Novella Rejection

Tor had an open invitation for novellas in January of 2016. Tor was looking for sword and magic fantasy submissions, but with a focus on non-European origins since most fantasy is obviously European/Medieval inspired. I unfortunately only found out about the invitation about a week before the closing of the acceptance period, but I decided to go for it, and I wrote a novella in less than a week.

I settled on writing about a roaming hunter/forager tribe (heavily inspired by the Plains Indians) being raided by a nearby civilization in order to bring back offerings for sacrifices (heavily inspired by the Mayans). The raided tribe enlists the aid of other nearby tribes to unite against the underworld lord that has become too greedy with its demands of sacrifices. There are also elements from the Iroquois, Hopi, Aztecs, Nazca, and a few others mixed in as I tried to pull elements from various indigenous North and South American civilizations. The result was a hastily written story that ended up being almost 23,000 words.

I then waited with fingers crossed for 328 days to hear the verdict.

It was declined.

I am not too bummed about it. It was a rush job and I wasn’t terribly pleased with it myself, but I tried. I would also like to thank my friend Amber for providing a second set of eyes and some pointers. I don’t think it is good enough to further pursue publishing, so I thought I would share it here for any who are interested in reading it.

Cummings – A Sacrifice of Innocence
Click on the above link to view/download the pdf.