A Girl and Her God

A story set in an altworld where gods exist as tangibly and unremarkably as humans do, out in the open, and society has developed around this fact of life. 

A desperate and poor young woman goes to Shrine in order to entreat a neighborhood god to change her fate. Naturally, this has unexpected and far-reaching consequences when she finds herself the beloved of a smart and ambitious deity with big plans and something to prove...

--

Religion doesn't involve any faith in this world -- you can literally bump into gods on the street, and they are every bit flawed beings with recognizable personalities (although not always modelled on human personalities). The principal difference between gods and people is that gods, despite being real and tangible in every way, are connected directly to the cosmos at some prime symbolic level. 

--

Altworld is basically like ours -- magic doesn't work as advertised, science and technology are truth-apt ways of getting at reality, and the world has gradually urbanized, industrialized, and networked as in our history. The names of the countries and culture groups are different and geopolitics is very distinct, but it's nevertheless a familiar sort of world, one which you could move into and not have any fundamental surprises other than the fact that gods are part of the general population.