Your result for Which fantasy writer are you? ...

Michael Moorcock (b. 1939)

3 High-Brow, 11 Violent, -39 Experimental and 3 Cynical!

Ok, I know there is a great deal involved in Fantasy writing where magic is concerned, and the bulk of that probably has to do with magic-users [I.E. sorcerers, wizards, witches, etc.]. Magic, in its very essence, denotes some type of ‘greater power’. That being said, it really chaps my ass when I read anything about ‘ancient’ wizards who refuse to use their power.

I mean come on, I get it that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’, but there is a point of stupidity in withholding your power. The current book I am reading has a seven-thousand year old wizard who learned his trade from a God, and for all intents and purpose was the 1^st wizard in the world. However, he is posing as a petty trader as he searches for someone who has stolen something, all the while worried about agents of another nation discovering him. Seriously? Am I supposed to believe someone with 7K years of magical experience couldn’t just summon this person to him, roast his ass, and then destroy the ‘bad’ nation wholesale? It’s the ‘Gandolfian’ syndrome, the ‘I am unreasonably powerful and immortal, but I can’t really help you other than vex you with riddles’. Give me a break.

I really just want to see a wizard of unlimited power BE a wizard of unlimited power. Sure, a story might not be all that interesting if the boy king was escorted right up to the gates of the evil villain, armies laid low in the wake of magical power, and then allowed to slip his destined magic blade into the subdued villain who just got mind blasted by the arch-magi of good, but that seems to make much more sense to me.

Maybe this is the reason markets change, because tales like this no longer hold water with ‘educated’ readers of Fantasy. *shrug*

Just to clarify, even if you could produce a 60K YA book that followed the journey of a young boy through his first year of middle school, it would fall out of the ranks of YA if you gutted two 13 year olds in the first couple of chapters?

It also wouldn’t really be YA if all his friends died in horrible ways each book until at graduation he was the only one left standing?

To sum up using another series. Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts and Ron gets his intestines spilled by the sorting hat. Hermione gets her throat cut in Year two. And by Deathly Hollows all of Gryffindor is in the grave.

So… this wouldn’t be YA right, and I should just make it 90K and sell it as standard fantasy. Any thoughts?

      You know what’s funny, people say their books are like their children, but if they do think that then I would say either 1 of 2 things back: 1; they don’t have children, or 2; they are way too close to their work and will never be successful with it.

      I have come to believe that books are like houses, not children. You start with a strong foundation, then build the walls, the roof, then start the interior. A crit, an edit, a reader, they’re like building inspectors, interior designers, feng shui specialists. You invite them in and they make what you built something magical. Sometimes it isn’t pretty, but what you must realize is as a carpenter you might not be the best interior designer, or plumber, or electrician. Some day you might be all those things in one, but truthfully, only a few ever reach that heightened position. 

      In the worst case scenario the building inspector comes in and says the foundation isn’t sound and condemns the structure, but in my mind that is better than moving in all your stuff and having it crumble down around you. We can love the house, it’s yours to the bones, but it isn’t kindred or blood. It is just a place, and family resides in the soul, not a place. This isn’t a baby, so you shouldn’t treat it like one. You don’t invite someone into your home and say tell me what you really think of my daughter, be brutally honest, I want the truth. Children are sacred; your book is simply words on paper.

      Listen to people; let them help you with your work. Still, once you are published, once you have a few books under your belt, it might be harder to ‘listen’ to a reader, but as of now that isn’t remotely the case with me. I need help, and I will take any hand offered me so that I can reach the places I want to go. I would say to anyone out there, if you ask someone to help you in any way, take their advice to heart.  

      I certainly understand what you’re saying concerning the changes in the industry. I have read Martin and Goodkind, and all I can say about them is that they are the kind of fantastic writer I never want to become. 

      I read in one of your blogs about you wanting people to boycott a TV station in England because they were showing images of Diana after her accident. I believe that the above writers, although brilliant, show the same lack of class with their renditions of truly corrupt and dark fantasy. If it takes rape, incest, and bondage to be a member of this new ‘elite’ fantasy marketplace, then I guess I’m not ready to join.   I mean really, isn’t there enough ugly violence in the world without dragging it into fantasy? It saddens me that somewhere in the 90s this new style started to sell and now all publishers care about are the bottom line profit margin so they are sticking with what they know works. Wizard’s First Rule and Game of Thrones could have been written just as well without all the crude violence in my opinion, and Martin’s main characters are children for god’s sake. 

      You asked me who my work is most like, and I would answer Glen Cook and Robert Asprin, but I guess that shows how far behind the curve I really am.

     I correspond from time to time with EDITED, and I always wondered why a published author would be so jaded, but your description of the current state of fantasy explains his mood. Here is a gentleman who made his name writing two-hundred page humorous novels that are wonderful and fun, but now has to worry about his mortgage because he can’t get his new works picked up for publication. He must be some kind of relic, and I guess he would now be considered a ‘good’ writer instead of a ‘special’ one, producing works that don’t have a place in today’s market.

      I was asked recently by a doctor friend of mine, who was putting together a library, for four books to add to his collection. He wanted two fantasy novels and two sci-fi, which I gave him, but it took me days of struggle to think of the fantasy works to include. Could I really give him Goodkind if he had two young sons? How can you possibly recommend such things? Are such titles, no matter how many copies they sell, really a fair representation of the full spectrum of the fantasy genre? I believe they brand fantasy as some terribly creepy domain for pedophiles and rapists.

