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So What’s Wrong With (Some) Modern Fantasy?

So What’s Wrong With (Some) Modern Fantasy?

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“Ooo, Neil! You’re so creative! How do you get your ideas? All that magic and mysticism and darkness. OOoooo…”

Neil Gaiman
“Ooo, Neil! You’re so creative! How do you get your ideas? All that magic and mysticism and darkness. OOoooo…”

And repeat.

Yes, I was at a Neil Gaiman reading. And Gaiman, of course, rocks.

He doesn’t write about talking squids, but much of his output falls squarely in the Fantasy and Science Fiction category. Judging from the beer bellies and black T-shirts at the event, we geeks know this — hard to miss when he’s written Batman, Babylon 5, and Dr Who. And of course, a good whack of his prose fiction counts as Fantasy.

What’s interesting is that the non-geeks don’t seem to get this. To them he’s this wonderful, off the wall, creative genius, the sole acceptable purveyor of vampires and werewolves and Old Gods. If they are aware of the wider genre(s), they dismiss them as “sweaty handed nerd stuff.” Rayguns and space rockets are fine in Dr Who, but not elsewhere.

You see the same thing with Tolkien and also our local hero, JK Rowling. People who are snotty about anything with magic on the cover, go crazy over the Potterverse and Middle Earth; “It’s not Fantasy, it’s Children’s Fiction/Literature.”

This is maddening. Geeks are people too. How unfair to be sneered at, put down, for one’s tastes by the same people who are embracing them. It’s like being beaten up for “being a Paddy” by a party of drunks on their way home from Riverdance.

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Some Comments on the SFWA Rate Increase

Some Comments on the SFWA Rate Increase

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SFWA logoSo, I saw that SFWA (the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) is raising their qualifying payrate from 5 cents/word to 6 cents/word. This rate is part of SFWA’s formula for determining whether a market or an individual sale is a professional sale for the purposes of qualifying for SFWA membership. With some other minor details, a writer can qualify for full SFWA membership with three professional short fiction sales, or the sale of one novel at professional pay.

The last time SFWA raised its qualifying rate was nine years ago, when social media was less developed than now, and I’ve already seen some reactions about what this will mean for magazines that qualify right now at 5 cents/word. Short fiction economics being what they are, a few magazines will be at a decision point. Do they incur the costs of raising their pay rates and remaining SFWA-qualifying markets, or do they remain at 5 cents/word and possibly lose out on that part of the author population that is looking for SFWA membership? Many magazines are volunteer-run operations (bless them!) and/or are running losses, and/or are making ends meet with grants and kickstarter campaigns. Publishing is not a business you go into to make money. Hayden Trenholm, publisher of Bundoran Press, often tosses out the old saw that the way to make a small fortune in publishing is to start with a big fortune.

Writers (and publishers) are human beings. They pour their hearts into acts of creation in defiance of odds and common sense (once again, bless them, and me, who participates in the insanity of creation against all advice just as much as anyone else). We all ache for acceptance and recognition of our art, and SFWA is powerful professional recognition. Someone is saying “You are good, we welcome you to our group.” Heady stuff for any artist, although that’s not exactly the wording on the acceptance note. Whether or not you subscribe to the whole professional association thing, our reactions as artists are very much human.

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Why Did the Genre Cross the Road?

Why Did the Genre Cross the Road?

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Red Plant Blues Last week I was talking about dystopias and satires, urban fantasy and paranormal romance, and further thought has led me to observe that genre can be a tricky thing. Of course, I was really talking about how definitions change and evolve, and how we all fight the changes we don’t agree with. I didn’t really talk about the difference between nouns and adjectives. I didn’t mention that something can be dystopian, without being, actually, a dystopia. Or that something can have satirical elements, without being, technically, a satire.

After all, practically everything we read – or watch for that matter – has a romantic element, but that doesn’t mean we’re reading romance novels, or watching rom-coms.

Total aside: is there a rom-trag genre? Wuthering Heights, maybe? Rebecca? Truly, Madly, Deeply?

Anyway. I’ve actually had a romance novel published, so I think of myself as someone uniquely qualified to talk about that aspect of crossing genres.

As with any other genre, romance has characteristic conventions, but what really makes a romance novel a romance novel is that it tells the story of a very precise portion of the protagonists’ lives. Specifically, it tells the story of how they met the person they love, and began spending the rest of their lives together. Other things are very likely happening to the characters at the same time. They have work lives, social lives, family obligations. They may have crimes to commit or solve. But if the main plot concerns their love life, then it’s a romance. If there’s also a mystery/crime, that means there’s a mystery element, one that exists only to allow the characters to meet, interact, and so forth.

