Earlier today I dug into the bowels of my hard drive and unearthed something that hasn’t seen the light of day for around eight years. My 155,000 word fantasy novel manuscript “Empire”.
Most of those words were eked out on the tiny keyboard of a Psion Series 3c palmtop computer while travelling through Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand and North and South America, in dodgy backpacker hostels, budget hotels and cheap cafés. There was no such thing as WiFi and netbooks!
I finished the book soon after moving to Ireland in 2000, and then life took over.
The twins — our first children — arrived around about the same time as our first mortgage, and mundane things like paying the bills took precedence. I’ve hardly peeked at “Empire” since… until now.
With a published non-fiction title on internet marketing under my belt now, I figure that this is a good time to resurrect my fiction-writing ambitions.
With that in mind I’m going to be writing to publishers and literary agents in Ireland and the UK over the coming weeks, and figured that I’d make a synopsis and the first two chapters of Empire available here for perusal / feedback / (constructive) comment.
So, you’ll find a brief synopsis of the book below, followed by a link to a PDF of the first two chapters. Let me know what you think in the comments, and if you’re an agent or publisher, and would like to see the full manuscript, just drop me a line. Continue reading »