fun following them down the new paths that they are blazing.

It may just be me, but I enjoy stories that come to an end. Only after a story is over can I take the time to really look at what happened in the book, and how everyone got to where they were at the end. As nice as it is to have more of the story to look forward to, I enjoy having some unknown left, some of the story left untold. Only then do I get the chance to really consider the type of characters that have been created, and what I think they would do. Considering characters in this way invariably makes me appreciate the work more.

You've already proven that you can do it. Take Subjugation. You've created a completely disseperate environment than Sennadar, but it is no less engrosing for being completely different.

It may be selfish of me, since it would involve more work for you, but I vote for creating a new universe.

[J-Man5]

I personally think not a new universe per say but a new plane or realm. Just like how Pyrosia and Sennadar are accessible via the Astral plane and are linked into the greater universe of universes. I think that this new world could be setup the same way. If you want cameos then you can have them. If you want to have other fiction for fans to read for free then fine you already have two series. Some of the magic stays the same. The other you can invent. Like I remember there was reference to the sung magic of some worlds.

J-Man5

[michaelsuave]

I think its pretty clear what Fel is going to do from his posts. I like the idea, and I know that anything Fel creates will be worth while in the reading department, just like all of his other books. I just hope he can find a publisher.

~michael

[Fel]

Actually, now that I've said that, I've decided to indeed build a new setting from the ground up. I know it'll be a lot of work, but I've had a couple of interesting ideas around which to build a story line.

Magic will be a new system in Myradon...and it is slowly dying. That's going to be a major plot point, because the slow weakening of magic has reached a point where the magicians of Myradon have taken notice of it, and are frantically trying to discover how and why this is happening, and try to stop it.

Myradon will be broken up into a series of small fractured kingdoms, barely more than the age of warlords in ancient Greece where a king was king of little more than his city and a little farmland surrounding it. Myradi kings will control more territory, but they will be no less violent, and the setting no less dangerous.

There will be non-humans, but there will be significant segregation of the races, as nobody trusts anyone else.

Myradon itself will be littered with old ruins filled with artifacts and architecture that indicate that those long-lost civilizations and peoples were actually much more advanced than the "modern" Myradi. Modern Myradon will have a technological and social structure akin to the early dark ages of circa 800...the age of iron, before the discovery of steel. But there is steel out there, hidden in the old ruins.

I've already engineered the first of the main characters. The main character is Tanner Yellow Eyes, who is a tanner by profession who does not have a proper name, and is thus named for his craft (back in those days, what you did was often your surname...thus why we have so many people named Smith now--they descended from blacksmiths). And as his name suggests, has very unnatural yellow-colored eyes, which hints that his bloodline is not entirely human. His yellow eyes are more than simply cosmetic; Tanner can see things that normal humans cannot, and this ability is what gets him mired into the main plot.

The second is a man with no name, just like Tanner, but he is nameless by choice. Tanner eventually simply refers to him as the Warrior. He is a Chuken, a mystical warrior largely unknown to most common Myradi, but who are both notorious and highly feared among the ruling classes. The Warrior has no name, and he does not speak. He sacrificed both his name and his voice in the pursuit of his Chuken arts.

Accompanying the Warrior is Mayajanni, an apprentice Chuken who acts as the Warrior's voice even as the Warrior continues her training in the Chuken arts. It is custom for any Chuken who has reached the seventh ki and leaves the dojo to be accompanied by at least one apprentice of at least the first ki, who still has a voice, and can speak for the master when necessary. Mayajanni is not human; she is a steppes elf, a race of slender, tall non-humans from far to the south, and are notorious for their ferocity and rough ways (consider the steppes elf society as a cross between the Mongols and the American Indians).

Tanner falls in with these two after he leaves his home village to travel to the neighboring town of Ardest, to start up his own tanning business. But the roads are fraught with peril, and an encounter with bandits brings Tanner and the two Chuken together.

[MommyDoom]

<visual>

MommyDoom genulflects wildly.

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GADS it would be SO cool to live inside your head, kind of like "Being John Malkovich" but in a cool, fantasy world...

[michaelsuave]

<visual>

MommyDoom genulflects wildly.

</visual>

GADS it would be SO cool to live inside your head, kind of like "Being John Malkovich" but in a cool, fantasy world...

LOL!!!

[SirVal]

Man, the story isn´t even written yet and already I´m hooked!

The Warrior (as Tanner calls him) kinda reminds me of ´The Unknown Warrior´ out of ´The Raven´series by James Barclay and of an ugly dark elf out of ´The Riftwar Saga´by Raymond E. Feist; he cut out his tungue and tattood his whole body with strange marks to become a better warrior or something. . . its been a while bud thats what I remember. I thought both stories didn´t elaborate enough on these characters (not that they´re near the same as your ´unknown warrior´, they just remind me of yours).