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Heroic Historical and Uncomfortable Truths

Heroic Historical and Uncomfortable Truths

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large_towton
A winter battle. How positively…

People often quote LP Hartley (without having any idea they’re quoting him, or who he was, me included) — “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

To an extent you can take a tourist attitude and go, “Look at the funny foreigners. How romantic!”

Distance in time fosters distance in morality, making it — for example — entirely acceptable to offer Battle of Towton greetings cards. A winter battle. How positively Christmassy!

Or for the Scottish Borders Council to adopt the Border Reiver as a logo.

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The Powerful Geek

The Powerful Geek

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Darth Vader in a suit-smallWhen I was ten years old, my father enrolled my brother and me into martial arts classes given at the local YMCA. It was a two-class session, starting with tae kwon do and then switching to judo for the second hour. It was my first real experience with physical training outside of school gym class. I was hooked right away.

At first, I really preferred the tae kwon do with its blocks and punches and kicks that somewhat resembled what my brother and I watched on Black Belt Theater on Saturday afternoons. The judo, on the other hand, was a lot more work. The instructor spent half the class running us through fairly rigorous calisthenics, followed by grappling and throws.

Now, by the time we began these lessons, I was already a fantasy- and scifi-loving geek. I was into Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, Conan, and superheroes. For me, martial arts were a real-life connection to the heroic feats that permeated those works. Bruce Lee was one of my earliest personal icons. As I got older and went college, I added bodybuilding to my repertoire. After graduating, I worked for fourteen years as a guard at a maximum-security juvenile detention center, where my training was put to practical use.

It doesn’t require a Ph.D. in psychology to realize I was undergoing a transformation in all this. Studying these arts and working out allowed me to model the attributes of my childhood heroes. Yet, in aping these heroic qualities, I was also feeding my inner fantasy life. It helped me to make the decision to pursue fantasy writing as a career, as if it were a natural step on my personal journey.

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The Uses of Ghosts

The Uses of Ghosts

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living-with-ghostsWhile Black Gate readers may (fairly) view me as a sword-and-sorcery writer, thanks to the Tales Of Gemen the Antiques Dealer, a good many of those who have stumbled across my fiction might (fairly) think of me as a horror writer. Since I never expected to fall into that particular category, I’ve been doing a good deal of soul-searching as to the value of what I’m up to – the value, as it were, of basing so much of my tale-spinning on the supernatural instead of, for example, “real life.”

Dare I take this moment to point out that an entirely different set of readers might quite reasonably think of me as a writer of literary fiction?  Yeah, I wear that hat, too.

This odd combination of multiple caps has led me to the following conclusion: ghosts are a tool in the writer’s toolbox, as specific as more established weaponry like setting, length, voice, and theme.

Without further ado, I offer my list of why Things That Go Bump In the Night have worth. I don’t expect this to be an exhaustive list, but I trust that I have made a good start. Perhaps you, gentle reader, will be inspired to add to the till?

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“You Keep Using This Word… “

“You Keep Using This Word… “

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utopia thomas more-smallDid you know that in the 18th century, “conscious” meant “guilty”? People have always played fast and loose with terminology and definitions, and we’re all bothered by the ones that bother us, and not by the ones that don’t.

For example, there’s been a bit of an outcry lately over the changing definition of the word “literally.” While I understand – and sympathise – the fact is that new definitions don’t replace old ones, and that English is a language that’s been evolving forever. What’s more important, it seems to me, is that we decide which definitions we’re using at any given time, and we make sure that all other parties to the discussion are using the same ones.

So much for the definitions of words. What about when the word itself is the definition?

I always thought I knew what “Urban Fantasy” meant. You know, a novel set in a city, with an element of fantasy added in. Usually, but not always, a modern, our-world city*. A novel where the story couldn’t be set in any place other than a city, using the tropes, paradigms and conventions of fantasy. That’s what makes it a fantasy novel, just as the necessary setting makes it an urban fantasy.

Then I was invited to be on a panel where we were to discuss whether it was possible for urban fantasies to have male protagonists. I was confused. I wasn’t aware that to a great many people “urban fantasy” is coming to mean “paranormal romance.” Which is, you know, a romance novel with an element of the paranormal added in. Using the tropes, paradigms and conventions of the romance novel. Which is what makes it a romance novel.

