by the hearth
This is the home of the book nerd. If you would rather read a book than watch TV, you'll fit right in. Here's the spot by my hearth where I share all good things literary:
- rants and humor about books, readers and writers;
- book reviews with a literary and outsider bent;
- lists of great books for specific topics, tastes and purposes;
- helpful tips for anyone who writes on style, voice, world building and characters;
- war stories from the world of indie publishing;
- And tasty morsels about my books, settings and characters.
This is my blog on writing, books and publishing. I may get a bit opinionated at times. Fair warning. If you like my blog, check out my book The Soul and the Seed.
read this.
Love Trumps hate.
This contemporary fantasy thriller predicted the revolt of park rangers, the politics of hate and the brainwashing of a nation more than two years ago. It's fiction with an eery ring of truth.
A story of friendship across borders and resistance against a modern tyranny, this series packs a powerful punch.
Five stars from Amazon reviews.
Get ebooks and paperbacks:
Book 2: The Fear and the Solace
Ten-year-old Shanna has an uneasy feeling about the stranger her seven-year-old brother Rye met on way home from school.
Is she just a silly chicken or is this what Momma calls intuition?
Then Shanna and Rye are disturbed by an angry presence in the shadows under some pine trees and by a mysterious raven. Their mother shows them how to use the magic of Imbolc to protect themselves and stand up for their beliefs.
Shanna and the Raven is the first book in the Children's Wheel of the Year series for earth-centered and Pagan families. It is also a useful book for anyone teaching children about multicultural tolerance and about how to use intuition rather than prejudice to judge potentially dangerous situations.
This week I would like to take a back seat and put the spotlight on Julie Freel, the painter who has made the Children's Wheel of the Year books possible. You can see photographs of many of the illustrations from the Imbolc story titled Shanna and the Raven here.
Children love the direct, emotive paintings that illustrate the scenes of these everyday adventure stories. The paintings bring alive the traditions of the earth-based holidays and without them the stories would be incomplete.
It's time readers got to know the artist behind the illustrations. The best way to do this turned out to be in the form of an interview, so here it goes.
1. Julie, the first Shanna book is largely about intuition. How do you define intuition?
I describe intuition as an internal knowing based on experiences and wisdom that you have gathered. And something beyond that which is unnameable.
2. What do you call the unnameable?
Mystery
3. Is painting an intuitive craft or is it mostly learned skill for you?
It's both.
4. What do you hope to give kids who look at your pictures in the Shanna books?
A sense of connection to the characters and understanding of the story that leads them to a deeper connection with themselves, the earth and mystery.
5. What is the best part of painting illustrations?
The only illustrations I feel inspired to paint are those which have meaning and depth for me. There is a magic in painting that occurs when these marks on a page suddenly pop into the experience you're trying to illustrate.
6. What is the hardest part?
My technical deficits, reworking illustrations when the picture gets muddy instead of clear, leaping internal hurdles like self doubt and time management, so I sit down and do it.
7. What feeling do you have when you are in the midst of it?
When it’s going well, it’s like being in love. When it’s not, I feel frustrated and hopeless. Best is when I get lost in painting, then it’s calm and meditative.
8. Is there anything interesting you can tell kids about the process of making illustrations?
Illustrating a story you want to tell is most fun if you do it in your own way, without thinking about whether anyone else will like it or trying to do something that's really not you. In terms of working with someone else to illustrate a book, it helps me that my writer sketches her vision for scenes.
9. What was the most important part of learning to paint for you?
Drawing was something I could do well enough to gain attention and validation. The first thing I remember that inspired me to paint was Van Gogh. His bold colors and brush strokes called me to express my own emotions through color and form.
10. What is the difference between painting a stand-alone painting and illustrating a book?
The book provides structure and motivation to paint more often. It's nice to do both. Even stand alone paintings have to be something that really motivate and touch me in order to inspire me to paint.
11. Where did you learn painting and drawing?
From watching other children draw as a child, from high school art teachers, college classes, occasional classes and workshops.
12. How do you keep learning?
By painting with artist friends.
13. Where are you from?
As I child I grew up in Southwest Michigan and spent my adult life in rural Eastern Oregon, traveling often to the Czech Republic to see family.
14. Where do you live now?
In northeastern Oregon.
15. What animals do you live with?
Toby, my cat and Sami, my dog and various grandchildren.
16. What is something surprising about you?
I am a child and family counselor and my work with disadvantaged children inspired me to write and illustrate the first (and perhaps only) therapeutic story for Romany children living in Czech orphanages.
Thank you, Julie. If readers have further questions, you can post them in the comments and I'll do another interview post. You can find the Imbolc story Shanna and the Raven, Julie's first book illustrated with oil pastels here.
A child adopted soon after birth cries bitterly for a sister and later it is discovered that a biological sister was born to her birth family.
A four-year-old turns to his grandmother and says, "I'll never forget you, Grandma. Never ever."
An timid little girl found her strength in the song "Jesus Loves the Little Children" at Sunday School, though she didn't really believe he was the one and only god. She then grew up to be a therapist for traumatized children.
Children know things that don't make logical sense. There are so many things they don't know--like if you chew on that electrical cord it will eventually fray and zap you with electricity and if you throw your plastic toys across the room in a tantrum some of them will break and the others will be confiscated.
But then they do know some incredible things.
James Hillman, a prominent psychologist and author of The Soul's Code, wrote that children possess a form of intuition which seems almost miraculous and as we age we lose it, some faster than others but almost all inevitably.
I am always the student in class with my hand up and an annoying question bursting out. If I were at a lecture by Hillman, my question would be, "Do we have to lose it? Isn't there some way to keep on knowing?"
I have been fascinated by that question for years because I had predictive dreams as a child. I can't prove it to others, but I know that it wasn't my imagination. I knew.
When I was nine I dreamed of the moon, big and full in the velvet dark. Then the moon rippled and shattered, breaking into two--one still round and whole and the other squashed and blurred. That was all but I jerked awake and sat up in bed, bathed in cold sweat.
I immediately knew what the dream meant. I had lost one of the new contact lenses that my mother had bought with a huge portion of our family's meager subsistence income. I wasn't told exactly how much but I knew it was a lot. My vision impairment is such that I could see twice as much with contact lenses as I could with glasses, so I needed them badly.
That was why the dream left me shaken and gasping for a few mements. I was relieved that I was in bed and the contacts were safe on the shelf beside me. Just a nightmare, I thought, and I went back to sleep.
The next day I put in my contacts and went to school. I came home and immediately got out my sled and followed my brother to the sledding hill. We barely stopped for dinner. Then the moon rose and we went back out into the silver fairyland of a full-moon winter night.
I straddled my sled at the top of the hill, tasting the cracking cold on my tongue and the ultra dry air in my nostrils. My brother let loose and slipped off down the hill into the dark. I dug my heels in and pushed. The sled scraped against the hard crust of snow and then I was flying.
The cold air rushed past my face, ice crystals stinging so that I had to squint my eyes. The night was alive around me, the sound of sled runners, the shaddows of well-known trees, the star-studded sky and the moon hanging straight out in front of me. Coyotes called on the far ridge and I looked up at the moon, whooping with sheer joy.
And then I saw it. The moon rippled... and then shattered, just as in the dream.
A spark of fear jolted inside me. I had forgotten the dream until that instant and with the wind and spraying snow in my face and the speed of the sled, I could do nothing.
Except cover my face with my mittens and slide to the bottom completely blind.
My brother came when I called for help and I gingerly took lowered my hands from my face. My right eye felt wrong and the moon and everything else was completely blurred. He crouched down to look at my face and then at my mittened hands. And there, amid the snow and wool he found the tiny contact lens--worth more than all of our Christmas presents put together.
On the eve of Imbolc, Ten-year-old Shanna and her seven-year-old brother Rye find protection and connection through the use of intuition and through a myterious raven, who turns out to be a friend. This is the story of a modern earth-centered family who follows the old gods and celebrates the wheel of the year. The Shanna stories give children in Pagan and goddess traditions a community and inspiration within lively adventures that kids can't get enough of. Check out Shanna and the Raven: An Imbolc Story on Amazon.
That was the first prophetic dream I had but not the last. Several times during my childhood, I had other such dreams. I can't explain it but I am telling the simple truth. I dreamed it the night before each time I came close to losing a contact lens. My doctor always said it was incredible that I never lost a contact and never had an eye infection. It's unheard of among similar patients.
When I first got contact lenses, I lived in a cabin without hot water or an indoor toilet. To say that money was tight would be a vast understatement, so it is good that my dreams helped out. I could wish my dreams had warned me about a few other things in life than just this, but mostly they didn't.
Some children seem to be protected. Is it a guardian or is it intuition? And if it is intuition, what is intuition exactly? I have found some answers to these questions, answers which led me to a earth-centered, polytheistic Pagan path. But each person answers these questions in different ways and I doubt there is one absolute truth.
There can be sign posts and maps however, help along the way.
The book Shanna and the Raven is a piece of a map for both children an adults. It is a children's story of today's world, an example of how children use intuition in the real world--for protection and well-being. It is also a story of one family's celebration of Imbolc, a tale for earth-centered families that portrays seasonal celebrations as an integral part of life.
The roar ravaged his ears, the cacophony deafened him, and he swooned into mindless unconsciousness...
Quite.
Creative Commons image by Brandi Redd
That is what happens to readers who read purple prose, if they don't just toss the book and find something better to read. Fortunately for the readers, most of them do toss such books.
And the writers cry in lonely despair, "But it was such a beautiful phrase!"
Writing students often justify embellished prose by claiming that they wish to use the "full power of the English language" or that they refuse to "dumb down" their writing with common and simplistic words. While using the full power of our incredibly versatile language is a worthy goal and I am not in favor of dumbing down writing to the lowest common denominator, neither of these goals really have anything to do with the use of purple prose.
Purple prose is something to be avoided. Period.
And yes, as with many things in writing there is a fine line between purple prose and style. But we can get to that.
Purple prose arises when a writer:
Creative Commons image by Alice Popkorn
No reader enjoys purple prose. Some writers will argue with this because writers sometimes enjoy their own purple prose. But writers don't really count as their own number one reader. Purple prose isn't legitimate description, which may bore some but inspire others. Purple prose is always boring, annoying and embarrassing.
That said, almost all writers go through a stage of purple prose and many of us struggle to weed it out in editing even as professionals. Struggling with the demons of purple prose is no sin. Allowing them to cavort drunk and unhindered through the temples of our word gods is.
Fortunately, the methods for stamping out purple prose and making your descriptions shine twice as bright are relatively simple. Here are the basics:
On top of these common guidelines, there are a few specific tips professed by George Orwell, the father of the genre of dystopia and a writer of extraordinary clarity and descriptive prowess:
Finally two advanced tips from my own hard won experience.
These two rules are related. In the professional jargon of writers a "baby" is any word, phrase, plot twist or device that you are unreasoningly attached to during the editing stage. You will notice the pull of these bits. They are the parts that make you smile when you run across them and yet they rarely entrance anyone else. You know for sure that you have a "baby" when you find yourself thinking or saying, "But it just sounds so good!" or "It's only that I really like it that way."
These are red flags.
Sure, we are allowed to have preferences, but if your only defense against problems with a word, phrase or plot twist is that you like it, then you should almost certainly get rid of it. This is painful but will vastly improve your writing. It is called "killing your babies" because all writers know the pain of it but we have to laugh at ourselves a little in retrospect. If you look back on the "baby" phrases and words you were so attached to a year or so ago you will know what I mean.
This is a safe place for writers and readers alike to discuss these issues. I read all comments and I love to hear from you. What are your experiences with using description and metaphors? Any particularly harrowing stories about "killing your babies?" Comments of your own experience are always welcome. We are concerned with improving our own writing, rather than judging others.
When I was in high school my teachers, mentors and family members gushed praise over my talent as a budding writer. I'll bet that if you're reading a post about the secrets of the writing craft, yours did too... or perhaps they still do.
Creative Commons image by UNC CFC USFK of Flickr.com
I have seen many talented students in writing classes and writer's critique groups over the past twenty years. And there is one terrible affliction that affects them all at some point--the same one that has at times afflicted me. That is the belief that I had made it.
I don't mean financially. There are only a handful of writers in the whole world who have made it financially through their craft. But I'll admit it. I've suffered through times when I thought I had become such a good writer that I had little left to learn of the craft. I'm glad to say that as I've gotten older, that particular affliction has recurred less and less often.
Before you get offended and go off certain that you are the exception, sure that you have learned all the basics of writing and only need to polish the brightest jewels in your prose, please stop and consider. I was seventeen when an article I wrote in a small-town newspaper won a statewide competition. I didn't even have to submit the article. It was noticed all on its own. My first writing professor in college initially scoffed at the idea that I would double his required word count and make it all high quality as well. He wasn't scoffing after two semesters in which I delivered before every deadline. And yet when I look back on my writing from that time, I can only cringe and laugh and tell myself it is good that I've improved.
Creative Commons image by Stuartpilbrowof Flickr.com
I had the spark and many others do too. I am not saying you're a hack, just that many new writers who are good still don't have the best skills of the craft. And after twenty years of writing non-stop, I stand in awe at all I have left to learn.
So, don't despair. Keep your current writing in good clean folders and notebooks. Make sure you keep it safe. You will need it in ten or twenty years, when you will look back and be astounded by how far you have come. It will make you cringe but also give you courage.
But I promised you the big secret of writing gripping characters, not all this blather about how much you have yet to learn. Don't worry. That wasn't click bait.
It's only that my writing students have been teaching me that new and talented writers who can dance with language, produce dazzling sentences, craft sturdy and beautiful paragraphs and plot a snappy narrative believe they have it made and often refuse to consider technical terms. They assume they know the "rules" already, even when they don't.
