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bi-dazai · 5 years

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Hey! You! Yes, you!

Do you like fantasy stories? Of course you do.

Do you enjoy stories of teenagers trying to deal with the typical emotional hardships of being a teenager while also handling a revolution that involves swords, magic, occasional gods chiming in to help, and the power of friendship and learning to be confident in yourself?

And do you like the promise of not one but several endgame gay pairings? Fantasy gay pairings?! Of course you do!

Then my new online serial is for you!

Priyana is the story of three teenagers - Nik, Rada, and Kane - who find their “fate on fast forward” when the most annoying yet strangely likable character I’ve ever written cruel Prince Leander arrives in their small town. After the prince captures Amarandos (the man who raised the trio), burns their home down, and vows to destroy the escaped three kids, our trio find themselves thrust abruptly into the destiny which they thought they would be following much later on. Vowing to rescue Amarandos and reclaim the throne from Prince Leander and the evil King Olbert, they venture across the land of Priyana, learning about the true, hidden history of their country and their family, and making friends, enemies, and mending a scarred populace on the way.

The first book, Soul, follows the trio as they attempt to recapture Amarandos and struggle with the strange new existence they have been thrown headfirst into. With nothing but each other, they must learn to work as a team and not just as three moody teenagers raised by the same man. They journey to the mountain-enshrouded city of Nahvsenn, where they encounter a passionate, well-established underground rebellion simply awaiting the moment to finally take their city back from the evil King Olbert’s reign. Could our trio be the herald of that moment?

Priyana takes strong inspiration from Avatar: The Last Airbender in terms of the exploration of themes, worldbuilding style, our main characters’ relationships with the history of the land, and character development. It is written by a bisexual non-binary with an adoration for fantasy, the written word, and using fiction to criticise the ills of the society we live in.

A recommended minimum reader age would be approximately 10-12 years old, as the work contains some death, minor violence, and minor strong language.

Priyana will be published as an online serial, with the first 4 chapters published on the 12th January, 2019, the 5th chapter published on the 19th January, and the rest of the 19 total chapters of Book One: Soul being published fortnightly (every two weeks) from the 2nd February. It will be available as a PDF with occasional sketches for the series on a Google Drive (I will post the link to the folder on my Twitter and on this blog each time it is updated) and as a text-only version in the Original Work tag on Archive Of Our Own.

Chapters range between 2000-10,000 words, so it will only take 10-20 minutes out of your day to read a chapter. Sweet! And even better - it’s totally free. That’s right. A cool fantasy story, easy to read, not to long and overbearing, for free! *Keanu Reeves voice* Whoa.

And good news! If you are just so hyped for this series that you find yourself at the edge of your seat in anticipation for mid-January, well guess what! The first chapter is currently available as a sneak-peek preview! Nice!

Check out the first chapter here! It will only take you about 10-15 minutes to read, and even less time to reblog and share the news! Because this is the only form of advertising this thing has!

Even more information available under the cut:

I’ve been working on this almost exclusively over the last two years. Everything is so insanely thought-out and I’m sure I must have gone over everything over a million times now. So to say this means a lot to me is an understatement.

Certain tropes in this story are criticisms and deconstructions of common fantasy tropes, particularly tropes rooted in misogyny, racism, and xenophobia. Certain character beats are familiar to character beats in other stories that I wasn’t entirely happy with - for example, in Book 2A, there’s a character beat in Rada’s arc which is remarkably similar to a character beat in Sakura’s (from Naruto) early episodes. However, I never liked how Sakura’s character change from that beat (hint: when her hair gets chopped off) was so minimal, and often she would be acting like she would when she was first introduced. Rada is probably the best example of me using different character beats and subtly implementing them in hers to, at least in my opinion, show would could be instead done with said character beats.

So yeah, this story is in essence, a lot to me. If you’ve read and shared the news, it means the world to me. Each person that reads it I am eternally thankful for. Each person that shares it and recommends it even more so.

This isn’t my first major writing project - I’ve been writing long-form chapter books all throughout my teens, with my first chapter book having been written when I was 10 years old (sidenote - that one is a preteen mess in which I introduce vampires out of absolutely nowhere and include a wizard called Carrot-Eye). However, this is the first project I’ve written with the intent of being seen by eyes other than those in my close community of friends and family, and instead being published for those all over the world.

I struggled for a while with whether or not I would charge for this work. I’ve spent so much time and effort on it, and every day has been spent buried in Priyana, that it almost feels unfair to myself to release it for free. But as my first work, and as a poor person with few industry contacts and no industry contacts that could help me in this format, I realised it would be unwise for me to charge for it, and would make it accessible to other poor people like me. Free stories, yall!

That being said, if this project reaches a certain level of success, I’ll happily open up a Patreon, Ko-Fi and maybe a few other routes of donation. It’s my dream to be a full-time writer, and I’ve poured so much of my heart into this project already that I’m fully sure this is what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. I want to make people think with my stories, but I also want them to enjoy them and escape from real life. I want people to fall in love with my characters, to experience their emotions and to connect with my work. I hope I can do that for as many people as possible.

I’m going to now set some promises, as this series is going to be published for many years to come and my promised gay pairings are, as I mentioned, endgame, so they will be happening later on. So the following things, I promise here and now, to uphold in this series:

- there will be both a WLW and a MLM pairing with major characters

- there will be time spent exploring the dynamic and romance of said pairings

- there will be a trans girl (hint, hint: sister girl) major character with a major character as her love interest

- there is a nonbinary character from the first chapter, who although starts as a villain, undergoes a long arc in which they eventually decide to redeem themselves on their own terms

- i promise not to demonise the gender, ethnicity, race, or customs of any minority or minority-coded characters

- at least two major characters are mixed race, with issues of race, immigration, generalisation, and xenophobia explored from the perspective of racial minorities

- issues such as the above are explored with a mindset of long, long hours and days of research into real life scholars of race, gender, sociology, etc, and especially their perspectives on fantasy and allegory

Thank you for reading this, and if you did, thank you for reading that chapter and sharing!

-Natalya

#priyana

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