Here’s a synopsis of my debut fantasy novel, “Love After Death.” That’s still a working title, but I’m thinking more and more that I’ll keep it. See what you think.
The story takes place on a world called Pharas, where magic is the norm. Humans on Pharas are said to have come to the world from Earth a couple thousand years ago through a magical portal that is still operational. The protagonist is a thirty-two-year-old human man named Alonso. He’s married to a shadow elf woman, Ngozi, whom he’s known since he was sixteen. They are childless and since being married have discovered they can’t have children. They own a tower by the sea and now they are broke. Ngozi works but Alonso doesn’t because he’s too depressed. Alonso wants a daughter, and although he has secretly “adopted” the ghost of a twenty-year-old woman as his “daughter,” he wants a flesh-and-blood daughter.
Tax time is coming soon, and Ngozi isn’t making enough money to pay the taxes. So she takes the initiative to find Alonso a job that she is sure he can do: a job delivering hats in the nearest city, Hooblaport, which is where Ngozi works. The city was founded by a lizard-like humanoid kindred called the hoobla, hence the name Hooblaport. Alonso’s employer is a hoobla milliner, but it’s a human sorceress called Lady Ryley who got Alonso the job, and she has some requirements of her own. It turns out that more is expected of Alonso on the job than he or Ngozi realized. Alonso is expected to do a little more than deliver hats.
Lady Ryley spins a web of seduction that Alonso becomes trapped in. He struggles with spilling everything to Ngozi because they need the money for their taxes, and he suspects that Ngozi would have him quit the job if he told her everything. At the same time, Alonso is also struggling with his feelings for Ngozi, and wondering what it would be like to make love to a human woman, which he has never done. This just makes it more difficult for him to say anything to Ngozi that would cause her to ask him to quit his new job.
Staying with the job, Alonso becomes more and more a puppet to Lady Ryley. She lends him a “horse” for him to use to make his deliveries. Turns out the horse is more than just a horse. For that matter, some of the customers are more than just customers. Things continually get more problematic for Alonso, regarding both his physical well-being and his commitment to be faithful to his wife.
As the story progresses, Alonso discovers many truths about himself, his wife, Lady Ryley and a few of the females who entered his life because of his taking the delivery job. Someone wants him dead, and that someone may have a god on their side. He doesn’t know exactly who he can trust, but he learns where his heart belongs. Does it belong to Ngozi or someone else? Will Alonso ever have a real daughter, and if so, with whom? Will he even stay alive long enough for anything else to matter? Or can he perhaps find love after death?
This story is already written and is with some beta readers now. But I would love to have your input. As written, the novel includes half a dozen scenes where sex is a primary activity, always consensual between male/female adults. The scenes are told from Alonso’s point of view and are explicit because the story is basically stream of consciousness, and Alonso has no reason to censor his thoughts. I could conceivably rewrite the scenes to be less explicit, at least to the point of not mentioning specific interactions of particular body parts. But then the story might lose a certain authenticity of voice.
If you can spare a minute, I’d really appreciate it if you left me a comment to say not only whether you like this story idea, but whether the inclusion of explicit sex scenes would keep you from reading the novel no matter how good the rest of it sounds.
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After the novel described above went to beta readers, I’ve decided to change it up quite a bit. I’ve wrestled with my thoughts about it for a while now. My decision is to no longer have Alonso as the protagonist. His character is difficult for the character to empathize with, because his condition is hard to understand from his perspective. So I’m using three of the female characters as point-of-view characters now. Between them, pretty much all of the story details can be revealed, including many that the original main character was not privy to. All three of these new point-of-view characters will be much easier to empathize with and have much more interesting and active roles in the story. Alonso will still be central to the plot, but just as Sherlock Holmes was not used as the point-of-view character in stories about him, so it will be with Alonso.
I’m also considering changing the final outcome of the book from what I previously sent to beta readers, back to what I’d originally been thinking the ending would be, to something I’d considered using when the novel was still a germ of an idea in my noggin.
Removing Alonso as the point-of-view character will also change the nature of those sex scenes I was worried about. They won’t all of them go away entirely, but they won’t be described as explicitly coming from the point of view of the female characters.