My writing students recently swore to me that they know what P.O.V. means. Their manuscripts tell another tale.
So, I decided to put this out there. The single most important key to writing gripping characters is the correct and deft use of Point of View. As you probably already know, Point of View (abbreviated to P.O.V.) refers to the perspective your story is narrated from. It goes beyond the difference between first person versus third person. Or the mandatory caveat that stories can technically be written in second person, but that just because a thing can be done doesn't mean you should.
There is also the difference between limited P.O.V. and omniscient, i.e. whether the reader feels like a bug sitting in your character's brain, listening to his/her thoughts and watching the action through his/her eyes, or feels like the God of monotheistic religions, sitting on a cloud and viewing the whole thing from above. As the terms hint, the former is called "limited" P.O.V. and the latter is called "omniscient."
Creative Commons image by Dennis Skley
If the terminology of "first person" and "third person" gives you trouble, here is an excellent beginner's guide to P.O.V. But what I am discussing in this post goes a bit beyond the bare bones.
Many writers think of P.O.V. as a simply a technical decision you make at the beginning of a writing project, like the verb tense you will use. You decide whether or not you will tell the story as "I" and in the present moment, so that the reader feels like they are the main character and the events are happening right now OR if you will tell a story about another person--a guilt-ridden old man, a reckless young woman or some other "he" or " she"--and in some long distant fantasy age or possibly a yet unforeseen future. And ,many writers believe that once the decision has been made that's the end of it and that gripping characters can be had with any tense or P.O.V.
Many will argue that P.O.V. is not character development and thus it has nothing to do with how gripping your characters are.
But they'll be wrong.
Deciding which P.O.V. to use is no small thing. It's a momentous choice and not one you can change easily. I can tell you from bitter experience, that if you change your mind two chapters into a story and decide to change your P.O.V. you should definitely not attempt to edit your chapters to reflect the change. You should start from scratch and write the chapters again. P.O.V. affects everything, every turn of phrase and many things too subtle for anyone to consciously edit well.
The reason for this gets at the root of why P.O.V. is the key to gripping characters.
Here is a hard truth. Despite all this talk of different P.O.V.s in fiction, there is in reality only one P.O.V.:
Creative Commons image by Jimmy Baikovicius
The reader.
I'm serious. At the very least, it's the only one that matters. When you read George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, you are presented with a myriad of different P.O.V.s but they all meet at one point. They all meet in the reader. The reader feels and understands the various characters, knows their fears and anger, grits their teeth in frustration and clings to fleeing hope.
How does Martin manage to get readers so hotly engaged in the characters and the story and keep them that way for years... a lot of years?
It is primarily because when Martin wrote, he clearly took the position of each character in turn, put himself in those shoes and smelled what that character smelled, felt what he or she felt, burned with the anger of that character and knew the history of that character--even the history not specifically stated in the pages.
New writers make P.O.V. mistakes a lot, chief among them being what we call "head-hopping." You can technically avoid head-hopping by learning what it is and how to avoid it from a technical standpoint. But there is an easier short-cut to avoiding it and one that will inevitably make your characters grip the reader more.
Try this exercise. After you finish reading this, take your hands off your keyboard, close your eyes and form the image of the character who you want to tell your next story. I don't care if this is the kennel boy, the vapid alien, the plucky rookie cop or an omniscient God. Make up an image. Then make up an image of a video camera in your hand. Put your eyes into the camera and then your ears and lastly your heart. Make sure they are firmly inside this camera. And then hand the camera to your character.
Creative Commons image by Ed Brambley
Good. Now, go write. But write ONLY what that camera in the hands of your character sees and hears and feels.
If you are writing the next big thing after A Song of Ice and Fire and you need to jump from character to character, take a moment each time you want to make the switch to a different character. Envision the next character and clearly see within your mind the character who had the camera last handing the camera to the next character. Then continue writing.
Don't just switch without taking the time for this exercise or some similar moment of concentration and visualization. You must take this time and engage in a conscious process of switching. That is the key to writing gripping characters.
Not just deciding on a P.O.V. and not just choosing the "correct" one for your type of story, which is a debatable issue. But rather the clear understanding of what your P.O.V. can see and hear and feel.
Your book may not be a movie and you may not even want it to have a film-like feel. That doesn't matter. Your narrator still can only experience what he/she/it experiences. No more.
You can have the camera held by one person and thus see all closely from that person's perspective, including understanding their inner world and feelings of that one character and misunderstanding and guessing at the feelings and thoughts of other characters. Or you can give the camera to God and point it at the characters, seeing all of them more objectively, yet not delving deep into their inner thoughts and emotions. But you cannot have it both ways without a clear break.
Keep in mind that characters cannot actually see themselves, unless they are looking in a mirror. You cannot start a sentence describing a character's facial features and ending with his inner, unspoken fears. Well, physically you can of course, if you really want to. There are plenty of examples of a character looking into a mirror and noting their appearance and then continuing with their inner thoughts. But this is an overused technique and should only be employed if it comes up as a completely obvious choice for your character. If you create this kind of sentence without the mirror and thus imply looking from the outside and then the inside of the person at the same time, you will destroy your reader's experience and turn readers away from your character. Such a character does not hold interest or empathy.
When I explained this in classes, one student responded by pulling out examples from classical literature in which this rule has been broken by famous authors of the distant past. The question was plain. Do I dare to challenge the titans of fiction?
Well, in some ways I do. We don't look down on the great medieval painters because they painted stiff, portraits of children with faces that appear middle aged. But neither do we emulate them. Crafts progress and P.O.V. is one way in which the craft of fiction writing has developed over the past several hundred years.
Creative Commons image by Isawkins of Flickr.com
On the other hand, many early works are quite good and have a magic of their own. I didn't claim that P.O.V. is the answer to everything, just the key to gripping characters. Engaging character development was not always the highest goal of the fiction writer. In the ages before Facebook and on-demand TV, fiction could take at least a little longer to get around to the point and characters could be a bit less gripping in favor of other virtues of the prose.
Today, however, they can't.
Either you grip your reader or you die. All writers must die as George Martin would probably say. The question is whether or not you will die in obscurity without your stories being read.
If you want to grab readers, make your characters grip. And in order to make them grip, be absolutely certain of your P.O.V. and stick to it. Never forget who is is holding your camera at any given moment and be firmly inside their experience as you write.
There is more to writing gripping characters of course, things like character description, motive, character arc, background and believable interactions--all things I will discuss in other posts. But getting the P.O.V. right and sticking to it is more important than any of that. Without a solid and steady P.O.V. there is no character to develop.
I love connecting to fellow writers. Let's share our experiences. Drop me a line below and tell me and other readers about your experiences with writing P.O.V. Have you made any dramatic mistakes with P.O.V.? What is your favorite P.O.V.? Are these terms new to you or have you been wrestling the beast for some time?
Be well and keep writing.
I’ve got to be honest here. This is unlikely to be the most popular blog post about social media and on-line marketing. That’s because I am not going to tell you this is the best time to be an author, entrepreneur or creative artist and there is a ton of money just waiting for you once you buy my book on marketing and use my simple five-step plan. That’s what a lot of sites say and it’s a more palatable message than the truth.
Creative Commons image by Moyan Brenn
I’ve spent the last three years busting my butt looking for answers in this field, trying out quite a few things myself and watching many of my fellows crash and burn. I have no intention of writing or selling a book about how to market on-line. So I don’t need to make things sound better than they are in order to sell you something.
And yet I want to tell what I have learned.
“Why?” I can hear you asking. “If you know so much about it, why don’t you just write your own book on marketing?”
I’m not writing my own book on marketing because I don’t see any quick or easy ways to do it. The whole rigmarole around selling such books by promising unrealistic fantasies of people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps makes me physically ill and tempted to violence against innocent pieces of computer hardware (because the authors of said drivel are out of my reach).
The real impetus behind me wanting to blog about how to market on-line is that I get spammed every day by dozens of new entrepreneurs and authors tagging me in their posts about their new cover, their new jewelry line, their new Amazon discount deal or some such as well as new the same people force-adding me to their fan groups and fan events, thus dumping dozens more emails in my inbox before I have a chance to opt out of these spammy groups and events. I mostly just delete these spammers, sometimes unfriending them if I have time. Occasionally I vent my frustration with irate messages asking them to stop spamming me and suggesting that this is an unwise marketing strategy for books or anything else.
But the other day I took a different tact. I was in an especially good mood, so instead of ranting and deleting or even ignoring, I simply sent the spammer a concerned note, explaining their tagging tactic was going to backfire and make people hate them. And instead of an irate response back, which is usually what you get for your trouble, this one thanked me, said he was very new to marketing and asked for advice.
He was the author of an erotic thriller—something I would read AFTER I finished all the technical manuals and pukey romances, if I were stranded on Mars for years without access to any other reading material. In case you can’t tell, I find erotic books excruciatingly boring. I know. I’m weird, but all readers are weird in one way or another and this guy seriously had the wrong reader demographic going. I had to tell him.
So in the interests of reducing spam and of having a blog post to send future newbies, here is what I know about on-line marketing.
Spamming doesn’t work. I know you’ve probably read marketing things that say a person has to see your book or product X number of times before they’ll be likely to buy it and so you’re trying to fill that number by making sure people see it on social media.
Here are the problems with that concept:
That’s why many on-line marketers turn to tactics that cause potential customers to remember them with hate rather than trust. These tactics primarily involve ensuring that your message gets specially delivered to the individual.
These marketers use whatever Facebook or Twitter or other social media happen to be directly delivering to people at the moment. Right now on Facebook this means adding people to groups and events without permission and tagging people in posts. Both of these tactics are legal on Facebook and they result in the person added or tagged getting a special message about it—a message that always gets delivered rather than just sitting in the news feed que and possibly not being seen at all like regular posts.
Some marketers feel that they have somehow “earned” the attention because they have to input each name to be added or tagged individually and it is actually quite a bit of work. But whatever the marketers think, the result is still the same. They are forcing the random people they target to deal with yet one more message in their already swamped on-line environment. This either results in the person swiftly dismissing the spam or in the person taking a moment to notice and hate the product presented.
Don’t do these things.
Don’t post tons of posts about your book or product, don’t in fact try to get random people to see your message X number of times and don’t send random people special messages about your book or product, so that they have to take the small action of deleting your message and/or opting out of your spamming group or event.
These tactics don’t work. If they worked for someone else it was before 2011 or they are a celebrity of some kind already.
There are no quick fixes. The book market is completely saturated--over-saturated by orders of magnitude. Many other on-line markets are similarly flooded. It is very unlikely for a new author, artist or innovator to break in without several years of work, unless you have some prior celebrity and a big publisher or distributor (and even then it isn't a done deal). But from three years of hard full-time work, a ton of reading and discussions with more experienced marketers, I have observed a couple of strategies that provide some returns:
Creative Commons image by 401(K) 2012 of Flickr.com
Strategy 1: Find a clear-cut genre and write A LOT of books in that genre (more than ten, twenty books is better) following genre standards to the letter and write snappy, easily read prose.
This is not about writing “well.” It is about writing what the largest group of readers wants and that is not actually in line with good prose. It is instead about keeping everything ultra simple, both plot and prose. Characters must fit popular beauty standards and the problems and solutions in the books must pander to the current trends of the age group of the your ideal readers. Avoid controversial subjects or main characters representing minority groups.
Then give away a few books for free, sell the rest cheap and blog about your genre incessantly. The same might be applied to music, I suppose, but with physical products this mainly requires producing the cheapest and least environmentally-responsible product you can. I’m not saying this is a good tactic. It’s a soul-destroying tactic for either writers, artists or other businesses, but I have observed that it has some merits as a marketing strategy. It can make someone a living.
Strategy 2: Choose an underrepresented non-fic topic and write a book or two about that. Alternatively specifically include characters representing minority groups or other demographic niches (not genre so much as demographics). Sell those but blog incessantly about your topic, minority or nich and advertise your books in each blog post.
This can be applied to physical products as well. Simply choose to sell something that is unavailable or not widely available on-line but needed by a specific group of people (even they are only 0.2 percent of the population) and then blog the hell out of it. It takes several years to break in and you need some luck. First, you had better be right that your product or book niche is both underrepresented and needed. And you have to hope that several other businesses don’t come up with the same idea at the same moment or slightly earlier than you.
I recently found exactly the product I needed for my hyperactive child who legitimately needs to chew on something in order to focus. I found one on-line company that could demonstrate a track record and had nice-looking chewies designed for older kids (not babies) made from materials that don’t pose a health risk. I had never heard of the company before but they got my business right then, because I searched and they had a blog and it demonstrated knowledge and a track record. I bought $50 worth of products from them immediately. No X number of views. Just a niche need met. This is a much better strategy than the first but it does require you to have a niche and to blog for free for months, probably years before you ever see payday.
Strategy 3: Finally, you can write or make only what you are passionate about, blog incessantly about the topics and themes connected to those books or products, advertise the books or products beside each related blog post, offer a free book or sample for subscribers to your blog, blog at least once a week, post your blog posts on social media where people may actually really want to read them, such as matching-topic Facebook groups or Twitter tags.
Thus I write fantasy and blog about herbs because fantasy readers often like herbs and there are herbs in my books. I write dystopia and I blog about social exclusion and social justice issues related to the themes. This has gained me a mailing list of five hundred truly interested people in one year and favorable Facebook and Google algorithm ratings. Some people now come to my site by searching Google for some of my keywords. I don't have to rely on having a huge number of Facebook friends or on manually inputting their names into spam methods, because I can reach people who aren't friends with me at all by putting interesting posts into Facebook herbalist groups that will actually enjoy them.
