Important Notice (updated 12/12): My finals are next week; they end on Wednesday, so hopefully after that I can have something new up...I feel really bad for not having anything posted lately even though I keep promising it.
Unfortunately the next story in the Nickolas Darian series fell through and I reverted to my last series for comfort (well, not really, but we will pretend...). I am considering posting what was The Clei Files and is now Graceful Antiquity. I have over half of the first book done, which is good...but it's still in its rough form and I'm wary of posting it. Again, sorry for the lack of updates and I hope mid-December will bring something new!
--E.M.
My name is Efirnda McDannak. I am the author of The Clei Files, Anice, and Treaties and Alliances.
I also find myself writing mysteries such as A Disconsolate Truth. To begin with, I try as hard as I can to update novels such as this faster-moving one at least once a day, if it is going well. If not, then I will try to go at once a week, so if my posts are slow, it means that my writing is going slower. Also keep in mind that for A Disconsolate Truth, this is the first draft. It will be revised and reworked to move at a better pace and flow clearly. I will not revise until I have reached the end of the story, so as to give myself some sort of plot to follow.
The Clei Files is complete, but I am reworking it and it will be on the "back burner" for quite a while, which means it will not be released beyond File One for a while. It is a novel I have worked on for over five years, and put many of those years into intense research. The novels concerning Inrugia and the angels are all put on hold until I complete A Disconsolate Truth. These include Treaties and Alliances, and Anice. My apologies, but sometimes I just can't work on those and need a break.
If there are any updates, they will be places here instead of at the top of a chapter, as I find that disruptive.
~~
Note: I've recently recieved a question from someone I know asking why I don't review and read a lot of the work here on FP. Well, I can be quite honest about it...I'm a picky reader. Bad, bad bad bad, since I'm an English major. Honestly, the styles these days don't capture me. They don't intrigue me, and I wish that they did so that I could stick to and review a story for pleasure. I'm an avid reader, so don't get me wrong...but I'm also one of the few people alive at this point who regularly reads novels such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway. Also, I loved Ressurrection by Lev Tolstoy and his shorter plays such as The Living Corpse. My favortie short story is The Nose by the Russian writer Pushkin (great parody on Peter the Great's installment of military ranks!), while my favorite novel is by far Robert K. Massie's Nickolas and Alexandra. So, as you can tell, books of magical means don't hold my attention. As for my own fantasy's, I eventually will finish them, but I work more with folklore than with actual fantasy (for an example, my play The Bone-Tree surrounds some of the most basic of folklores, the witch and the mermaid).
If you would like me to review your work, do let me know! I would love to do it, as I find myself very critical and a good editor (I tend to edit my mother's cover letters for major fiberoptic companies and my fathers messages to the bosses of his programming comapny, Ball Aerospace), so I am willing to do it. If you would like an example of my editing work, please feel free to e-mail me, and I will share it with you. Also, should you be interested, I would be willing to edit larger scale novels for a fee of $10-20, depending on novel length.
I suppose other than that, I should give some information on myself...well, I'm not going to mention my age. People can think of me however old they like; it doesn't bother me a bit. I am a female (as if Efirnda didn't tell you that!) and I've written over the span of some eight years seven novels, each over 100 pages typed, 12 point and single spaced. None of them are published, as I'm sure you've noticed; however, my goal is to send in A Disconsolate Truth once it's complete to a company and see where it goes from there. I live in the States, womewhere, meh, southwest of, uh, New York. Sure...that's good enough, I guess...lol.
A bit of information for those out there who are like me, hoping to become an author someday--fantasy has become the most competative market! If you're going to get published, write something other than fantasy! Try science fiction, historical fiction, non-fiction--anything other than fantasy! If you manage to get noticed and published with something new, I congradulate you and introduce to you the fact that once published, you can more easily get your fantasy works through the door. I've come to realize that most publishers don't want fantasy unless they're a fantasy publisher exclusively. Baen is sci-fi/fantasy, so you can try them. DAW Books, however, is not. They prefer historical novels, and so on. I'm sure this is all stuff you've heard before, but chances are, someone who has never noticed it before will read this and it may help. Besides, writing something new always inbtroduces to the writer broader and more useful skills. I wrote exclusively fantasy for a long time and couldn't understand why I never liked what I wrote. It was then a few months back I started work on A Disconsolate Truth, and out of all of my novels on this page, it has had the most positive feedback and I find myself proud that I've written it thus far...so...
Don't be afraid to exapnd your horizons!
Please feel free to contact me, and thank you for visiting my page.
--E.M.
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