Read this first

Hello. I'm Alex, and in my spare time, I have been writing a novel. It started out as a story for my teenage daughter to read and hopefully enjoy. But then I got to wondering if I could improve it to the point where other, less nepotistically biased people might enjoy it too. 

The genre is Speculative Fiction and it is mini-novel length (~60000 words). I've really enjoyed writing it, and I've learned lots. It's hard to be objective about it though. 

Inevitably, it's pretty rubbish. I'm under no illusions otherwise. How could it be any different? After all, I don't really know anything about novels, except that I enjoy reading them.

And so my request to you please. Can you help? Would you be interested in reading this story and then offering feedback? Or have you done something similar yourself before and can offer some basic feedback to a newbie? 20 minutes of your time could be really useful to me.

I'm not sure what to do next with the novel. I'm tempted to publish it online more widely for free, or to offer printed versions at "cost price". And then I was thinking that I could allow readers to offer feedback and suggested improvements, in a kind of collaborative writing approach. And the story could improve over time.

Or maybe some more conventional approach makes more sense. 

I've made the first eight chapters publically available, so you can decide if it's the kind of thing you like. Please get in touch if you'd like to read the rest, and then I'll unlock the rest for you. I'm doing it this way because I'd just like to have some kind of way of tracking how many people have read it.

You can contact me at: alex @ ry-lan.com
Thank you!

Before you start reading

The titles of the chapters are a bit poor. I don't know if I want to keep them even. It might be better to have no chapter titles. They are mainly there because it's a lot easier to edit with them. The same also applies for the sub-sections, ie "1a, 1b, etc". They are only there to make editing easier. In some cases, they don't even make sense. I'll probably remove them once the editing is sufficiently complete.

You may wonder, did I use AI to help me right the novel? Yes. I don't believe that I could have done it otherwise. Most of the character dialog was written by me. AI doesn't seem as good at this natural speech. At least, I didn't like what it made. But a lot of the narration is written by AI under my direction. It still wasn't particularly quick or easy to do. And I had to spend quite a long time removing common AI words like: stark, contrast, delve, etc.

The story is original by me. It's not based on any existing people or ideas. It is based on a plotline that I've had for ages in my head. And I was glad that I was finally able to write it.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.