The Long Road
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
It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to crank out a blog of an evening. I completed the line edit in double time, missing deadline by a day, but I’ll take it, and my editor is a forgiving soul, for which I am grateful. The essential truth of 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, …
Oh yeah. The music, the costumes, the saturated colours, the visual style that played with realism and then deliriously ignored it to tell its story in its own defiant way, and managed to sweep me up in it. I watched this movie four times in a rather dilapidated cinema in Dundee, complete with decayed but …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: The Three Fours #2: Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Spoilers for a 30+ year old movie follow. And for Alien3 too. You've been warned. There are only three movies I’ve paid to see more than once in rapid succession, and each time I ended up seeing the film four times in the theatre. In each case I was lured into the atmosphere of the …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: The Three Fours #1: Highlander
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
Of course in truth that isn’t why I write fantasy, but it is a pleasant and unexpected side effect! Only 4 days to go now before my first visit to a Comic Con, and my first participation in a Con! How weirdly awesome is that? I’m going to geek out and take my ancient paperback …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: To Introduce My Fellow Panelists at Denver Comic Con
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
Last week I talked about what success meant for me nowadays. A big part of why the shape of success has changed for me over the years is a growing acceptance of the things I can and cannot control in this writing life. I was very unrealistic in my youth. I wanted it all, but …
