Looking for Beta-reader (Adult literary fantasy, particularly first 20-25K)

Hi, all,

I'd love to get some outside eyes on a MS I've been working on for far too long.

The story is set in an old theatre balanced between worlds, where Brynna spends her evenings pretending to be a post-modern talking cat in silly plays. The playwright, however, has lost the ending to a very old, very twisted story he's caught up in, and now he expects her to create a new one for his forgotten characters and the ghostly audience that's watching.

It is a very weird book.

A slightly-outdated query can be found here--it'll give you a general gist. The first 750 words were in Beta Project a few years ago (which is why I'm not entering it again; note that it has changed somewhat, too): password = testing.

Genre: Fantasy, with a literary bent. Some meta-fiction, absurdism. Channels animal fantasy, particularly the REDWALL series, though this and just about every other trope is zig-zagged at some point, to varying effect. Has a romance sub-plot I wrote by accident. Also a surprisingly large chunk about real estate.

No real trigger warnings, save insufferable pretentiousness.

Feedback: I'm looking primarily for someone who'd be willing to read the first several chapters, so I can get a sense of where and why people might stop. I have no issue if you don't want to finish, though I'd be grateful to know what might have tripped you up.

If you want to keep going, I'm happy to have more eyes on the whole thing, too. The full MS is 125K.

I'm experienced doing testing and feedback for creative projects and have been in numerous writing workshops. It's unlikely you can give me any harsh feedback I haven't heard before, and I'm grateful to get any data points I can.

Experience: That said, this is a weird book that doesn't always play nice with convention. I'd like to figure out where it's not working, so would very much appreciate readers who have read some literary fantasy or lit-SF or other work that bends genre, especially if you can help diagnose any technical problems in the narrative that I may not be seeing after so long.

I don't like putting up gates, so if you're a first-timer and like the sound of the first 750 and want to take a run at it, let me know a bit about your reading tastes and maybe we can start by swapping the first three chapters.

Publishing: The book is polished and has been through various rewrites and previous rounds of beta-reads.

It is out with a scattering of agents right now, and has had full requests. Because it's a weird book, I'd like to make sure I'm maximizing what interest the MS can generate, so want to do a round of beta-reads over the summer/fall before sending further queries.

Timelines: Fairly flexible. Would like to do another round of queries before the year is out and I don't want to query while people are beta-reading. But I'm a slow reader myself and have several other projects on my plate, so feel free to take your time.

I am nominally open in swapping but, as mentioned: Projects. Plate. Plus it would need to be a genre I can work in and at a level I can work with. If you want a swap, let me know and let me know what you have--we'll go from there.


If you're interested, please send me a PM here on AW. I'm happy to send a larger excerpt privately if you'd like to get a feel for it first.

Thanks to everyone who beta-reads and critiques here to make this community what it is,


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Sage said:

I remember that one! (Not literary bent, myself, though)

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Glad you remember it. And thanks to everyone who crit it back then.

I actually did make some hopefully-not-insignificant changes based on those crits, so the 750 linked above is very much only so people can see if the style jives, since it is such a weird book.

If people want to get a more current taste of it before committing, that's fine--just drop me a PM and I'm happy to send as much as you'd like to look at it. Any and all feedback is helpful.