All three of my novels (ebooks) are on sale for $0.99 to celebrate the solstice and the official beginning of summer! All three are pretty summer-y books, perfect for beach reading. For less than three bucks, you’ll have plenty of fantasy to enjoy!
Category: 13 Treasures Britain (Page 1 of 4)
The “Magna Carta” is an idea I discovered in No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty.
Basically, it’s a list of all the things — plot elements, character types, settings, themes, language, etc. — that you enjoy in a story. Then, with said list as inspiration, you can begin crafting your own story, filling it with as many things from your magna carta as possible, thus ensuring that your novel will be something you enjoy writing. We are all readers first, after all, so if we write what we enjoy reading we will create books that excite us.
I taught a Creative Writing class a couple of years ago, and I used the Magna Carta idea with my students (we also did the Anti-Magna Carta, which is from Baty’s book as well). I modeled it for them by creating my own Magna Carta for fantasy literature. I am not sure it’s an exhaustive list of the things I like, but it includes many elements that I enjoy. Some of them are easily found in today’s fantasy genre, but some (“Stories where violence doesn’t always save the day” or “Mothers and non-traditional protagonists”) are harder to come by (at least to my knowledge).
My Magna Carta for fantasy stories:
- Magical treasures
- Lots of magic (but it’s not commonplace)
- Magic that is numinous, mysterious, and unpredictable
- Magic that involves transformations
- Lost/forgotten empires
- Places/people/things being lost to the mists of time
- Dragons
- Female characters being skillful/having professions
- Characters who aren’t fighters still having an impact on the story
- Stories where violence doesn’t always save the day
- Desert settings
- Cosmopolitan cities
- Mysterious towers
- Sinister magicians
- People who can do a special craft
- Musicians
- Music
- Dungeon crawls
- Writing that is poetic and mythic
- Mothers and non-traditional protagonists
- Characters with lofty dreams
- Highly flawed characters who have to persevere
- Characters who need to atone
- Stories about forgiveness
- Stories where characters go on an inner journey as well as an outward journey
- Journeys to strange, new lands
I’m especially interested in women who have professions that aren’t the trope-y, “masculine” professions like assassin or soldier. I want to read (and write) stories about women who are craftspeople, midwives, brewers, scholars, cartographers, apothecaries, and more. I’m interested in women who are mothers who also GET TO HAVE ADVENTURES. Or perhaps a fantasy novel with an elderly person as the protagonist. I’m curious to see how such non-traditional protagonists would thrive in a fantastical world filled with danger and magic. I feel as if far too often, the “ordinary” folk who are tasked with a quest are either A.) young people or B.) “ordinary” men who used to be soldiers/warriors/wizards/ etc. George R.R. Martin explored some of these non-traditional protagonists in his A Song of Ice and Fire series (characters like Sansa and Catelyn), but he still stayed mostly in the realm of high-born people. Not many POVs from regular folk.
However, even though I’m interested in “regular folk” (especially mothers and elderly people), this doesn’t mean I want a low-magic story. What I really love seeing is how ordinary people deal with the numinous, the extraordinary, the strange, the magical. And preferably, they deal with these things in a non-violent way. Not that I don’t enjoy sword-play and action scenes (I do), but it would be nice to have more fantasy that didn’t lead to climactic battles and bloodshed. I’m guilty of this tendency myself; Merlin’s Last Magic, thus far, has lots of violence and killing. But in future stories and novels, I’m interested in exploring how to tell a rousing tale that doesn’t end with a big battle or a violent death.
Overall, the Magna Carta is a useful tool for writers. It’s not meant to limit or restrict writers from pursuing an idea that might not fit their “preferred list,” but instead, it gives them a clearer idea of what they love and what they’re interested in exploring. The things on my magna carta get me excited to start writing; they stir my imagination and feed my muse.
When I wrote the second draft of The Thirteen Treasures of Britain, I was also reading The Last Unicorn. Even though my story and Beagle’s had little in common, the music of his prose, the vitality of his world made an impact on me while I was writing. I wanted my book to capture some strain of the magic that I felt The Last Unicorn possessed. Even though I knew my own novel would never equal Beagle’s masterpiece, I wanted to try. In short, The Last Unicorn was inspiring. It energized my writing, and I found myself more joyful while I read it, and more joyful while I was writing my own story.
