Steel Enema

Some people on Authonomy last week got a kick out of this excerpt from my fantasy novel The Shard, so I figured why not post it here. To set the scene, my MC Midas and his sons got themselves trapped inside a mountain along with a small group that was going after a dragon. Since Midas's primary goal was keeping his sons safe, he wasn't at all happy about this. After much exertion, the group manages to pass through the mountain and get within sight of the exit only to encounter an overwhelming number of goblins along with three trolls. The situation seems hopeless...

BTW, since the excerpt mentions the 'Kaldarion Sword', I had better let you know that this was found in the dragon hoard and was a dwarf-made weapon presented to the first great king of the Known Lands, Aronis Kaldarion, two thousand years earlier. It was lost when the dragon destroyed the capital city eight centuries ago.
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The first goblins smashed into the line and were cut down. Years of training snapped Midas out of his panic. He bulled forward into three goblins, bowling them over with his shield. He kicked at them while they flailed on the ground, and plunged his sword into the belly of the nearest. He thought for one last second about yelling to his sons to move to the rear, but then he was forced to turn all his attention to mere survival as new waves of goblins enveloped the group. The hall was too large to allow the party to maintain a shield wall, so the goblins easily swarmed around the flanks.


This is it! We’re dead! These words passed repeatedly through Midas’s head as he thrust and punched and kicked at howling figures that came at him from all sides. He swept his shield around in an arc, clearing a small space to his left. Then much of the torchlight dimmed as a massive figure loomed over him, sweeping a huge mace back over its head.

He couldn’t think. He knew he was about to die. The only bit of open ground he saw was the space beneath the troll’s legs, so with the logic of pure desperation he jumped forward and ducked under the massive pot belly. The troll’s ring mail skirt scraped against his helm, and with a surge of strength born of fear Midas plunged the Kaldarion Sword upward through the troll’s buttocks. Blood drenched his sword arm. He was shocked at how easily the blade penetrated all the way to the hilt.

Underlying Message Within a Story

Almost all stories have some sort of underlying message, in many cases more than one. I touch on many issues in my fantasy novel, from women's rights to evolution to religion to racism. However, there is one true emotional undercurrent to my book, and it is based upon my own greatest fear in life.

In my story, the main character has certain expectations to meet, from his duty to the king to his own expectations on how to properly prepare his children for life. These expectations are offset by his tremendous fear for the safety of his children, especially since he already experienced the death of his eldest son in a manner for which he holds himself responsible.

This ties in exactly with my greatest nightmare, which is a fear of something bad happening to one or both of my sons. As logical and sane as I consider myself to be, I cannot imagine what I would do if something happened to them. I feel like I would lose my mind and no longer want to live. So, I poured some of that fear into the story line of my main character, only I had him actually have to confront the reality of his fears coming true, not just with the original death of his eldest, but later with his youngest son also dying. I have to admit that I cannot read that part of the story without tearing up a bit. I read it aloud to my family and I had to pause when I reached that scene. I sure hope I never have to face this fear during my life.

A Problem of Characters versus Reality

Yesterday Nathan Bransford did a post about absent parents in YA fiction. The consensus opinion, with which I agree, is that the presence of parents interferes with the ability of the child protagonists to go out adventuring (not to mention that you get a built in amount of sympathy due to whatever has removed the parents).

I had a slightly different issue in my novel. All of us who have been studying writing have read numerous times that we must cut down the number of characters to just those that are truly needed for the story. It isn't good to introduce and let readers get to know a dozen characters and even more sub-characters if some of them play little role in the plot or their role could be just as easily done by an already existing character. My problem is that in a standard medieval society, families tend to be very large, often with more than a dozen kids. I do manage to show this in passing by describing some families this way, but when it comes to the families of key characters, I keep their numbers way down. After all, it wouldn't help the readers or the plot any to have to introduce 14 brothers and sisters, even if that is more realistic.

So, I find (for me) unsatisfying but plausible reasons for all of my major families to have only two or three kids. A mother died in childbirth and events have prevented the father from remarrying. A wife who dislikes her husband and avoids her wifely duties as much as possible. Anyhow, I kind of despise doing this, while at the same time I completely understand that having too many family members simply doesn't work for my kind of tale.

Have you had to compromise absolute realism in order to make your story more readable?

North Hemisphere-centric

It occurred to me the other day that every fantasy book I have ever read was North Hemisphere-centric, regardless of whether it was set on Earth or an alternate-Earth. I tried to imagine doing my fantasy novel as if it were set in the Southern Hemisphere, with the ice/cold to the south and the deserts to the north. I bet if I did that many readers would be confused!

I thought about all the fantasy maps I have seen in my life, and in every case the cold and ice was to the north. In one sense this is logical, since our European medieval life (upon which most fantasy is based) was based in the north, and most fantasy readers also live in the north (the major exception being Australians). However, there is nothing to say that a different world would similarly be north-centric.

How about you, have you any thoughts on this? Have you read any fantasy books that were set in the Southern Hemisphere?

Writing Fantasy Races

I purposely chose to use my favorite fantasy races in my book, well aware that there is a rabid group of writers/readers out there that never wants to see another elf or dwarf in a book again. I respect those readers' opinions, but I wish they would in return respect the fact that there are many readers who absolutely love reading about the standard fantasy races and want to read more about them. So, elves, dwarves, trolls, dragons, goblins, and even orcs populate my book. This is exactly what I love most, so if you are tired of such races, well my book is simply not written for you.

