Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

I was chatting with a friend recently, about writing, and genre, and realized something.

I write (mildly to moderately) literary fiction in fantasy clothing.

Don’t get me wrong, I love fantasy, I live and breathe it, it is, as the kids used to say, my jam.

But.

When I write fantasy I can’t avoid doing it my way, and that way is mildly to moderately literary. The adverbs are obviously a poor stylistic choice. I write to be read, but also to mildly to moderately challenge. With a side of possible infuriation. I don’t write comfort food for the soul. I wish I did sometimes.

I had this plan for a pulp fantasy in a D&Desque world. It’s turned into a discussion on how the abused become abusers when they get power, and about racism, and the destruction of trust. With dungeons.

I can’t help myself. This is who I am as a writer, and it’s about time I owned up to it. I’m doing that story next.

The P word. Pretentious. Is it? Maybe. That’s for you, my lovely readers, to decide. I’m just writing my worlds, interrogating my ideas and sharing them as best I can. I’ve been pretentious so long I’m postentious now. Bdum dum tish! Pretentious dad jokes, can they be a thing now? Should they be? I suspect not.

I want to share the wonder I felt as a child and teen when falling into fantastical worlds, but I recognize now how desperate I was to escape, too desperate, and that level of probably unhealthy yearning is not in me anymore. So can I reproduce it on paper? I don’t know. I want to. When the time is right, I will try.

Once again, I disagree with Yoda. There is doing, and doing is good, but trying is not always an excuse for failure, my little green friend. There is a lot of trying in this world, along with its big brother striving, and there should be. I am always going to try my best. Sometimes I might even do my best. That is always the plan.

And for me that plan is fantasy with some M to M literary weight behind it. I’m not a commercial writer, in some ways I wish I was, but that’s not how I’m built and not how I want to write.

So there you have it. I have a new book coming out in a few months, called The Red Palace. It is a Jacobean revenge play meets An Inspector Calls with an urge to the cathartic. It is a lot of talking, and then a place where words will no longer have any power. It is my reaction to our world, today, and there is a lot of anger in it, now released, hence catharsis. Hope, optimism, those can be for other books to explore. This is about crime, and deserved punishment.

I hope you check it out when it arrives. I’ll let you know as it draws closer.