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One reason I actually encourage you to indulge your own passions and write about what you love is that you won't have to do nearly as much research and the research you do have to do will give you added energy. I could have blogged about the history of the fantasy genre to support my books, but then I would have had to do a lot of extra research. I know medicinal herbs already, so I can blog about that. I want to avoid doing a ton of research, not because I'm lazy but because you never get paid to blog and you have to be able to keep it up for YEARS in order for it to matter. So pick a topic you don't have to research too hard.
This isn’t a hugely effective strategy, but it does get you a mailing list of actually interested people. It is most lucrative when combined with a niche market (see strategy 2) with very little competition. But it is also something you can do to feed your soul, while paying the bills with another job and having the hope that with consistent effort over many years, you may be able to make your living doing what you love. Honestly, only one in several thousand people will ever succeed with Strategy 3, but that is also the strategy that has produced some of the most remembered writers of history, who were often unknown in their lifetimes but were eventually discovered and recognized for their intense passion.
All of these strategies have one thing in common—the specific desire of the potential customer. In Strategy, 1 you cater to the largest known customer base, giving them what they want for as little as possible at all cost to quality and your own creativity--banking on the fact that although you will never be great you can make a living by simply having so many trickles of income that it adds up. In Strategy 2, you find a niche market in need of something and then fill that need. Here you have to price your products a bit higher (sometimes very high) because the market is small. In Strategy 3, you focus on your own passions and work on connecting with people who share the same passions and thus the desire for what you have to offer.
Contrast this with the author of the erotic thriller who dumped his video trailer in my inbox. No attempt was made to determine if I or anyone else tagged by his dozens of posts was at all interested in his topic. He simply fired his shotgun and let the random pellets spray. Pounding the average person with random ads will only get them to block you, delete your Facebook "friendship" and cut off all contact if they can. Thus it isn't good marketing. Blog about the themes of your books or possibly your genre if you are aiming for the mass market.
All three of these strategies share one more thing and that is a stand-alone webpage. I know there are Facebook business pages and I have asked experts about them, but I have not been able to determine whether or not they are good for anything. There was once a time (back in the dinosaur days of 2012) when Facebook business pages were considered "social credit," meaning a potential customer could go to your business page and see that you had a ton of "likes" and thus believe that yours is a moderately trustworthy brand. Facebook business pages and Twitter accounts show how many people have been persuaded one way or another to “like” your page, although bundles of “likes” are also for sale, so the credibility this affords is ever decreasing. However, these pages don’t really do much to get your message out to the people who want what you have to offer. The best base for any of the reasonably functional strategies is a stand alone website.
So, here’s what I told the erotic thriller guy:
"If you write thrillers with a macho, gun-porn sort of aesthetic and you know a lot about guns, blog about guns. (Just an example. I have no idea what your thrillers are like.) And then you get on Twitter and FB and post the link to your blog with hashtags and in "Facebook groups" that like posts about guns—such as hunter's groups, NRA people, Republicans, survivalists, ranchers and men’s groups with that particular atmosphere. And then people who actually like guns will click on your link, go to your page, read your post, sign up for your mailing list to get more such posts and... eventually some of them buy your books, if you were actually right that people who like guns might also like your books. It's tricky and a hell of a lot of work, several times more work than writing a good book, but it actually allows you to post on social media in a way people will applaud rather than hate and thus they will like you rather than hate you. No one really has ever sold anything by annoying people. It only seems like they must have because annoying random people is the most common (and the most unsuccessful) marketing tactic."
I wish everyone out there good luck in finding those who want what you are selling. They very likely do exist even if you’re selling a thneed.
In my last post, you learned about the building materials needed to make a fictional language. Nuts and bolts, verbs and nouns, bricks and cement—that sort of thing. You could stop there if all you need is a few sentences of dialogue to add an exotic feel to a character who is supposed to be from another culture in your story. But the real magic and usually the whole reason for creating a fictional language for your story goes a lot deeper--to a level that makes your settings and characters live and breathe.
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Language is part of culture and culture is part of your fictional setting--the environment that shapes your characters. As such, when writers invest time and effort in creating fictional languages the purpose isn’t just a generalized exotic atmosphere, but rather a technique for shaping characters and social setting in specific ways. With languages, we can play with psychology and symbols and get deeper ideas across without having to spell them out and spoil the plot.
Creating a fictional language is a wonderful way to manipulate the culture and setting of the world in your novel because you become like a true magician. By uttering a few words, you create massive changes. As such, you must be careful what you wish for. Subtle things in a language can have far reaching effects.
Here are a few of the magic spells you can cast—or avoid casting—depending on your needs.
I mentioned gender briefly in the post about grammar. Many languages show the gender of a person being spoken about. Others even make clear the gender of the speaker, meaning that little boys and little girls actually have to learn to speak in two different ways. But it isn't a given. Some languages may not point out gender so much.
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Take a moment to think about the possible consequences for the culture. As a general rule, linguists have found that languages that emphasize gender are found in cultures where gender roles are very clear cut and inflexible. English makes it very hard to avoid spelling out whether or not a person being spoken or written about is a man or a woman. This has caused a lot of frustration for English-speaking feminists, who wish to break down stereotypes and avoid the second reference to a theoretical doctor or repairman as “he” or a nurse as “she.” In recent decades, many people have tried to avoid this with cumbersome constructions, like “he/she” or “they” used in the singular, or with obscure, made-up pronouns like “ze” and “xe.”
That may seem like a big problem to English-speaking feminists, but take a language like Spanish, where even the adjectives show what gender the person you’re talking about is, and all nouns are associated with a gender. Talk about stereotypes and assumptions!
Then there are the Slavic languages—like the Czech my children are growing up to speak—where it isn’t just pronouns, nouns and adjectives but even verbs! You cannot say anything about what you have done in the past without giving away your gender. Avoiding the gender of a person is almost impossible even in the shortest sentences. As a result, gender-neutral names are anathema and officially illegal. They would cause no end of confusion. Small boys in this culture—my son included—often encounter a strange problem because as toddlers they are exposed primarily to women’s speech at home and thus inadvertently speak like females for a few years, not having heard enough male speech to form it correctly. Men often come down heavy on this quirk of little boys and thus reinforce the patriarchal idea that being female is shameful. Gender roles are often starkly defined.
What does this mean for your fictional language? Well first of all, if your story takes place in a culture with heavily defined gender roles, make sure the language has lots of gender definition in it. You can point out these issues, even if your dialogue is actually written in English. How characters think about language and the mistakes people notice others make in language are both keys to cultural norms and can say volumes about the social environment without you having to explain.
On the other hand, if you want to claim that your fictional culture is not hung up on gender and is thus more equitable, you will need to do away with this sort of gender differentiation in the language. Preferably don’t even use separate pronouns for “he” and “she.”
My own example comes from The Kyrennei Series. It isn’t until Book 5, that the Kyren language is more deeply explained, but there are earlier hints about gender neutrality. As in many fictional languages where the author wants to emphasize gender equity, there is no specific pronoun for “he” and “she” in Kyren.
However, almost all societies do have divisions. (If yours doesn’t, where will your necessary, fictional conflict come from?) It is an excellent idea to emphasize the most crucial social divisions in your grammar. What if instead of “he” and “she,” you had separate pronouns for peasants and nobility? Your social structure would be locked in place even more rigidly than medieval Europe. Peasants and nobility might not even be considered to be of the same species!
In my Kyren language, the division that is not apparent between genders exists between the old and the young and between those who are Kyren and those who are not. There are four different pronouns for “he/she” (and another four for “they” for that matter. In Kyren, you get no breaks for speaking in the plural.)
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There is a pronoun for a young Kyren person and one for an old Kyren person. There are also pronouns for a young non-Kyren outsider and for an old, non-Kyren outsider. Just to make it more fun, all nouns come in these categories too, just as nouns have gender in Spanish. The verb endings reflect the same differences.
This tells the reader—without anyone ever saying it outright—that the ancient Kyren culture was obsessed with age, respectability and Kyren versus outsider status. There are important reasons for this as any Kyrennei Series reader will know. That’s why it's magic. This kind of game with gender and social divisions can paint vivid pictures and spark massive conflict in your setting.
But go cautiously at first! As with all powerful magic, there are costs and pitfalls. Keeping the words of the spell (and the grammatical endings) straight can be an immense task, if you complicate your language in this way. At the very least, you should play with it a bit before inserting it into a book. If you want to tackle encoding social divisions in your language, make sure that everything I wrote in the last post about the building materials of language is very familiar first.
Most languages change their verbs a bit to show when something is happening in the present (you’re reading), in the past (I wrote), or in the future (you’ll write). There are some languages that don’t entirely separate these ideas of time, however. Or they may do so in ways English speakers would find unsatisfactory.
One could say that English is a bit obsessed with pinpointing time exactly. We have at least twelve basic verb tenses, all of which we consider to impart crucial bits of information. Consider the differences between the sentences “I will have written it by tomorrow” and “Tomorrow I will have been writing it for a week.” Most languages would have to go into quite a lot of explanations to make sure you got all the nuance of difference between those sentences.
Why does English have so many verb tenses? Possibly our ancestors worshiped clocks. Hard to say but if you want to make a society obsessed with time, you had better give them at least a moderate number of verb tenses.
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Conversely, if you want to protray a society where people live in the moment and emphasize their phlegmatic relationship with time, you don’t have to give them verb tenses at all. If they really need to specify that they fought a battle yesterday, they can just say, “We fight yesterday.” The point gets across. And there are real languages like this.
What if you’re writing science fiction and you have a society that is very familiar with time travel? They would almost have to do without verb tenses. Thus it would not be so important whether the battle already happened or will happen in the future. That’s relative and might even be changeable.
As with gender and other divisions, be careful with over complication. But also have fun. Time is a lovely play thing.
A prejudice is simply an assumption or a pre-conceived notion. It does not mean your character is bad. Everyone, even good people, make assumptions all the time. And many assumptions and prejudices stem from the very language we speak.
Terminology, such as the word “disabled,” creates assumptions. When a person (or a machine) is called “dis-abled” our English-speaking brain assumes that this means it is less able in general, even though what we actually mean is that one certain function works differently. In today’s society some “disabilities” such as deafness, may not really “dis-able” the individual in any significant way. Deaf people simply speak a different language. We all have differing abilities and lack of ability in various areas. Whether you are called “disabled” or not, you know if you are a fast runner or if you have perfect pitch. Often certain abilities will be mutually exclusive. You can’t have both the strength of a body-builder and the speed and agility of a prime soccer offense player. The two don’t work well together, but neither is considered “dis-ability.”
In fiction, you could construct a language where terms for bodily abilities were different and thus created different, possibly more open-minded assumptions. Of if you want to heighten conflict in your story (always good for your plot), you could construct terminology that actually increases assumptions. Consider the interesting real-world fact that the word for German in many Slavic languages literally means “those who can’t talk.” It is very similar to the modern word for “mute.” One can see what the ancient Slavic tribes thought of the ancient Germanic tribes. But the assumptions carry over subliminally even until today. You can do this in fictional languages as well.
In the Kyrennei Series, the term “Kyrennei” means “people of the night spirits” or something of the like. Their term for people who aren’t Kyrennei is “Nyttanah” which means “people of the day spirits.” There are all kinds assumptions and prejudices that pop up because of these two terms. I don’t mean by this that my characters are bad and evil racists. I simply mean that they are reawakening an ancient culture which makes certain assumptions and this does play into some of the conflict.
Another way to show assumptions and prejudices is in the use of adjectives and nouns. As I said earlier, putting a certain gender to each noun will automatically cause people to leap to certain associations with that noun. School is feminine in many cultures and castle or fortress is usually masculine. If it were the other way around that would say something interesting about the culture. But there are many other ways to do this beyond gender.
The best way to show this trick is by example. In my fictional language, Kyren you cannot say an adjective such as “big” or “small” without giving away what you think about the person or thing being described. Adjectives have endings that show whether the speaker thinks the attribute (such as largeness or smallness) is temporary or permanent. Thus if you say a child is small, you will use a temporary ending. But if you say an adult is temporarily large the connotation is quite different. In fact, in the world of the Kyrennei an adult can be only temporarily large--generally those who carry Kyrennei genes but are born into Nyttanah bodies. If they undergo a genetic change, they will become smaller, more the size of a young tween.
And the ending also changes depending on whether or not the speaker thinks that all similar people or objects generally share that attribute--in this case temporary largeness and whether the person or object is unique in being being temporarily large. So, if you speak about a child as small, you will either say the child is temporarily small like all children or temporarily uniquely small to say the child is small for the age. There is no middle ground. You have to choose in order to use the adjective “small” in Kyren.
This is a very advanced linguistic trick but it can define your society in interesting ways. If you force the language to reveal the assumptions of the speaker, whether those assumptions are about groups of people or objects (as in Kyren) or about whether or not actions are completed or not (as in many real-world languages) you will force your people to be cautious in their wording and create cultures where offense is given easily.
Good fiction must have conflict and that is why most of my language-tweaking suggestions involve giving your fictional culture problems and tensions. But there is another way to create conflict—love.
That’s right. Make your people love something and then threaten it, abuse it or deny it to them and you’ll have more conflict than you know what to do with. But the deeper the love runs, the greater the passion will be.
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And there is nothing deeper in psychology than the way we use language.
So, if you want to make your fictional characters love something with a deep, irrational passion or show a cultural reverence for age, wisdom, freedom, youth, piety, virginity, sex or whatever, encode it in the language.
First of all, you can make words connected to those things you want your fictional people to revere romantic and beautiful in sound. This can be particularly effective when the thing you’re adopting as a social obsession is actually something modern society thinks of as negative, such as death or sex.
