The Long Road
To be honest, in writing The Killer and The Dead I didn’t set out to explore aspects of metafiction, which I define as fiction that interrogates itself, and that can operate in a separate space in the reader’s mind beyond merely the ingestion and understanding of the narrative: it just kind of happened. In meta …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: To Explore the Meta
The adventure of a blank page is the infinite possibilities it represents. Each word written at first narrows the choices left for those to follow, words determining their most likely successors, options being lost due to the rules of grammar, the syntax of language. But, after a time a magical thing can happen: the groups …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: To try to Touch the Unknown.
I would like to thank Steven Craig and Parker Performing Arts School for inviting myself and the ever excellent Cheryl Carpinello in for a sequence of Q&A sessions with four classes of engaged and enthusiastic pupils today. I really enjoyed meeting the students and burbling on at length about many aspects of writing and fantasy …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: To go to a School and try to Explain Why I Write Fantasy
Time for another attempt by me to ramble on randomly about fantasy and see what falls out. No planning for this blog. I should be in bed already! If you don't have time, the title sums it up and you can stop here! (Added this line in last, haha!) When I consider characters, dilemmas, conflicts, …
So: thoughts have been gathered, and revision begins. There is a lot to do. So right now I’m oscillating between this. And this. The thing is not to blindly rush in, or panic about how much there is to do, though that is tempting. I have to remind myself not to get bogged down …
I write fantasy because I want to put words together in magical patterns that cause as much delight in others as putting them down did for me. I write fantasy because I want to say something new in a genre dominated by tradition. I write fantasy because I want to explore strange new worlds and …
In the fantasy of my youth non-human races were always part of the magical formula that took me from the mundane here, to the fantastical there. Talking animals, creatures from greek myth, folklore figures brought to life, all of them were part of that secret world just around the corner and over the hill …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: To Write the Classic Non-Human Races, in Other Books, Later
So folks, while it is fresh in my mind I thought I’d reiterate what I thought was one of the central points discussed during our panel at Denver Comic Con. (Thank you once again to my fab panelists!) And that is this: I feel that paying attention to the culture a character grows up in, …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: Morality, Culture, and Character Creation
Now I've done a blog before about how it takes a team, but tonight I'm just saying, for the last time, that I and my companions on the panel will be at Denver Comic Con tomorrow at 12 midday, room 404, discussing Morality and Culture in Fantasy Fiction: a look at how grounding characters in …
Last week I was going to write this column, but got distracted by a blogging landmark. So here we go! Now I’ve always wanted to write fantasy. I have a few memories of my life before I wanted to write tales of magic and wonder, but there aren’t that many of them. One is of …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: The Illusion of Control