What I really wish to discuss is an odd problem I encountered while writing the book -- whether or not to capitalize the race names when they are used. I had never thought about it before. When I started typing out the story, I initially used capitals, not even really thinking about it. It was no problem to use 'Elf' and 'Dwarf' as I typed, but I initially hit a snag when I first needed to use the term for the human races. Would I always capitalize 'Man'? I thought it was no big deal and simply did so for a while, but I began to encounter things I hadn't thought about.

I turned to Tolkien to try to resolve the issue. He only confused me more, since he was not entirely consistent in his usage. For the most part, he capitalized race names whenever they were used in their broad form, but he did not use capitals when the usage was personal. So, if he was referring to the dwarf Gimli, it would not be capitalized, but he would use the word Dwarves when referring to the race in general.

Okay, so I began doing this in my book, only to run into snags. I had one sentence where an elf was referred to personally but there was also a generic usage of Elves within the same sentence. So, if I went with Tolkien, I would have had the same term in one sentence with one capitalized and one not. I could just see a literary agent looking at my text and dismissing me as an idiot!

So, I dropped it all and decided to go with all lower case for races! It isn't a perfect solution, because I always run into critters who wonder why nothing is capitalized, but honestly it is the simplest solution that I could find.

Favorite Woman Authors

I have blogged many times about my favorite authors, J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin. It would be a little unfair to leave Robert E. Howard and Stephen King off of that list, too. However, I haven't blogged much about my favorite female authors, and I do have some whose books I love and reread every so often.

My favorite has to be Colleen McCullough.




























Sorry for so many links, but this entire series is brilliant. Anyone who loves the history of Rome simply cannot miss out on these books. I studied Roman history all my life, as it was my favorite period (especially Republican Rome), but I still learned more from this fictional account of history than I ever had before. McCullough uses real history as best she can, while fictionalizing most of the action within the historical pieces. Her writing is vivid and exciting, and I will most likely reread this series throughout my entire life, just as I do with Tolkien or Martin.

My next favorite is Ursula LeGuin, primarily for her fantastic Earthsea series. I do have a bunch of her other books on my shelf, but I have not gotten around to reading them yet. Regardless, no fan of fantasy should miss her Earthsea books. If you think young wizards discovering their power and going through a wizard school is cliche by now, well remember that LeGuin did it first. Sorry, Harry Potter!















 The last one I will feature this time is a lesser known author, but she deserves better, all the more so because the subject of her fantasy novels is one I would normally think I wouldn't like, yet she manages to make it truly interesting. It is Katherine Kurtz for her Deryni cycles. There are too many of them to put them all up here, so I will just put one and let you know that the entire series is well worth reading. Religion plays a huge role in these, and I have never been thrilled with such books, but Kurtz makes it work very well. 

 Now, there are many more female authors that I love. I must mention J.K. Rowling since I will certianly be revisiting the Harry Potter novels, despite the fact that I am not a big fan of YA books. I have some books on my shelves that I have not yet read, while I have heard good things about the authors, such as Mary Kay Penman or Robin Hobb.

 So, what female authors will you always reread?

Romantasy

I decided to follow up on my last post because I hadn't been prepared the first time I visited B&N. This time I went back with a pen and paper so I could take down title and author names. To recap, I was stunned the other day (the first time I had the chance to go to a real bookstore in a couple of years) to see just how attrocious the covers were on many titles I saw on the shelves in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section (with apologies to Kevin Hearne).

It appears that today's publishers have decided to go after the huge female audience for romance by turning speculative fiction covers into mimics of romance covers. As Alex Cavanaugh stated in the comments yesterday, they also seem to want to place supernatural stories in the fantasy section rather than in the horror section where they belong (though I would imagine that the brilliant Anne Rice is quite happy not to have these books shelved next to hers).

I call these new covers Romantasy, which I define to mean a cover that at first glance looks like a romance but turns out to be a speculative fiction book. The very first shelf I saw in the fantasy section the other day had nothing but these books on it. Here are the first six I saw on the shelf:

For those of you who love such work, more power to you. I am not trying to offend you. I just cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to see such covers when you could have great covers instead. Check out the Frazetta covers for the Conan novels, or Alan Lee's work on McKiernan's Iron Tower trilogy. How about the art for Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books? Awesome. Only one cover stood out to me on the shelves when I looked today. It isn't the best I have seen, but it is head over heels better than those above:

The book is Ghosts of Ascalon. See, it is still paranormal in style, but it is actually interesting and immediately conveys the fantasy setting. I would buy this book and hope that the story inside reflects the care that the publishers took on the cover art. The others? I will never get the chance to see if they have a decent story inside, because I would never buy such a book.

One last thought that strikes me as interesting (completely scientific, of course, based upon my own long life of reading speculative fiction). I have found that the quality of covers alone actually does tend to predict the quality of the work inside. I have never yet encountered a great cover that did not end up having a great story inside, and conversely I have never been surprised by how good a book is when it has a terrible cover. Not once, ever. There is a gray area, though, in those books that have mediocre covers -- these ones I have found can range from great to awful. For instance, I thought the George R.R. Martin covers for ASOIAF were very mediocre, but the story is fantastic.