This is a good place to make up idioms. You can make positive associations between words that today’s real-world culture might not see as positive.
Here's a real world example from the Czech language. When a person wants to say that a situation, idea or thing is NOT good in Czech, they might say, “It’s not greasy and salty.” While not being greasy and salty (especially applied to things that aren’t food) is generally considered a good thing in modern culture, that phrase dates back to a time when the poor peasants in this landlocked country desired salt and fat (usually a priceless bit of lard) above all else. And the phrase is still widely used today. Language shows what we desire and love.
Obviously idioms can just as easily show what a culture despises or does not value. In English, when we say, “The CEO made a blind decision,” we aren’t just saying a bad thing about the CEO, we’re also expressing a cultural assumption about blindness as unwise or stupid. If you are aware of these markers and use them in the dialogue of your characters as fictional idioms, you can create complex loves and hates in a reader without ever having to resort to the more obvious tricks of the trade.
These are a few of the advanced, professional-grade power tools used by writers when constructing a fictional language. Pulling it all together can take time, especially if you make the language overly complex. But you may not need as much of it as you think. Insert a few specific idioms into your English-language dialogue and you’ve essentially hinted at a fictional language. If used consistently and with care the bits and pieces can make the cultural setting of your story shine.
J.R.R. Tolkien has long been seen as the master of fictional languages—a genius in fact—and many writers I talk to say they would never attempt to repeat his feats because that would require being an academic linguist.
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My bachelor’s degree is in linguistics—Slavic linguistics to be exact. And I had the great honor to study with professor George Smalley at Lawrence University in Wisconsin in the 1990s. However, I’m not an expert or a true academic linguist. And still I can make a very credible fictional language, and I can tell you that it isn’t as difficult as it looks. There are amateur pitfalls to avoid, certainly, but the background necessary to start a fictional language can be laid out in a few steps.
The first and most indispensable step for making a fictional language without looking silly is mastering the parts of speech or the building materials that you'll use to construct your language. The essential issue is that you don’t want to take a sentence like, “I’m going to cut off your stinking head, you barbarian!” and translate it word for word simply by making up a word for each word in the sentence. That would result in something like “Gwa’l tori ik akshi ma lu yelim krat, dre marano!”
Even if you wrote each one of these words down in your notebook and remembered them well enough to use “dre” for “you” the next time you wrote a sentence, it still would be silly. For one thing “dre” doesn’t appear to be related to “lu.” And it should be, because “you” and “your” always have some relation in any language. Beyond that “am going to cut” is one verb and in most languages it would be one word, maybe two. English is a bit strange that it makes so many little words out of one verb.
If you tried to make a fictional language by the method of translating every word from English, it would not only be silly, it would be insanely difficult to maintain for more than a sentence or two because of the finicky little words you'd have to keep track of, like "am" and "to."
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The key to making a believable fictional language and not going nuts while you do it is having a good grasp of your building materials and making your own rules for them. For most people, the most difficult part of creating a fictional language is reviewing what you learned in middle school English class about verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, articles and the like.
Now stop that! Your eyes are glazing over. I can smell it. I’m not going to make you diagram sentences. But essentially if you can keep these few terms straight, you can make a fictional language that no one can sneer at.
A verb is an action. (Sit, run, be, am, am going, are sitting, was running, has been reading—be careful of the fact that many verbs in English are made up of more than one word but that’s really the only tricky part.)
There are no known languages that don’t have verbs of some sort. The main trick to this part is making sure you’re using the whole verb. In the sentence “I will have been writing for ten years next week” the verb is “will have been writing.” That’s four words in English (not even counting the pronoun), but in many languages it would be one word. It is much easier to simplify your verbs in this way. You don’t need a word for each of the four words “will have been writing.” .
Instead what you need is a rule. Take the most important word from that verb—”writing”—and make up a word that means “to write” in your fictional language. Let’s say you make up “Falimanesa.” Great! That sounds suitably grand for our noble profession.
But stop a minute and look more closely at your fictional word. You must decide what about it makes it basic verb in your language. Is it that it starts with F? Or is it that it ends in “esa” or just A? Usually it’s the beginning or the ending. Just as English has “to” to show that we’re talking about the basic verb “to write” other languages have their own ways to mark a verb.
Let’s say you decide to go the easy route, like I would. Looking at your first fictional verb, you decide that all basic verbs will end in A. (Vowels are a good choice for the standard ending.) So "Falimanesa" is "to write" and "Bida" is "to eat," and so on. Just build a word list as you go. If you only need a few sentences of a fictional language in your book, it won't even be that many words but it will look like it's a real language.
Then it’s time to decide how complicated your grammar will be. In the beginning, it is best to start out simple, which means you probably won’t have much beyond a past tense, a present tense and a future tense.
Past tense is things like “I wrote,” “I was writing,” and “I had written.” In your fictional language you do not need separate words for these different English phrases. They’re all just past. They happened. It’s over.
Present tense is things like “I write,” “I’m writing,” and “I have been writing.” Don’t complicate it. Make them all the same. The same goes for future tense. There is no need to have a different form for “I’ll write,” and “I’m going to be writing.” They are in the future. If you want to make your life difficult and have a degree in linguists somewhat more advanced than mine, feel free to ignore this.
Now you need to have a simple rule for your three verb tenses. Let’s say you make all writing in the past be “Falimanesan,” all writing in the present be “Falimanesat,” and all writing in the future be “Falimanesas.”
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Simple. Elegant. Easy to remember. Past verbs end in AN, present in AT and future in AS. Yes, most languages have exceptions but don’t tinker with that until you’ve mastered this. You can also theoretically make your verb change depending on what the subject is. It can be as simple as the difference between English “I run” and “he runs.” But it isn’t necessary and at first it is better to keep it simple. It will look complicated enough both to you and to your reader by the time you’re done.
In the fictional example of my sentence about cutting off heads. We need a verb for “to cut.” Let’s make it dramatic like, “aksha.” To show that the cutting is going to happen in the future (however near) we’ll use “akshas.”
A noun is a “person, place or thing.” (Yup, you probably remember that from grade school. "Dog", "house," "houseboat," "you," "Mr. Blip the alien" and "I" are all nouns.)
Theoretically, nouns can be simpler than verbs. You don’t really NEED to have various forms of nouns. But you should be aware that most languages do have some rules. In many languages, nouns have a gender—masculine, feminine or neutral. Some languages have even more than that, although they aren’t called gender anymore but “noun classes.” The basic thing is that if you have a gender, it’s best to find a way to show which gender your noun is by its spelling just as we did with basic verbs ending in A. You could say all masculine nouns will end in O and all feminine nouns will end in hard-sounding consonants like T, K, G, B and D. It all depends on the gender roles in your fictional society.
It’s also good to know that many languages change their nouns depending on where they are in a sentence or context. This is called “case.” You don’t have to do it and I recommend not dealing with it if you don’t yet know what a noun case is. But you will need to have a way to show the difference between singular and plural nouns (dog vs. dogs). You will also need to add something to your nouns, when you run into prepositions like “to” and “for” and determiners like “my” and “that.” But those can be saved for another section. Just be aware that you’ll probably need to add something to your nouns, either as separate words or added to the beginning or end of the noun.
In my example, we have four nouns “barbarian,” “head,” “you,” and “I.” Let’s say “head” is feminine. So we’ll say, “krat” and the barbarian is a male, so we’ll say, “marano.”
Now one of the more important parts of a fictional language is what you do with the pronouns. “I” and “you” are not your average nouns. They are pronouns. They’ll get used A LOT. And they don’t have to follow the same rules as other nouns. This is one place to make exceptions.
If you have made very simple verbs that don’t change depending on who is doing the action, then you really need good pronouns. Make pronouns short and easy to differentiate. We’ll say “I” is “Gwa” and “you” is “Dre.” At this point, it would be a good idea to make up your equivalents of “we,” “he,” “she,” and “they” as well and to decide if you’re going to have separate pronouns for different genders. Just as we have “he” and “she,” you could easily have different genders in the words “I” and “you.” But you don’t have to. In fact, you don't have to have separate words for "he" and "she." Feminists will be thrilled. But it's worth thinking about what gender is like in the society where your language is spoken.
An adjective describes a noun. (Green, huge, multi-faceted and monstrous—all prime suspects.)
An adverb describes the action of a verb (slowly, wildly, on Tuesday, for weeks on end—are all adverbs and like verbs in English many of them are actually phrases of several words.)
Some languages are less likely to use adjectives and adverbs and more likely to have a special verb meaning “to eat slowly.” You can play with such things in a fictional language, but you can also just copy English when it comes to this sort of thing. Tolkien did, so you’d be in good company.
It will be helpful to you and it's general good linguistic policy if there is some way to tell what is an adjective and what is an adverb by the spelling, just as we did with nouns and verbs. English has the ending “ly” to differentiate a lot of adjectives. Let’s say adjectives are going to end in IR and adverbs are going to end in ESE. In this fictional language. To make it simple they all will. Not just some as with the LY ending in English.
The one place to be careful is in adverb phrases like “on Tuesday” and “for weeks on end.” These usually tell how long something is going on and it is better to use one word for these phrases or at least come up with a consistent way of making them.
The only descriptive word in my example is “stinking.” Let’s say “yelimir” but make a little note in your notebook that “to stink” had better bear some resemblance to this word and end in A. Probably should end up as “yelima” for the verb “to stink.”
Prepositions are words that prep another word or phrase.
“In,” “at,” “under,” “around,” “before,” and “of” are all prepositions. Some languages don’t make them separate words but rather add a prefix or a suffix to the word that the preposition preps, as if they wrote “the dog is the kitchen-in” instead of “the dog is in the kitchen.”
You can simply translate prepositions straight across. Make up a word for “in” and always use it for “in” when you translate a sentence. Many languages work almost like that. At least they have a word that is a bit like “in” even though it is often used in a few situations where English would use “at” or isn’t used in some instances where English does use it. But in general you don’t have to play with your prepositions. But you can and it is one of the easier ways to make your language more authentic and less like a direct code of English.
In the fictional language Kyren in The Kyrennei Series I made many prepositions into prefixes, so that instead of a separate word, the preposition is attached to the word it preps. Thus, “of the Kyrennei” becomes “i-Kyrennei.”
Many real languages use a grammatical function called “case” which essentially acts like a preposition but instead of a separate word, it adds an ending to or otherwise changes the words being prepared. This is very common and English is a bit of an exception because we use almost no cases. (We do use cases when it comes to pronouns. That’s why you say, “You see ME,” instead of “You see I.”)
Some languages use a preposition word in some situations as well as the case ending, but in other situations it is only the ending. For instance, in Czech the word for train is “vlak.” But “in the train” is “ve vlaku.” There is both a preparing word for “in” and an ending.
If you have not learned a language which uses cases, it is better to avoid using such complexities. But you can easily make a special ending denoting each English preposition word. Your language would then appear at first glance to have cases and no one could really argue with you.
In Czech, going "by train" is simply "vlakem." There is no preposition word for "by" only the case ending. You could think of the ending EM as the equivalent of "by." It isn't quite that simple in Czech, but in a fictional language it would look very authentic.
Let’s use that trick in our example. We need the preposition “off” for the example sentence. But we’re going to add it as an ending to the adjective and the noun, instead of a separate word. So, I say “off” will give a word the ending ARA. So, “Gwa akshas … yelimirara kratara, dre marano!” We still need a word for “your” but we’re getting a lot closer and the sentence is starting to look like a real language.
The English article is “the,” “a” and “an.” The easiest way to deal with these words in a fictional language is just to drop them all together. Most languages do and it doesn’t hurt a thing. Although writing without article in English makes you sound like barbarian, it really doesn’t sound too bad in other languages.
Creative Commons image by Jem Henderson
However, other words like “my,” “your,” “some,” “any,” “this” and “that” are very necessary. There are more complex ways to handle them, but for the purpose of making your first fictional language relatively easy, it is best to simply designate a word for each of these.
Just keep in mind that they should be short and they can’t be entirely arbitrary. Possessives like “my” and “your” should have a clear connection to the pronoun they are related to. So, if “dre” is “you,” then we’ll say “drem” is “your.”
Words like “this” and “that” are also good to keep slightly related. But that’s a detail.
Other words such as the connectors “and” and “but” or interesting constructions like “would,” can be handled by simply making up a word to correspond to the English equivalent. That’s the simplest way, even though you can get complicated with many of these concepts as well.
It’s only advisable to think before you leap. Some words like “since” can be a preposition and a connecting word. And a word like “could” actually is a combination of “can” and “would.” Be aware that some words ending in ING in English look like verbs but they are really nouns. A "human being" is one example. Make your words relate in logical ways as much as possible. You’ll save yourself a headache when trying to use your fictional language and it will look much more believable.
Now go play with your words or else. Gwa akshas drem yelimirara kratara, dre marano!
"If you have a choice of schools, ask what they do about bullying and if they say they don't have a bullying problem at their school, choose a different school," a teacher with twenty years experience once told me. "All schools have bullying problems. The ones that acknowledge the issue and have a policy for dealing with them have fewer problems."
That is some of the best advice I've ever heard on the subject of bullying. And there is a lot advice out there, but much of it is ineffective precisely because it is focused on making things look peaceful and happy on the surface.
As a girl, I was once the new girl at school. In class, I was treated well, if coolly. The school was a good school with high standards. But there was no policy or way of dealing with bullying. I went to the bathroom during a break and three other girls came in after me. They wetted down hunks of toilet paper and threw them over my stall door, jeering at me and laughing as they splattered me with the sodden paper.