      However, I have no intention of ‘pissing into the wind’ so to speak. The current market is the only market, period. I feel as though what I’m writing today fits into the fantasy world of twenty years ago [or heaven forbid fifty years ago], and if the field has ‘advanced’ to become so overtly ‘adult’ in the intervening years, then perhaps what I am writing isn’t what it appears. Instead, I might be writing young adult fantasy rather than mainstream fantasy. With the success of Rowling, Christopher Paolini, and Philip Pullman, isn’t it possible that my less than ‘edgy’ and humorous style might fit perfectly into such a category? 

      I have a wife, a mother, a son, and a family, and I just don’t see how someone who writes such dark fantasy as Martin could possibly look a relative in the eye with pride in their work. I really don’t want to be forced into perversion by a dark market, John.  I don’t believe it’s fair to the fifty percent of fantasy readers that are female, or to my wife, my sisters, or even my son. What are we teaching our children with scenes in which brothers and sisters fuck each other before throwing eight year old children from tower windows? I’m not a bible thumper, in fact I have no belief in organized religion what-so-ever, but I do strongly adhere to a code of common decency and respect for humanity. If you truly believe that I must become dark to sell in this genre, then please say so, but if there is another way I would love to hear your thoughts. The simple statement ‘then become a better writer’ comes to mind, but I hope that isn’t forthcoming. 

I’m often intrigued by the use of ‘odd’ words in stories and novels. I can say that I enjoy the little used word now and then, but when does it become a practice of trying too hard, pushing your own sense of linguistic intellect, or heaven forbid drifting into pulp? Sure, we don’t want to repeat the same word three times in a paragraph, but are we better served re-crafting that paragraph than going to the thesaurus and trying to find two more creative versions of the same word? How often do you guys and gals use a thesaurus or even the thesaurus option on MS Word, you know the old Shift + F7?

“Concerning not so much the concubine as three eunuch priests of Cybele and a slave-girl from Samos – a tasty affair of wondrous complexity, which you must give me leave to let simmer in my mind so that I may serve it up to you skimmed of the slightest fat of exaggeration and with all the spice of true detail.”

                                                         Fritz Leiber: Adept’s Gambit

LOL, that’s some frickin’ awesome pulpy goodness. Cheers, Mr. Leiber, I bow to your linguistic aptitude and lush sense of prose.

I did another touch-up on Trench of Skulls this morning and will be sending it out in the next week. I really thought I was done with it but another market opened up, so I can now hope it finally finds a home. The same goes for To Educate a Thief. Also, I pieced together notes on another short to go along with those two but haven’t yet got the hook that it needs. It can be so hard turning a vignette into a short story, and I absolutely won’t write something for publication unless I am sure it’s a short.

Music has always been a great trigger for me, perhaps not in the sense of causing a story to appear, but certainly in getting my creative juices flowing. In 2002 I bought a CD called Celestial Journeys. I used it during my writing sessions for a full year and recently pulled it out and downloaded it to my Ipod. It is now within a 516 song mix, but whenever a song from it comes on I stop what I am doing and feel the need to write. Now that’s funny, I’m like a dog that salivates when a bell rings!
 

Anyway, music tends to transport me places. I associate certain songs with certain times and places.  No matter what I’m doing a song can take me to that place, and it makes me smile. Does anyone else do this with music or is it just me?

I’ve talked about this before, but after hearing that J is moving on from the agent search on her ‘elder statesmen novel’ as she concentrates on new projects, I thought I would address it again.

“They” say it takes 4 novels to get published, but I have often thought about, and seen others thinking and doing, the ‘rewrite, redux, and re-edit’ of old novels in hopes of sending them out again. My thought process here is pulled in two directions, but the older I get the more I am leaning toward the 2^nd of the two, trunk the story for good!

As writers we grow each day, and going backwards is no help at all as it draws away from the progress we make when we continue to write new work. Seriously, go back to something you wrote a year ago and crit it as if it wasn’t yours. What do you find? Now try it with something two or three years old. Even worse huh? I began my latest work, Winter Novel One on August 1^st 2007, and I hope to have it presentable for agents and publishers by August 1^st 2009. Still, how much has my writing changed, developed, and grown in those two years? 

This stuff takes time, and if I wanted to go back to my first novel, heaven forbid, I would be time-jumping to 2003, SIX YEARS AGO! Really, I can’t even read it because there are so many issues in the pages, and although I still believe the story is strong, the writing is horrid, so why waste my time on something already done and failed? 

I’m just here saying that I believe we write and move on, the point of diminishing returns coming after the book makes its final round of submission, and if it doesn’t make a cut you trunk it for good. If it takes three years to write, edit, and submit a novel then that is more than enough time and energy placed on in a single place. Sure you might think, ‘but it was three years! I can’t have wasted that much time on a failure!’, but that is looking at things half empty. This is a process, we learn with every new word, so it was just your groundwork laid to the next bigger and better tale, right?

Anyway, that’s the thought of the day.

Well, considering the success of the Romance/Erotic topic, I thought I would try another genre debate. This one actually means a great deal to me because I consider my Winter Novel to be straddling the two genres of this new debate, assuming of course you use a definition like Justin did concerning Romance/Erotic.

Let me explain… no, there is too much, let me sum up. My protagonist is 18, but the book contains no sex, only a smattering of interpersonal relationships between the opposite sex, and no hardcore bloodshed. However, my question is, would this be straight fantasy because the MC is 18? I could just as easily use Microsoft Word Replace and change the MC to 16 and have absolutely no impact on the story at all, so if I did that would the book suddenly become YA?

What defines YA? And if someone says androgynously sexy young vampires I will de-friend them :)  Remember, this is in your own words, as I’m not looking for the Wiki def!