Would you read this book?

[Ghill]

A friend of mine played a DnD character, a half-celestial, who gained some notoriety in and out of game. I kind of snowballed and mutated. At time of writing he had (I believe) four entire books written about the Yomish race and its various "leaders", the total page count well in excess of 1,000 8x11 pages. I am trying to convince him to actually let someone read it, and from what I know I think it would do decently as a book.

SO, here is the premise: An ingenious magical tinker and inventor creates an artificial life form successfully. This is a big deal to his neighbors, and as he creates more and more of his "children" as the population of his home city-state begin to polarize on the issue. The people who think that artificial life is a good thing, the people who think it is permissible, and the people who think this is a horribly amoral or dangerous thing end up in open conflict which leads to a civil war. The civil war destroys the city and leaves the artificial race (called the Yomen, I do not know the canonical reason for this) in a position of power. In the generations to come the Yomen separate into three distinct classifications, the first is made up of sidekicks and helpers who struggle to help destiny happen, the second a race of supernatural killers who intend to exterminate all other races in existence with only themselves remaining, and the third gets killed off so fast that I never learned anything about them. It is a struggle between competent, powerful, successful evil, and luckless, overwhelmed, paranoid good. The helper race is called the Yomish, and they work to set up and prepare heroes to fight the vastly more powerful forces of evil. The main recurring characters are the Yomen (yes, that word is used a lot), originally a single individual whose soul has been recombined and spliced into various incarnations (some of them simultaneously) to organize the Yomish in their effort to have others thwart evil.

Wow, that is verbose...anyone think it has potential?

[Serpentine]

Are there any particular characters you can tell us about? What exactly are the Yomen like?
As a premise, it seems pretty good, but a book's more than it's premise.

[Salbazier]

What are the current conflict ? who are the main characters and what are they doing? Just 'a struggle between competent, powerful, successful evil, and luckless, overwhelmed, paranoid good' doesn't hook me enough. Honestly, judging from that paragraph alone, i'll be more interested reading about the civil war time than current time.

[Knaight]

The premise could work, but I find the idea of the civil war, maybe leading into reconstruction of the Yomen (a kind of man vs. nature, man vs. self story, along with a societal coming of age overlay) far more interesting.

[Lord Loss]

Yes. Yes I would. It sounds very interesting. Any more information?

Also is the Target Audience? Teenagers, Young Adults, Adults?

[Quincunx]

Premise means little; it's writing style or lack thereof which counts.

[Ghill]

*Glee!*

Okay, I will try to get him to join the forum. He can do a better job of representing the book then I can.

[Knaight]

Premise means little; it's writing style or lack thereof which counts.

On the other hand, a lousy boring premise can break a story with good writing style. But if the premise is good enough, writing style is far more important, on that we agree.

[Salbazier]

Premise lure readers to read. The question is 'would you read it?' not 'would you enjoy it?' or even 'would you read it until the end?' :smallwink:

[ForzaFiori]

As others have said, the premise is interesting. The Civil War period would also be good.

Yomen, to me, brings images of the Yeomen of the middle ages, the free men who did not own land, or who owned little land. The origins of the "middle class". As (originally) as society of free, albeit second class, citizens, that might be the origins of the name. Just a guess from the small synopsis obviously, but it could be right.

[Telonius]

Depends greatly on the editing. 1000 good pages is a joy to read. 1000 bad pages is Crossroads of Twilight.

[Ghill]

Nice catch ForzaFiori, that is sort of the roots of the title. It is actually a lot stupider than that. The entire works sprung from an odd project a few years back, where my friends wished to link together all the DnD characters (and most of the other gaming characters) he had created up to this point. [sic] Yomen the Bowmen got his original name from the Dr. Seuss character...then the historical Yeomen was studied and the some of the characteristics of the Yomish were derived from it.

He said he would get on as soon as possible, I think he will be going by HemlockSoames, but I am not sure.

EDIT: Oh, and the reason I was much more detailed about the origin is because that is what I know most about. It was only recently that he told me he finished the "Chronicles of Yomen", before that I had only heard about the beginning.