No adult ever saw these things and I was far from the only one to face them alone. I knew from a lot of experience that if I told teachers about the incident, it would be dismissed with a bit of sympathy or the teacher would freak out and demand to know who had done it in front of the class, which would result in far more ostracism.
So, I never said anything about that incident. The cumulative effect of bullying can be quite severe, impacting a child's ability to learn and causing psychological and relationship problems that last a lifetime. If a child faces only a little teasing or bullying and it isn't addressed, they will often feel that it is "just the way life is" and thus they will become a perpetrator at other times. Every child in our schools has experienced either bullying or being a bystander, feeling helpless while another child is bullied. And many have been bullies and may feel defensive shame that actually contributes to perpetuating further bullying.
The problems seem intractable, particularly considering how much violence and injustice children observe in the adult world. However, anti-bullying programs have shown over many years of trial that there are methods that schools can use to mitigate bullying and vastly improve outcomes. The methods involve mediation and bringing students, teachers and parents together to discuss divisive issues.
But you may ask what you can do if your school isn't yet open to such holistic anti-bullying programs.
Even where such programs exist, children need to build the confidence to speak up about harassment and have a measure of trust in the program. Where formal programs don't exist, there are still many skills that an individual child and her parents can employ to improve a situation.
The healing purpose of the new book in the Children's Wheel of the Year series Shanna and the Pentacle is to highlight a real, contemporary and truly problematic bullying situation and offer a functional model for dealing with it. Unlike many anti-bullying books the end result is not a school with no bullying problem and a bunch of kids drawing rainbows. It is a realistic end, in which Shanna, who faced bullies, comes to understand the situation better and learns to stand up for herself. She gains friends among children who are open to differences. Because problems among children are often rooted in the attitudes of adults, this is also addressed and children can see that adults make mistakes and that these mistakes can be addressed through a respectful process.
This book and others in the series can be used to give children confidence in a solution as well as to bring comfort in the knowledge that they are not alone. Every child is different from the norm in some way and many have experienced the pressure to shave off any of our protruding corners--to hide those parts of us that are not perfectly "normal." Healing stories give both children and adults the understanding of our differences as gifts and the knowledge of that many others have been through the same difficulties.
Shanna and the Pentacle has just been released in ebook format and will be available in paperback next week. Find out more here.
I was returning to the apartment of friends where I was staying late in the evening. I was a teenager alone in a city far from home. And one of those things that parents fear most happened.
A man came down the sidewalk toward me and stopped under a streetlight. The street was nearly deserted, only the occasional car going by and no other pedestrians. The man greeted me in a friendly and kind way, but I felt instantly that something was not right.
There was nothing so terribly wrong about this man, except perhaps the fact that he greeted a young girl alone at night in a city. If he had been a few years younger, even that would not have seemed out of the ordinary at all. Still my hackles rose. Somehow I knew…
Intuition?
That illusive term we can’t quite explain. Some believe it's merely the quick, subconscious analysis of factors barely perceived by the senses. Perfectly logical and scientific. Others believe something more mysterious or spiritual is at work.
Either way it's a faculty that we know we have. Myth has it that women use intuition more easily and more readily. But the truth is that men can use it as well. But in either gender it helps if one has some practice and confidence in one’s own intuitive abilities.
That night when I was out alone on a dark street in a faraway city, I was afraid but I had been taught to use my intuition and I had been given a few self-defense skills by a handful of teen workshops. And so, with the feeling of danger buzzing in my nerves, I played cool for a few moments. I pretended I had no foreboding sense about the stranger and chatted lightly to him as we walked toward the dark apartment building. And I quietly gripped the key to the door in my pocket.
Illustrations by Julie Freel
As I turned toward the building and said goodbye to the man, his hand came out and settled firmly around my upper arm. My feeling of danger had been correct. Now, out of the light and away from even the sporadic traffic of the street, he would make his move.
“Hey, Nat! I’m over here!” I called gaily toward another doorway as if I did not sense the tension in his grip. “Come meet this guy.” Then to the man. “My brother and his friends are here. You’ll like them.”
His hand lifted from my arm in a second of uncertainty as he doubted whether or not someone could be hidden in the shadows. And in that second, I bolted for the safety of the correct doorway, racing inside and up the stairs to a door with locks and deadbolts.
Twenty years later, I am a mother myself with two growing children. And like all parents I want to arm my children with the skills to protect themselves in an unpredictable world. There are some who trust in weaponry, whether it be guns or pepper spray. But statistics don’t back the theory up. Such physical weapons are more likely to be seized and used against the defender than employed against an attacker.
Illustration by Julie Freel
Others favor teaching self-defense and martial arts techniques at a young age. And these techniques are more useful. I carried pepper spray for years and never had it handy in any of the dangerous situations I encountered. However, I did use techniques like the ruse about friends waiting a doorway that I was taught in self-defense classes in this situation and another similar incident.
So, I will teach my children these skills and see to it that they have more training in self defense. But I also know there is another faculty that was even more crucial to my safety at the time. I was prepared to escape and cautious enough not to give away the fact that I was alone, because my intuition was strong and well practiced. That I believe made all the difference in my two encounters with personal danger as a teenager and intuition saved me from great potential harm.
That’s why I have given a great deal of thought to how to help children develop intuition. I know that it can be developed. It's enhanced by both practice and confidence. I trusted my internal sense as a young girl because I had been told by wise adults that I could and should tap into that inner knowledge. It was important both to my inner development and to my practical safety.
As a writer, one of my tools is now storytelling and I’ve seen the power of stories to impart deeper understanding and inner confidence. As a result, I became interested in the stories available for children on the subject of intuition and self-protection. But I was surprised at some major gaps in the literature for kids in this area.
There are children's books that explain about "okay touching" and "not okay touching." There are even storybooks to help the youngest victims of abuse cope after the fact. But there is precious little out there to help children successfully avoid abuse or an attack in the first place.
Partly this is because adults write the materials for children and it pains us to be too upfront because that might frighten children or lead to paranoia. And it's partly because evading harm isn't simple at any age and intuition is a slippery concept to impart.
Beyond the issue of the topic, many of the stories in this area are not very much fun for children. They are too often pedantic and unlikely to be chosen by children. Instead these are books chosen by adults to forcefully teach a child. But anyone who has watched how children absorb information will know that it is very difficult to force children to learn concepts that are preached directly. It's much easier for children to absorb concepts and lessons that are part of a suspenseful, gripping story that is fun to read.
From this need was born the first book in the Children’s Wheel of the Year stories. There is a tradition in the modern earth=based spirituality movement that claims February 2 as a holiday devoted to intuition and protection. It's an ancient Celtic festival called Imbolc. The themes are inspiration, intuition, protection, healing and the hope of new beginnings. These themes are embodied in the story of Shanna and the Raven, a book I wrote for children ages six to twelve, in hopes of answering the need for stories that help children develop intuition and train their inner listening skills.
The story begins when ten-year-old Shanna and her seven-year-old brother Rye meet a new neighbor on their way home from school. The neighbor is nice enough but he asks their names without giving his own. And more than that Shanna just doesn’t have a good feeling about the situation. Then the children encounter a raven that seems to warn them of danger and darker fears haunt their steps. As the story progresses Shanna learns the meaning of intuition and the raven, which she initially thought might be a bad omen, helps her to understand her inner sense. When true danger threatens her brother, Shanna’s intuition leads her to come to his aid in time. The story teaches both how to tap into intuition and the confidence to trust one's own sense.
Shanna and the Raven is the first book in the Children's Wheel of the Year series. It will be published on January 8. Within a few days it will be available in Kindle, Nook, Apple and other ebook stores. It will also be available in paperback here. The beautiful illustrations have been created by Julie Freel with pastels in a style that is very emotive and close to the hearts of children. We both hope the books will bring joy and confidence to many, many children.
When I was a teenager and a serious fantasy fan girl (I read The Silmarillion twice and wrote epic poems to chronicle its stories), the first book on writing I read was about how to write about magic. It would be twenty years before I became a fantasy author, but as a reader I loved learning about the mysteries behind the creation of my favorite fantasy worlds. This post (originally published as a guest column for Marie Lavender's blog) comes from what I learned both as a writer and as an avid and studious reader of the genre over four decades.
The vast genre of fantasy is akin to a wildly diverse landscape—encompassing vast plains of epic proportion, shear crags of nail-biting tension, dark places where many fear to tread, deep forests of ancient myth and cities of every description where corruption and courage vie for dominance. Still, as enormous as this genre is there is one thing that indicates whether or not a story belongs in the fantasy universe. Fantasy stories contain some form of “magic.”
Creative Commons image by Nicolas Raymond
It may be no more than subtle dreams invading reality in magical realism or it can be a full-blown flying printing press that shoots bolts of lightning in a steampunk/western mashup, but there’s got to be magic.
Magic in this context can be defined as something that cannot be explained purely by science. The line between fantasy and science fiction is under some debate because there is always the question of whether something that can’t be explained by science today might someday be within scientific grasp. But fantasy should generally fall on the side of strange and wonderful things that science isn’t expected to explain.
For writers, the fantasy genre maintains all the challenges that other types of literature entail, plus a few. There is often a lot of work to do to develop settings and to make characters that are very different from us relatable. But the thing that makes fantasy either fly or flop is the design and execution of whatever magic is in the story.
While it may be fun to throw pure imagination at the page and let all things go wild, as in Alice in Wonderland, writers do well to be wary of that path. It can lead to obscure literary praise (if done extraordinarily well), but it leads into the surrealist subgenre of fantasy, where few paying readers venture. And thus it doesn’t generate bestsellers.
If you want to not only write fantasy but have other people read what you write, careful thought on magical systems is mandatory. David Eddings reportedly spent six years developing his magical system before starting the Belgariad. Being less bold than the grand masters of fantasy, I took twenty years to work out my first magical system and it is satisfyingly troll proof. A magical system doesn’t necessarily have to take that long, but some serious thought goes into the good ones.
There are rules you can follow to make the process easier. Good magical systems can be had by rehashing the same themes explored since the dawn of true civilization (ahem… that being in 1911 when J.R.R. Tolkien started writing for school magazines). However, the key to creating a great magical system is in the conflict that arises from a unique premise.
With that in mind, here is my code of magical development:
Problems can arise when a writer is exploring a magical system while writing. It’s fine as far as it goes, but this exploratory approach requires major editing and you shouldn’t start publishing until you know your magical system to its very core.
Creative Commons image by Shock2006 of flickr.com
I’m going to use some examples from my contemporary fantasy series here, not because I think mine is the best or because I want to force it down your throat, but because one can only really write about the behind the scenes methods of an author from first-hand experience. I spent many years, testing out different scenarios in my imagination before writing and this resulted in a logically sound and yet deceptively simple scheme.
In the long forgotten past, a very negative magical work was created and it took over the wills of its human creators. The negative magic itself became a living entity—the Addin. The Addin desires absolute power over humanity and it gains it through usurping the wills of individuals and using them as pawns. Many of the political, economic and social leaders of today’s world are in fact controlled by the Addin. No human being can resist Addin domination for long, if they are specifically targeted. Most people don’t even know it exists and think that simple greed and corruption account for any abuses of power and the destructive tendencies of their leaders.
The world I created for The Kyrennei Series is eerily similar to the real world and that has been the key to its impact on readers who find the Addin frighteningly plausible. That’s part of the magical system of this world and while the main characters don’t entirely understand it even within the first few books of the series, my understanding of it as the author keeps the series consistent and gives the story a connection to authentic emotions.
I never spell this out in The Kyrennei Series but essentially magic comes from primal life force or energy. It operates on another plane of reality that can affect physical reality in certain ways. Emotion is also energy. The intensity that goes into the use of magic matters and the Addin, of course, operates primarily through the usurpation of the emotions of others.
This was important for me to understand as an author even though the characters didn’t get into the theoretical basis of magic in their world. It has implications for the way magic works. The Addin steals the power of human beings by usurping their emotions. But there are people that the Addin cannot take over. They are the Kyrennei, a non-human race that lived on earth long ago, but the Addin was able to annihilate them fourteen centuries ago because they were smaller and physically weaker than humans. Still, before they died the last Kyrennei mages set a magical process in motion that hid the genome of the Kyrennei within the DNA of certain humans. When the Kyrennei thus return from extinction after centuries of absence it is their power to resist the Addin and their other abilities with energy and emotion that matter. And the details of this premise fit together nicely because they are rooted in the source of magic itself.
Just as magic should have a source, it must have limits. If it didn’t have limits, there would be nothing stopping anyone with magic from getting everything they want and ruling the world. And that would make for a boring story. Limits equal conflict and conflict is good for fiction.
The limit may be as simple as a Cold War between magic users, such as “I can sense your magic, so if you try to kill me in order to control the world without competition, I’ll vaporize you just as you vaporize me.” There’s conflict there, even if the magic is otherwise limitless, but that would make for a very inflexible conflict.
Creative Commons image by Shadowgate
Here again your characters don’t necessarily know the limits of magic in their world. Or you might have some fully informed magical scholars. But the “author god” should know the limits. What can magic do? What can it not do? Is it limited by space and time? Is it difficult to learn or limited to only some talented magic users? Is it theoretically possible for magic users to read minds, live forever, change anything into anything, bring back the dead, put out the sun or drive the planet like a space ship? If they can’t do these things and much more, your magic isn’t limitless. And you need to know where those limits are.
Often the outer limits of magic will not be firm, however. Some types of magic may be stronger than others, some magic users may be able to do more and certain devices, substances or rituals may be able to push the limits of magic. Again, the “author god” must know what is possible and what determines the abilities of magic users.
