hermitscave
patreon
New Novel: Upward Spiral
🕑 Added 2020-04-06 06:03:48 +0000 UTCHeyo, people. Hermit here.
As promised, here are the first few chapters of my new novel. Though they're a bit late, to be fair. I've been struggling with the title and character names a lot and I'm still not sure about either, so they may still change.
The novel is a xianxia novel with a strong murder mystery component, but hopefully with none of the cliches.
For now, here's a preliminary synopsis for you:
Cultivation used to be a secret art, transmitted from master to student.
Now the world has changed, and the mysteries are gone, as powerful sects use modern methods to understand and harness the mysterious powers of qi.
Thrown into this changing world, a young cultivator leaves the countryside and goes to the big city, to infiltrate a powerful sect and find those who killed his master, and took his home.
Now on to the poll: If you end up reading the chapters that I'll post after this, I'd love it if you could give me feedback on the names. I've heard lots of people complain that characters in Xianxia novels are hard to remember, since chinese names mean nothing to a lot of people and are all short and samey to a western audience.
Please tell me if you like the names I have right now by filling out this short poll. There's three options I'm struggling between:
1. Breton names (what I have right now). Maybe I'll add some other lesser-known european languages like frisian as well, depending on how many different countries/cultures end up showing up in the novel. They sound old-timey, mysterious and unique, but may be too close to western fantasy and create the wrong image.
2. Chinese names: The classic. If you've ever read a xianxia novel you know what to expect. No, I'm not naming my MC Long, Yang or Chen.
3. Burmese names: Closer to chinese names in how foreign they are to a western audience, and they're still east-asian, so the names preserve the eastern fantasy feel of xianxia better. I like how the names look on paper, but know little about the meanings behind the names or about the culure behind them (or even the proper pronounciation), so I might screw up and make some unintentionally funny or cringey mistakes. To give you an idea, examples of Burmese names might include: Khine, Thura, Pyae, Zeya, Linn, Ko, Nila, Yu, Sanda.