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The Hero’s Struggle

The Hero’s Struggle

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The Swords of Lankhmar-smallConan the Barbarian. Elric of Melnibone. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Gilgamesh. Hercules. Hector of Troy.

These giants of heroic fantasy (and the mythology from whence it springs) strode across the landscape of my imagination as a young man. They were my guiding stars when I started to write my own stories. But what were they teaching me?

When I think about these heroes, one thing that comes through is their incredible lust for life. Even when they lapse into melancholy, they never stop striving, never stop fighting, and that struggle is the essence of life. Whether it’s Conan carving out a place for himself in the kingdoms of Hyborea, or Elric fighting to keep his fragile body alive with potions and sorcery, or Hector facing the dread Achilles to protect his home, these heroes confront the challenges of their ages.

Their struggles say a lot about humanity. How far would we go to protect our own? Where is the line between justice and vengeance? Is violence ever warranted?

So when it came time to create the heroes for my own stories, I didn’t set out to emulate these characters, but time and time again I noticed certain parallels. For instance, Caim (the main character of my Shadow Saga) has many of the physical traits of the Gray Mouser, but married to a personality more like Conan. Caim is direct in his sneakiness, deliberate in his dealings, and he possesses a code of honor that, although rather bleak and brutal to most people, elevates him above his peers.

Heroes often fight. They tend to love and mourn with superhuman passion. But first and foremost, they struggle. With their enemies, with their societies, with the gods, and oftentimes even with themselves. They struggle, and so must our contemporary heroes who wish to tread in their titan-sized footsteps.

The Plot Thickens. Or Maybe Stretches.

The Plot Thickens. Or Maybe Stretches.

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NovelistI had occasion to look into John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist for something totally unrelated to the posts I’ve been doing lately on plotting and plot devices. While I was checking through the book for the quote I needed, however, I found a few things he had to say about plot that I thought you might find interesting.

For those of you wondering, this is not the British John Gardner who was tapped to write the 007 pastiches in the 1980’s, but the American one who wrote all that Old English literary criticism, who’s one of the best known teachers of creative writing, with his book The Art of Fiction considered one of the seminal works in the field for students and teachers alike. For those of us in the Fantasy and SF community, however, he’s likely best known as the author of novels like Grendel, and Freddy’s Book, and October Light.

I’m going to share these observations in the order in which they appear, for the most part without regard to context. I won’t apologize for all the male-centric pronouns, I’ll just  point out that the book was published after Gardner’s unexpected death (so no changes could be made in later editions) and that male-centric was the default back then (pre-1982), even for most female writers. Here we go:

The wise writer counts on the characters and plot for his story’s power, not on tricks of withheld information, including withheld information at the end . . .

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The Series Series: Tales from Rugosa Coven by, Um, Me

The Series Series: Tales from Rugosa Coven by, Um, Me

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While we wait for my current publisher to send me the new cover art, here’s my last publisher’s art for a novella in the Rugosa Coven Series.

A tight deadline for turning around my galley proofs meant I had to choose: either skip my regular blogging gig here, or blog about the only book I’ve had time to look at for the past two weeks: my own. I can’t very well review a book I wrote–not just because of the temptation to brag about it, but also because the nitpicky galley proof process is forcing me to second-guess every word of it, at a point in the production process in which only a few of those words can be changed. Should you buy my book? If anyone had asked me last night while I was doing battle for the last time with a paragraph that has been driving me crazy for the past seven years, I honestly don’t know what I’d have said. John O’Neill assures me that Black Gate‘s readers will be interested in my own experience writing a fantasy series and preparing it for publication, so here goes.

Once upon a time, there was a call for short story submissions from a horror magazine. The editors were looking for very short works of psychological horror on the theme of “the life interrupted.” I tend to write long, and I’d never written horror before (and since the story that came to me grew up to be a comedy, I still haven’t), so I thought I’d challenge myself by trying to write something for the call. I wanted to start with a character whose life, pre-interruption, was already unusual. My protagonist arrived in my head by way of this personal ad on the fictitious dating website PaganSingles.com:

Divorced Wiccan female, 32, seeks realistic rebound guy. Petite and trim brunette. Enjoys the ocean, 19th century novels, long Sunday mornings with the New York Times. Atlantis cranks need not apply.

What would be the most horrifying interruption possible in the life of a skeptical post-modern Neo-Pagan who prides herself on not being a New Ager? Discovering that the New Agers were right about something, anything, and why not Atlantis?

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