As an example, in The Kyrennei Series, the question of why the magic users don’t rule the world is answered. One group of them does rule. They exterminated the other group of magic users partly because that group resisted their control of the wills of normal humans. Even so, the ruling group does not use their power without limit. When they usurp a person’s will they make that person one of the elite group of magic users as well and thus they must share power with that person from that time forward (even though they will be a loyal follower of their patron’s goals). This is why the Addin doesn’t yet control everyone in the world. They are the wolves and wolves need sheep. If they eat all the sheep, they will have no one to rule over and no more sheep to eat. As such, there are certain limits on Addin, power but individuals sometimes stretch these limits. And there can be controversy, even among the Addin about how much is too much use of power.
On the other hand, the protagonists in the Kyrennei Series initially know little about the limits of magic as most of their magic has been suppressed for centuries. A key moment comes when Aranka Miko, the first Kyrennei to take her true form in modern times shows a group of resistance fighters that she has abilities unknown for centuries. Even then, any magic beyond the terrible power of the Addin and the simple power of the Kyrennei to resist the Addin seems very limited indeed. But eventually the Kyrennei find that their physical weakness is balanced by greater magical strength than anyone dreamed.
You may hate logic and believe that consistency is for fools (and you may even have a fun plot). However, you are likely to have a lot of unhappy readers (and a few angry ones). Not all readers insist on logical consistency but many in fantasy and science fiction genres do.
As a reader, I’m not a zealot (in that I don’t go to great lengths to try to find logical inconsistencies in books I read). But I am like most fantasy readers in that obvious issues simply distract me from the story and take me out of the “fictive dream” (that state in which you are feeling and experiencing the story with the characters). And whether your genre is fantasy or any other sort of fiction, it’s a mortal sin for a writer to boot the reader out of this dream state. It’s what makes readers put books down for a minute… or indefinitely. Don’t do it.
As long as you keep the reader feeling and experiencing the story, other writerly sins will often be forgiven and forgotten. And an underlying sense of reality and consistency is crucial to keeping the reader engaged.
How does that apply to developing magical systems? Magic is supposed to be illogical, right?
Yes and no. Magic is supposed to go beyond science. You can rewrite the rules of science. But you must still have rules. Gravity is a “rule” that keeps us from floating away into space and the rules of magic keep the reader firmly on the ground in your fantasy world.
There are rules about what magic can and cannot do. You make the rules. Then you play by them. Make sure that if magic can’t do something in chapter one there is a darned good reason if it can do it in chapter eight (and visa versa). If you give your main character the ability to magically transport themselves, you’re going to have to give a good reason for how they get stuck in any dangerous situation that your plot requires. Why wouldn’t they just teleport themselves away? Whatever magic you give your characters they have to actually use it when in need, unless there are specific reasons why they can’t.
In addition, if everyone can do magic in your fictional world, there must be a good reason if they don’t use it all the time (perhaps it is tiring or comes at some other price). If magic users can transform any substance or creature into another substance or creature, your magic users should never be poor. They could just transform dirt into gold. In fact gold would be as worthless as dirt. In a world with lots of transformation magic, no one should be hungry. But make sure you know if any magical transformations are permanent or not. Eating bread that turns back into rocks after an hour might be a bad idea.
So, consistency is good.
Creative Commons image by Hans Splinter
But… too much consistency can be a problem. If every use of magic always works exactly the same and is always successful, you’ll be giving up a great source of suspense for your plot. It often works best if magical ability isn’t absolute or well understood by the characters and magic doesn’t always work. This adds conflict, suspense and interest to the story. But again, the author must understand why the magic works in some instances and not in others, even if the characters are dismayed and confused.
Another common logical blunder occurs when writers set up the belief that magic takes a lifetime to learn. Magic users are invariably very old in such tales, until the main character arrives (usually an adolescent) who is supposed to learn magic. But the adolescent usually masters magic in a matter of weeks or months and soon exceeds the abilities of his or her teachers. This isn’t just a tired plotline. It’s also a logical inconsistency. David Eddings actually pulled this off in his Belgariad series, but it wasn’t nearly so tired a plotline when he did it (and his version is still among the best).
More importantly, he dealt with the logical inconsistencies. First, the talented adolescent was the answer to a prophecy and expected to be far stronger in magic than everyone else. Second, it did take him a few years (not weeks) to get to be really good. Third, the reason most magic users were ancient was that the talent for magic in Eddings’ world is exceedingly rare, so by the time the main character was born all the other magic users had grown very old. And fourth, even when the amazingly strong adolescent had come into his power, he still needed to consult with his technically weaker but more experienced teachers on a lot of issues, so it was still clear that he was strong but inexperienced.
Here’s an interesting irony for you. Fantasy must have some sort of magic to be fantasy and yet it isn’t a good idea to make magic the key to resolving your plot problem. The crux of fiction is a conflict or a problem that the main characters must solve. But fantasy writers shouldn’t just “magic away” the problem.
For example, if you have a young adventurer faced with an evil tyrant of great power in your story and the young adventurer must rescue someone, escape from somewhere, retrieve an important object or win a battle resulting in freedom from oppression (or one of the many other things that such adventurers do in fantasy books), it is inadvisable to simply say that your young adventurer learned a new magical skill and “bam!” the evil tyrant is sidelined or dead. This makes for a boring story and a poor ending, even if the rest of the plot is great.
Unlike most of the other rules in my code of magic, this one is often broken by commercial fantasy writers and sometimes stories that break this rule even have a moderate amount of success. However, you should note that the most successful fantasy does follow this rule. Harry Potter wins through moral fortitude, loyalty to friends and family and inner freedom of spirit, not because his patronus is just stronger. Frodo wins with only incidental use of magical items (like cloaks) by stamina, undergoing hardship and the final moral victory over the temptation of power.
The thing that makes these stories work is that the characters had to change in order to win. If Frodo had to climb Mount Doom on the first day of the Fellowship of the Ring, he would have failed. Harry Potter too. Maya Gardener in the second trilogy of the Kyrennei Series is frozen in fear in the beginning. It is only through many trials and experiences that she comes to choose her own path and stand up to aggression when it counts most.
That’s because magic, as important as it is to fantasy stories, cannot be “the magic bullet” of the plot. Magic is a tool in fantasy, but stories driven by changing characters facing obstacles with inner strength will always win the day.
FantasyCon is more than half-way over and the challenge of introducing the sub-genres in a blog post has come round to...
Wait a minute. That can't be right...
Me?
I have been set a task by with wizards of FantasyCon--a quest that appears impossible at the outset—to define “urban fantasy” and make it stand out as a genre. But as with the heroines of all good fantasy I must give it my best shot.
Unlike those genres that can trace their lineage to Beowolf, this is a new phenomenon, having taken root in the 1990s. Among the authors who have staked the territory most clearly are Jim Butcher (The Dresden Files), Laurell K. Hamilton (Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter), Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere), Kevin Hearne (The Iron Druid Chronicles) and J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter). And that diversity alone ought to give you some idea of the long odds on my quest.
It is often said that urban fantasy is simply urban, that its entire claim to fame is in the fact that it's set in cities and towns. But many other fantasy stories are set in cities past and present, and that doesn’t make such stories “urban fantasy.” Most urban fantasy is based in an industrialized or post-industrial setting and as a natural consequence it is mostly urban (because so is most of the population in such societies). And yet sometimes the story is about the fact that characters are forced out of the urban world to hide in what is left of the wilderness.
So, I’ll take another tack here. Urban fantasy isn’t only about setting. It’s a contemporary and urban form of mundane fantasy. The excellent genre-definition site bestfantasybooks.com defines “mundane fantasy” by saying it will not satisfy readers who primarily want to escape from mundane reality. Instead, “if perhaps you want to find a bit of fantasy within the mundane, maybe this sub-genre will be for you.”
And that is where urban fantasy shines. Of all fantasy genres, urban fantasy is the most close to home. A good urban fantasy tale should send shivers down your spine and make you think reality might just change the next time you step outside your door. It should cause you to look at the impassive faces on the subway during your morning commute and think, “Yes, I can see where it comes from.” It should hint that something inexplicable could happen at any moment in a banal industrial cityscape. It should transform the alleyways of a small, ordinary town into a setting for the terrible and wondrous.
In short, if high fantasy let’s you escape from your life while you read, urban fantasy captures you and invades your thoughts even when you are not reading.
Most urban fantasy is set on earth in modern or nearly modern times. It often either begins with a character who believes they live in the mundane world or with a character who must hide magic from those who don’t know about it. Its setting is important because it should mirror something very real and familiar in order to draw the reader into a web of “what if” questions that render the fantasy eerily plausible.
While all children know that Harry Potter’s magic isn’t real, they love the idea that a magical world is hiding in the city streets all around them, that a secret world could be just between the railway platforms or out the back of a local bookshop. And urban fantasy isn’t just for children and young adults.
Another way that some have tried to pigeonhole urban fantasy has been to say that it is shallow and lacking in social substance. This comes from a few popular associations but often they are misleading and belong as much to other genres as they do to urban fantasy. And look again even at Harry Potter. It may be a children’s series but the social and moral commentary run deep beyond what is usually preached at children.
Urban fantasy may not be famous for attacking huge societal issues or epic struggles yet, but I believe this is only because the other side of urban fantasy, where it connects with sci-fi fantasy, social sci fi and dystopian genres has been insufficiently explored. The defining factor in urban fantasy is its ability to seep into the reader’s world rather than forcing the reader to suspend disbelief. It poses a danger to those who have difficulty separating fantasy and reality because it mixes the two so well. It is no surprise that many urban fantasy narratives include an urban bookstore as a crucial location, given that bookstores are one place we can guarantee readers frequent. It is therefore easy for the urban fantasy writer to grab the reader’s reality with such a setting and slurp them down the rabbit hole.
Urban fantasy has the potential to be a deep literary and social genre precisely because of how it intersects with reality. There’s a wealth of possibility to explore in this sub-genre. It is a new genre and as such its depths have yet to be explored. The bestfantasybooks.com definition reads, “Urban Fantasy doesn't play by the rules.”
Friday, November 6 is Urban Friday at Virtual FantasyCon, the online convention that brings all the awesomeness of the fantasy freak fests of old to the comfort of your own screen. I'll be there hosting a game where you come up with and solve fantasy-related rhyming riddles to win an Amazon gift certificate. Join me for some light and relaxing fun to round out your Friday.
On Sunday, Nov. 8, Virtual FantasyCon will tackle young adult fantasy, and in this guest post, Cheryl S. Mackey digs into the genre and outlines the rules of the game for writers and what readers can expect.
Young adult isn't just for the younger crowd. Like The Hunger Games or Harry Potter, it can appeal to a wide range of ages. The reason it is called "YA" is due to the themes and the appropriate content. Great YA books often become classics for all ages. Cheryl clarifies these issues for writers and readers alike.
Take it away Cheryl S. Mackey.
Young adult fantasy is a genre readily enjoyed by readers of all ages despite its name. Just look at recent books that have shot to stardom like the Harry Potter series, or The Hunger Games, or The Mortal Instruments. Books for teens have exploded into the limelight, turning adults into rabid fans as well. However, at the heart of the genre the themes relating to the lives of young adults, even in a fantasy setting, is key.
Like any genre there are pros and cons to it and those may differ depending on if you are a reader or an author, or both. A big pro would be the amount of material out there. There are a lot of YA fantasy books. Also, a lot of variety if you add in the sub or side genres and then you have reading gold. A big con… this also gives authors and readers a lot to wade in and through to either find the right book or have your book found.
Readers can expect a lot of variety and there are two different takes on what angle YA fantasy (or even other genres… mystery, horror, supernatural, you name it) can approach the reader. Both approaches work well on their own merits. Either you can make the characters teens, like Harry Potter, and have their coming of age antics spur character and plot growth, or you can make the book readable by teens (think age appropriate themes, PG13), but have the characters more mature…act, react, and behave in far more adult scenarios (Think The Hunger Games). Of course, there is no 100% black and white on this, but most if not all books I’ve read fall into either of these angles. The commonality between them, especially in a fantasy setting, appears to be the slower march along the plot and a lighter introduction of details. You won’t find ten pages describing a chair in a house in YA anything. Teens, and even adults, just might not have the patience/attention span. Even The Hobbit may be too wordy for some of today’s teens.
Meshing the young adult themes with fantasy themes is richly rewarding for both the author and the reader. Fantasy by definition, has no boundaries. If you can imagine it, you can write or read it. Zombies, aliens, angels, witches, dystopian society, you name it, are all accessible to YA readers in a fantasy setting (for clarity, fantasy can also be linked to science fiction! Think Star Wars). However, when I study the YA fantasy books popular today I’ve noticed another binding element, realism.
Realistic fantasy has nothing to do with the idea that everything in the book must be real. There are loads of people who’d love to pet a unicorn, but not seen that yet. Realism in fantasy has everything to do with taking that fantasy world, whatever it is, and making it plausible, a seamless integration of the reader into the unreal world. This means fleshing out a world/universe to great detail, yet getting it across to the reader in ten pages or less (remember the chair?). Culture, religions, environment, races, music, writing, architecture, science, history, you name it. This is a difficult job for a YA fantasy author. The good ones do it very well and the great ones make rabid fans out of everyone.
Realism must also apply to characters and sliding into stereotypes and clichés is a pit of no return. Is it out there? Yes. Is it avoidable? Yes. Is it always realistic to avoid it? Nope. It’s up to the YA fantasy author to walk that line and walk it well so that the stereotypes and clichés do not overpower the plot and characters to the point of eye rolling and mic dropping. A great example of a stereotype that worked well is Hermione in Harry Potter as the nerdy-fact-bookish geek. Her role in Harry Potter was obvious. Give Harry (and the other ‘good guys’) the means to an end. Rowling kept Hermione from being eye roll worthy by giving her other roles to fill and other needs as a character. She evolved into a strong, independent, woman that could kick serious butt as well as memorize all the spells Ron needed for class.
Another side of realism is just how real to portray teens when they are the main characters/focus of the story. Drugs. Sex. Alcohol. Abuse. Gangs. Lies. Foul language. Cheating, etc. No one, even teens, denies those exist in our world. Some read fantasy to escape those realities and some read those realities because that is what can and does happen with teens in our world. There is a subtle divide on just how far to portray reality, especially in other genres and it is up to the reader and author to decide where the line is to be drawn. Should realistic portrayals of cultural and societal behaviors exist. Yes. Should it be forced onto a reader or author who doesn’t want it? No. Know that including such realisms is a personal choice as an author, and depending on what type of fantasy you are writing, it might not even be an issue.
In the end, YA fantasy is a thriving, vital part of the bookish world. The genre fills a need of teens (and adults) for age, character, and plot appropriate stories in a fantastical, but believable setting.
Cheryl lives in Southern California with her husband and two sons. Her books The Unknown Sun and The Immortals parts 1 and 2 are both young adult fantasy and available at Amazon.
She has a MFA in Creative Writing and enjoys games, reading and, of course, writing. She currently has a flash fiction story published online at The Prompt Magazine.
Her favorite genres to write and read is YA Fantasy closely followed by YA Paranormal and she would love to dabble in Sci Fi, Steam Punk, and Dystopian.
Monday, Nov. 2 is Paranormal Monday at Virtual FantasyCon. It's the place to meet authors, artists and bloggers who delight in ghosts, vampires and other things that go bump... in broad daylight half the time. Just as with the other days of FantasyCon there are games to be played and prizes to be won. I'm wondering if I could win the cosplay competition for this day by dressing up as an invisible character.
Probably not. But I have an expert on hand with a guest post from prolific science fiction and fantasy author Jonathan Yañez to explain what exactly it is that makes paranormal the genre of the strange and unexplained.
Take it away Jonathan.
In an age when writer's are asked to place their work in a specific genre, which genre do we choose? Just to name a few genres we have; paranormal, dystopian, steampunk, fantasy, science fiction, supernatural, epic fantasy, etc... There seems to be an army of option all bleeding into one another and making for a confusing decision. I'll spend the next few paragraphs giving you a better idea on what defines the paranormal genre and separates it from all the others.
First the actual definition of paranormal as defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
PARANORMAL - very strange and not able to be explained by what scientists know about nature and the world."Still not super clear, right?
As writers I think we have done a better job by narrowing in on a more thorough answer. Novels tagged as paranormal have been written in our modern day world with the introduction of paranormal elements such as; werewolves, vampires, witches, angels, ghosts, and so on. Examples of books that fall in the paranormal range could be Twilight (a paranormal romance) or The Mortal Instruments Series.The aspect that makes this genre so different and unique is the freedom to mix our everyday lives with the fantastical. It twists what we know and turns everything we take as ordinary on its head. It makes us ask questions like, "what if?" and challenges us to reimagine what we thought we knew.
About Jonathan Yañez
Jonathan Yañez is the author of over a dozen fantasy and science fiction novels. His works include, The Elite Series, The Nephilim Chronicles, Thrive, Bad Land, Steam and Shadows and The DeCadia Code. He has been both traditionally and independently published with his works being adapted into; ebook, print, audiobook and even optioned for film.
You can connect with him by clicking the following links to his website, facebook page or twitter account; jonathan-yanez.com, Facebook or Twitter.
https://twitter.com/JonathanAYanez
http://www.facebook.com/JonathanYanezAuthor
Thanks for that clarification Jonathan.
Bookworms, I hope to see you at Virtual FantasyCon next week, exploring and enjoying wild stories among the booths. You can find Paranormal Monday here.
Here's a little treat for readers of The Kyrennei Series.
Path of the Betrayer (Book Five of The Kyrennei Series) is published Kindle users and will shortly be available in Barnes and Noble, Apple and other stores. Here you can read an expert from the middle of the first chapter to whet your appetite.
I generally recommend that readers start at the beginning of series (The Soul and the Seed) because its world and characters are best experienced over the course of the story. But some readers here may be new to or long absent from the world of The Kyrennei Series, which looks eerily like our own world with a few subtle--yet nonetheless crucial--differences.
If you're new, you need to know that the Addin is a power cult that can forcibly take your will. The Addin Association is a conglomeration of powerful political and business leaders who run today's society. The narrator is Kai, a twenty-two-year-old Meikan student who has lived all his life in fear of the Addin. He was captured by them when a Wisconsin farm where he was hiding was attacked. He now expects that the Addin will take him and force him to become one of them. There is no hope of psychic resistance. Any human being can be taken and controlled by the Addin no matter how much they resist.
Kai is in love with Maya, a girl who is a member of the non-human Kyrennei race that the Addin are systematically annihilating because they disrupt Addin power. She was captured as well and Kai has every reason to believe she is already dead or soon will be.
After the shower, I expected to be taken back to the cell. Instead they put the restraints back on and led me up a flight of stairs and into another hallway that looked less like a prison and more like an office building. After a few turns the guy in front opened a door into a windowless room where three older men sat at a table drinking coffee.
The smell was overwhelming. The food they’d given me hadn’t been much and I was starving.
My heart pounded and I clenched my fists inside the restraints. This would be where they would take me.
I tried to control my breath. I didn’t want them to see how scared I was. The big guy leered at me whenever my muscles resisted him, and I knew he’d take pleasure in any display of my fear.
The men at the table watched me and sipped their coffee. My head was lowered, my hair hanging low so that they couldn’t entirely see my face.
Then one of the men at the table said, “Take that thing off his wrists.”
I remembered him from the attack on the farm. He had a wide smile with perfect teeth that reminded me of someone running for election.
“He might get violent, Mr. Bloom,” the guy behind me said.
“We can handle it. Thank you, Balshaw,” the man named Bloom said.
I thought of trying to grab a weapon. The two guys with me had guns at their belts. But I knew I wasn’t that fast. It probably wasn’t worth the energy. I felt too weak and tired to try—even for the hope that I might die with my soul intact.
The guy behind me unhooked the restraint and I kept looking down, avoiding eye contact with them. Fear was turning to confusion. If they had wanted to take me they could have.
“You’re name’s Kai, isn’t it?” Bloom said. His voice was low, almost friendly. “I know you hate us. Your kind have always been prejudiced that way. But I thought maybe you’d take some coffee at least.”
He poured from a silver pot on the table into a mug and put it in front of a fourth chair, his movements slow and deliberate.
“Come on,” he said. “Sit down and drink some coffee. We’re reasonable people and we’re not going to hurt you.”
I didn’t move from where I stood or lift my head. Did he think I was a complete idiot?
I didn’t know what he could be playing at, but the idea that I would now think he was benevolent was laughable. This man had overseen the destruction of Kaitlin’s farm. They had killed and taken my friends. He had done something with Maya. Of course, I hated him.
There was more silence. They waited. I rubbed my wrists, but then I had no place to put my hands. The track suit had no pockets. Eventually I ended up holding onto my own elbows. I didn’t care anymore if it made me look frightened. They knew I was scared.
I imagined I could feel their power buzz in the room like a live current. They could let me have my hands free, because there was no question of the outcome of any fight.
One of the other men at the table cleared his throat. At last Bloom sighed.
“All right,” he said. “Don’t drink the coffee then. But it’s your loss.”
He took a sip from his own cup and then leaned back, looking at me with his broad smile in place.
“Let’s be blunt here. You know I can get your cooperation if I want it.” He snapped his fingers and his eyes mocked me. “But that isn’t what I want right now. The fact is that there are things I want to know and there are things you want to know. I think we could come to an understanding about that.”
“If you think you can scare me into telling you about the Meikan sign, you might as well go ahead and kill me. You’re wasting your time,” I said.
Bloom and one of the other men at the table snickered under their breath and then downed slurps of coffee to smother their laughter. The third one didn’t change expressions but sat watching me with a scowl of undisguised disdain.
“Oh, sure, I can see why you’d think that,” Bloom said. “But believe me a lot has been tried in that department, for many many years. I don’t think you can tell us about it. The Kyris put some sort of spell on you Meikans so that you can’t speak coherently about it. Certainly if your people could, someone would have. Back in the Middle Ages, you know. All the various methods of torture and all that. But you don’t make any sense when you do try to tell it.”
I pulled in air through my mouth. “Then why don’t you get it over with. Anything else… you can make me do what you want. I know that.“
“So, you want to join, the way that other kid did?” Bloom said. “We’ve got a veritable flood of converts, it looks like.”
I didn’t answer. Was he toying with me? A cat playing with a mouse?
“How about this,” Bloom said, his voice musing, curious. “I know there must be things you want to know about your friends and such. You ask a question and then you answer a question. You can even go first. One question for free but after that you have to give an answer in order to get another answer.”
“If you want information, why don’t you just take me?” I struggled to keep my voice under control. I was gripping my elbows now to keep from shaking.
What a bastard! He was having fun.
“Is that your one free question?” Bloom asked. His eyes were the color of gravel.
I didn’t think they’d answer anyway, but I couldn’t help it. There was a question that burned inside me, every second. If there was any chance that they would answer, I had to try.
“No,” I said, my voice steadier. “Where’s Maya? Maya Gardner, the girl you—”
Bloom smiled and the others at the table smiled too, even the meaner-looking guy a bit. “You mean the Kyri girl you seemed so fond of? She’s here. In this building,” Bloom said without hesitation.
“Is she all right? What did you do to her?” I was desperate. I had lifted my head, my hands releasing their grip on my elbows.
I didn’t care that they probably wouldn’t tell the truth. My heart was in my throat. I knew I couldn’t do anything to help Maya, but the thought that she might be nearby, that she might still be alive…
“One question,” Bloom said. “That was the deal. You want to ask another, you have to answer one of mine. And you could always sit down and have coffee while we do it.”
I clenched my fists again. My back felt like it would burst with tension. It made no sense. But if they would answer…
“What’s the question?” I asked.
“Were there other Kyris at that farm? Most of your friends there ended up dead, I’m sorry to say,” he said, clicking his tongue with obviously fake regret.
“You took Jamaal!” my words came out with hot fury. I couldn’t hold it back. “You have to know that already. You could test their blood even if they were dead anyway. Why ask me?”
“Because I want to ask you,” Bloom said, his voice still smooth, curious. “Why is my business. If you want to ask your question, you answer mine.”
It wasn’t like I was giving away any sensitive information then. I was being interrogated by the Addin and yet they weren’t getting anything out of me that they didn’t already know. I wouldn’t have thought I’d ever answer their questions voluntarily but… under the circumstances. Well, what did it matter?
“No, there weren’t,” I said. “Satisfied?”
Their smiles didn’t waver.
“Now, come and sit down and take a drink of the coffee and I’ll answer the other question,” he said.
I took a slow step toward the table. The smell of the coffee was intense and I felt cold where I stood. What did it matter really? Maybe if I tried to act like I wasn’t afraid…
Read more of this story in Path of the Betrayer. You can get the Kindle book on Amazon and get the book at a discount until Friday, Oct. 30, 2015. Happy reading!
If you're new to the series, keep in mind that you can get one book free by signing up for my hearth-side email circle here. Take a look at the pages for the series, primarily The Soul and the Seed. If you've already read one but not the others and have yet to get a free copy, sign up and then send me an email to let me know which book you'd like and what format.
It's time to get ready for FantasyCon, the huge virtual fantasy convention, where you can hobnob with authors, artists and bloggers, play games, dress up and win prizes (mostly money and books). The way the convention works is this. There is a sub-genre topic for each day from Nov. 1 to Nov. 8 and the event will focus on that genre for the day. There will be a scavenger hunt that takes you on a tour of some of the hottest new stuff in the genre and lets you solve mysterious clues for prizes. Then there are the booths, where you can visit authors and artists, find out about their work and often play more games.
The important thing to remember here is the daily subgenre themes. I'm blogging a guest post that will whet your appetite for each day and introduce you to an exciting new author in each subgenre.
And the first day (Monday, Nov. 1) day features...
Science fiction.
No, that's not a typo. Science fiction can also be part of the fantasy genre, if it's science fiction that includes fantasy. Think Star Wars and Dune.
This time the guest post is by Alesha Escobar, author of... Take it away, Alesha!
There’s a certain sense of mastery we feel when we’re able to exert our power over nature through technology. The universe is not man-made, but technology certainly is. What drew me to science fiction, whether it was a film or book, was the idea that future technological advancements presented were just believable enough to be possible, though they had no place in our world today.
What also grabbed my attention was the range of stories--from flying among the stars to discovering intelligent alien life. The possibilities seem endless regarding the types of characters and situations we could explore in a science fiction story.
However, until recently, it didn’t occur to me that most of all, science fiction is really about ourselves. Yes, we are drawn to the scenery and technology, but even more fascinating is how we interact with the scenery and what we do with the technology.
In my recent contribution to the Masters of Time anthology, I set my story in a future where time travel was possible. And while the question of time travel (as well as its consequences) were interesting, what became central to the story was how my protagonist used this as a catalyst to assert his independence and vindicate his humanity.
A story can have the sleekest starships and the most exotic alien life, but if there aren’t characters there to wrestle with deeper questions and issues, then it all becomes window dressing. This is why I enjoy great science fiction stories. They will make you both think and feel, especially as you turn your gaze toward the possibilities that await us in this vast universe.
Alesha Escobar writes fantasy to support her chocolate habit. When she's not chasing around her children, she enjoys reading, cooking, movies and crafts. The first book of the Gray Tower Trilogy, The Tower's Alchemist, is currently free in the Kindle store. Alesha also has a short story, The Black Dagger Gods, published in the New Myths anthology by HDWP Books. Her most recent work, Logan 6, can be found in the Masters of Time anthology by Creative Alchemy, Inc.
Blog: http://www.aleshaescobar.com
On Thursday, Nov. 5 the virtual fantasy convention FantasyCon will focus on fairy-tale-inspired fantasy. It's a delightful--though not always light--sub-genre and made all the more whimsical by author Rick Haynes, who was chosen to define it with a blog post. I'm hosting the FantasyCon sub-genre posts here to give readers a little taste of the magic in each type of fantasy. After reading Rick Haynes's post, you'll be itching to find something with a touch of old, primal magic.
Take it away Rick Haynes
Fairy-tales ... from me?
After all, I mainly write medieval fantasy. And where would I start?
At the beginning, I suppose. But of course, didn’t we love to hear fairy-tales from our parents?
When I was small, my dad told me a different story every night, and every single one came from his own imagination. Looking back I realise how many were inspired by fairy-tales.
With the vivid imagination of a small boy, I had dreams of standing in front of the fire-breathing dragon and slaying it with one slash of my huge sword. Dad even made me a wooden one. And what about Jack and the Beanstalk? I loved it, but my mum was none too pleased when I cut down her giant sunflower.
Of course fairy-tales were told many, many, years before I emerged into the world.
Take the classic story of Little Red Riding Hood as an example. This tale was originally dated back to the 17th century. But latest research has suggested that it could be over 2600 years old, because a similar tale has been found in China. The only differences being that the main protagonist was a small boy and the wolf was replaced with a tiger.
Now that is amazing, for stories from that time, and for centuries afterwards, were never written down. Whilst subtle alterations have occurred and the tales have evolved over time, the basic story has endured.Not long after my father read me that story I met a large Alsatian in our street. I took one look before running all the way home, screaming wolf at the top of my voice. When my mother introduced me to the neighbour’s new dog and he licked me to death, I realised the difference between fiction and truth. I think I slept better that night.
And I still smile at the memory.
One of the most prolific writers of his era was Hans Christian Andersen, yet he is more famous for his wonderful fairy-tales; my favourite being - The Ugly Duckling. What a great tale, and with a nice moral. You can be ugly but you can change, and become beautiful. I’ve always believed that the story should not be taken too literally, as I am sure that he perceived that beauty could be found on the inside as well as the outside.
So, what do we expect from our fairy-tales?
Like any other story we demand a beginning, middle, and an ending, preferably a happy one: anything to keep us interested all the way through. But we don’t always get what we want, do we? And even then it’s not enough, is it?
We want, no, demand more, don’t we?
We want a princess or three, evil villains, brave princes and dragons with long tales and sharp teeth. And we wish for, elves, imps, dwarves, orcs, and fairies; not forgetting bucketfuls of fairy-dust. For you can’t have a fairytale without fairy-dust, can you?
With all the characters leaping from the pages our fantasies soar like an eagle, and all boundaries disappear in a trice.I wonder what would happen if we could bottle up the power of a child’s imagination. The mind boggles with the possibilities.
We love fairy-stories, and even though the tales get bigger in the telling, we pass them on to our children, and our grandchildren. We never worry about the effect on our young because we know that the tales never hurt us.
And as we see the magic in their eyes, we remember. Because fairy-tales will never die as long as we continue to allow the magic of the words to flow from generation to generation.And as a teller of tales, I should know ... shouldn’t I?
About Rick Haynes
I was born way back before time meant anything. One zillion reincarnations later, I think I know who I am, but I am prepared for a second opinion. I have always enjoyed medieval fantasy tales.
Once I started, I could never put them down, often reading them into the early hours. I found myself living the characters that jumped out from the pages, and I always hoped that one day I could create my own world, full of vile creatures and true heroes. And after the passing of too many seasons I finally began to remove the ideas from my head and commence writing.Several fantasy short stories arrived, and I found that the ideas came along quicker than I could type. My Drabbles also received a dose of fantasy magic, yet in the background, the dream of a novel grew.It has taken many a month to produce a story that had lain dormant for so many years. Evil Never Dies - professionally edited - is my first novel and is a classic tale of good and evil set against a backdrop of green lands, snowy mountains and dusty plains. I show the horrors of war, as well as the loyalty, love and fears of all those involved. I believe that all men are flawed, and I leave it to my readers, to decide whether I have succeeded in showing their strengths and weaknesses, their compassion and cruelty. For war brings out the best and the worst in even the gentlest of men.
I have let my mind wander freely over the words, and I hope that you will enjoy your trip into the world of my imagination.
I was recently interviewed by the wizards of FantasyCon, the virtual fantasy convention taking place between Nov. 1 and Nov 8. This is a huge event of authors, artists, bloggers and fantasy readers who want to get together, have fun, be awesome geeks, play games, win prizes and yak about great books. The can join eight different sub-genre events here.
The interview posts can easily get buried on Facebook, so here is a transcript of what I had to answer. As it turned out it wasn't really as intimidating as it sounds. If you're on Facebook, please share this interview by clicking here.
AF - I was teethed on Tolkien. I don’t remember the first reading of The Lord of the Rings. It was just one of those things that was always there. I read everything, including The Silmarillion as a teenager. (I wrote bad epic poetry in imitation when I was thirteen.) I also loved David Eddings’ Belgariad.
As an adult I like The Wheel of Time series, Harry Potter, and The Magicians. I also like stories that bring bits of fantasy into other genres like Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series and probably anything that crosses fantasy with a contemporary thriller without resorting to vampires.
AF - I love “what if” logic games. (And I’m the kind of reader who will throw a book at the wall if the author doesn’t play fair.) I also love the interplay of magic, spirit and reality in more contemporary fantasy. Fantasy is truly inspiring to me when it makes you look at reality differently. I’m also a sucker for Elves and Dragons. I have seen them written poorly, but I will do most anything for a top-notch story involving Elves and/or Dragons. I like literary and historical fiction too, but fantasy adds fun and tension that really inspire me.
A - I am finishing up the sixth book in The Kyrennei Series. It’s closest to urban fantasy or sci fi/fantasy. Take a contemporary thriller and cross it with epic fantasy. Add a telepathic power cult who secretly rule today’s world and their ancient enemies—a non-human race that’s supposed to be extinct. Mix in a group of underground Pagan freedom fighters, ancient myths, secret languages and a distinctly international cast. That’s it in a nutshell.
It starts out with The Soul and the Seed. A student named Aranka Miko is kidnapped, then rescued and pulled into the clandestine struggle because of a fluke in her genes. She has to choose between being a victim in hiding or fighting back in a way that will surely get her killed. At the core it’s a story about finding authentic hope and inner freedom when you’re massively outgunned.
Beyond that series, I’m currently working on some adventure books for kids from Pagan and earth-centered families. And I’ve just started a near-future dystopian novel.
I love to connect with friends, readers, authors and artists on Facebook. Please share this interview with your friends who like to read.
I will be a panelist and have a booth at the mammoth virtual fantasy convention FantasyCon coming up (November 1 - 8). This is a new kind of book-lover's event. The kind of nerdy conventions that hard-core fans used to spend thousands to attend can now be had by anyone with an internet connection. There will be fantasy games with real prizes (money, books and swag). There will also be at least 200 real authors to meet and a ton of free and discounted books to explore. It will truly be a fantasy paradise.
Each day of FantasyCon is devoted to a sub-genre of fantasy. And some who aren't fanatical about fantasy might not even know what some of them are. To gear up for the event then, I am going to host a series of guest posts from FantasyCon authors clarifying the different sub-genres over the next few days. First, however, I am going to post an interview with another kind of FantasyCon participant--a publisher.
Please welcome Carly McCracken of Crimson Cloak Publishing. And thank you for joining us today, Carly.
1. From a publisher’s point of view, how would FantasyCon help you and the authors in your company?
FantasyCon helps by making more people than we would normally have access to, aware of us, our books, our authors, our brand, and our mission.
2. Can you see online events as part of an author’s role in the writing world?
Absolutely! Authors need to continually put themselves in the public's (and potential customers’) eye. This is just one more way to achieve that! Plus it has its advantages. For instance, an author doesn't have to actually LEAVE his home, his family, his life to participate, and he/she can potentially reach a MUCH bigger audience.
3. What do you look for in a good fantasy and sci-fi manuscript?
It MUST have good story flow. You know, the kind that keeps you interested through almost every step of the entire book. It should have a well-rounded story, built with interesting and memorable characters. It doesn't have to be action-packed to accomplish this either! A good plot, characters that seem to come to life, and good dialog around a campfire can accomplish this as well as a good action scene. It SHOULD have some action somewhere, though. :)
4. This genre is filled with an abundance of sub-genres. In your opinion, what is the future of fantasy and sci-fi? How does this genre stand up against the many other genres in the industry?
Wow, that's a tough question. My personal favorite is Sci-Fi/Fantasy. I think this genre has the biggest possibilities, but even a good children's book is enjoyable if written well. The future is hard to predict at any time, but I don't think many parts of Fantasy Genre will suffer. They have been around a long time, and I think they will continue to interest people. I think there are a lot more people interested in Fantasy than any others. The only one that probably compares would be self-help books. Those get a lot of sales too. For good reason.
5. What draws you to fantasy and sci-fi, both as a reader and a publisher?
I love a good story. I love aliens, and space, and time, and magic. I love interesting characters. I love ghosts, and anything paranormal. It's all so fascinating, and different from the mundane stuff we deal with every day. I think that is what draws me (and most others) in. The escape from reality. We can imagine we are the character, or there with the character, and we can experience things we wouldn't be able to otherwise.
6. Can you offer some advice to fantasy or sci-fi writers in the community about manuscript to publishing?
Not much more than I have already said. You need to keep your story moving. If it flat-lines, you need to look at why, and either remove what is causing it, or try re-writing it. Also, be open to re-writes. A lot of authors get married to their work. While this is a WONDERFUL quality that will help you sell books (enthusiasm for one's own work will draw people), you don't want to be SO married that you aren't willing to listen to your editor. Editors DO know what they are doing, otherwise they probably wouldn't have their job. So please be open-minded, and be willing to work with your editor on re-writing parts of your story that might need this. You do NOT want the reader to lose interest in your book. Usually once lost, they will put the book down, and never pick it up again. Another thing you don't want to do is over-complicate your story. If you do this, you will make your book hard/frustrating to read, and that will lose you potential sales, or a good review. One bad review can do 10x more damage to your sales/reputation than the good that 10 good reviews do.
Here is a place of shelter. My readers are often the outsiders of the modern world in one way or another, whether you're earth-centered, social justice activists, urban homesteaders, people of diverse and mixed ethnic, religious and racial backgrounds, people with disabilities, people with non-standard gender and sexual orientation or just the people who didn't quite fit into the typical crowds in high school. That is why I have made this site to be a safe zone for outsiders, a place where you can speak freely and be respected. Most importantly a place were you just plain belong.
Just as all of nature grows, children grow and mature with each challenge they overcome. This Summer Solstice story. Shanna and the Goddess tells how a brother and sister stand up to a crisis and save the family garden.
The warriors of today's Beltane celebrations are water protectors and defenders of the earth. Here is a story to ignite passion. Shanna and the Water Fairy is the third book in the Children's Wheel of the Year series but also a stand-alone adventure story pf positive kid power.
Kids can handle bullying and stand up for their beliefs. Here is an Ostara story that empowers today's kids. Shanna and the Pentacle is the second book in the Children's Wheel of the Year series, which brings real adventures to earth-based holidays.
Adventure, intuition, courage and real magic! Shanna and the Raven is a gripping Imbolc story for kids ages six to twelve. None of that "teachy" stuff! This is fun and affirming for Pagan kids. It's also the first in a series of eight, the Children's Wheel of the Year.
Adult and Young Adult Urban Fantasy and Dystopia
Cross urban fantasy with contemporary dystopia and you get The Kyrennei Series. It’s the story of a young woman who doesn’t fit the mold, a band of international freedom fighters in the heart of America and half-forgotten legends coming to life. Constant emotional tension and living, breathing characters make this an unforgettable saga.
The facade of freedom is a thinly veiled lie. In present-day America, a power cult can usurp your will and turn you against your friends and family.
Once - more than a thousand years ago -there were people who were immune to Addin control of hearts and minds. Legends around the globe still speak of them - slight people with pointed ears, now relegated to fantasy stories. Their true name has been forgotten.
They were the Kyrennei.
A prophecy says they will one day return, but the Addin vow to exterminate them. The Meikans, the descendants of human allies of the Kyrennei, yet exist, though they live under a tyrannical treaty with the Addin that has bought their survival at the cost of centuries of silence. Now those who have kept faith with the ancient gods for a millennium stand at the cusp of a new era - the time of the Seed.
It begins in a large round valley in the mountains of northeastern Oregon. One day Aranka Miko is a small-town student. The next, she's a prisoner, a reviled mutant and not even considered human.
At the same time, a young doctor code-named Kenyen fights with a band of international outlaws in a clandestine war with impossible odds. His mission is to infiltrate the Addin labs in Idaho where those who carry the genetic code of the Kyrennei are being studied... and murdered.
Kenyen is barely keeping his cover, when Aranka turns up in his lab. She is not like the other young people imprisoned there. For one thing, she can see that he isn’t Addin. A careless word from her could destroy the resistance and doom Kenyen’s soul. But she could also bring unimagined hope.
Can one girl hold “the seed,” the first flicker of hope in a millennium? Can she even survive one more day in the labs?
The Soul and the Seed is the first book in The Kyrennei Series - a dystopian fantasy thriller of today's world. The second book is The Fear and the Solace.
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