It’s no secret that I’ve had trouble finishing my second novel, Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess. I’ve had babies, become the mother of three children all under the age of five, struggled to navigate the demands of teaching, mothering, and adulting, and all the while, I’ve felt less joyful and more overwhelmed. My writing time has evaporated, and with it, a lot of my enthusiasm. I’ve still managed to push on, to write even when it feels like a slog through the Swamps of Sadness, but without that spark of joyfulness that I felt when drafting The Thirteen Treasures. So this second book is taking an eternity to finish.
Curiously, at this very moment, I’m reading another classic of fantasy literature (A Wizard of Earthsea), and I’m finding myself suddenly joyful and energized again, inspired to sit down and work on the draft of my own novel.
Just like what happened with The Last Unicorn.
Le Guin’s prose, the depth of her world and her themes, the way I become completely immersed and lost in her story, the way it feeds my imagination — all of these things remind me of what it’s like to be a fantasy writer, to dream up characters and places and fantastical creatures. And when I do sit down to write, I feel nourished by Le Guin’s story. Great writing makes us as writers see what’s possible, what can be achieved with words, and when I know there are storytellers out there who have reached greatness, then in some small way, I hope I can reach it too. I know I won’t; that’s not the point. It’s the striving for greatness that gives me energy, that helps me find joy in my writing.
I am, at times, haunted by Ray Bradbury’s maxim to “write with gusto.” So much of my writing over the last year and a half has not been filled with much gusto. But when I read a great book — fantasy or otherwise — I gain some measure of gusto, some “kick-joy” (as Kerouac? would say), and I begin to wonder why I don’t just read great books all the time. If these books work like a tonic on my brain, why wouldn’t I imbibed every day? Why am I spending time on things that don’t fill me up with this kind of excitement and awe?
I suppose it’s because we don’t know which books will contain the magic until we start them, and I’m the sort of reader who hates to abandon a book once I’ve started it. There are a few that I DNF, but they are very few. And I also feel obliged to read widely in my genre, most particularly the books being published right now; I can’t exactly restrict myself to the Great Classics of Fantasy if I’m trying to keep up with what’s being written currently. Of course, I’ve read some current fantasy that has indeed been the magical-kind-of-great that I’m describing in this post, but without the benefit of time and distance, it’s hard to know which of these books will be The Ones, and which won’t.
Maybe I need to constantly have a great book on hand, for those times when my verve seems a little limp. I can always read more than one book at a time; I’ve been that kind of reader since I was a kid. But now I realize that I DO need to keep pumping blood into my imagination via these great books. I need Ged — naming the otak, struggling against the shadow, overcoming his pride — and others of his kind to journey with me, keeping me on the path of adventure, like Gandalf and the dwarves leading Bilbo to the Lonely Mountain.
I decided to set my series, Merlin’s Last Magic, in the 1980s because, for me, the 1980s were the “golden age” of fantasy-related stuff: Conan. Red Sonja. Labyrinth. The Dark Crystal. The Last Unicorn. The Neverending Story. Ladyhawke. Dragonslayer. Legend. The Dragonlance Chronicles. HeroQuest.
I grew up in the 80s, and because fantasy seemed to be everywhere during that decade, my imagination was fertilized by all of these movies, books, and board games. In writing Merlin’s Last Magic, I wanted to give a little nod to the decade that nurtured me.
But as I was preparing to write this post, I realized that perhaps the 1980s weren’t really the golden age. Or, if they were the golden age, then perhaps they’ve given birth to an even more exciting and fertile age for fantasy genre stuff: Right now.
I contend that perhaps it wasn’t the 80s at all that were THE decade for fantasy lovers; perhaps that time is now. Perhaps we are living in the true golden age at this very moment (the Platinum Age, perhaps). Just look around: fantasy and science fiction have never been more mainstream or popular, from HBO’s Game of Thrones to the Marvel movies to fantastic writers like Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, and Neil Gaiman (all of whom are being courted by Hollywood for big-budget adaptations of their work).
Being “Geek” is cool. Nerds no longer hide their obsessions but display them proudly. San Diego Comic-Con (not to mention the dozens of other conventions that have gained prominence in the last decade) has become Mecca not just for comics nerds and sci-fi geeks but for big-name celebrities and the mass media at large. When I was twelve, I tried to hide my love for J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle-Earth; when I turned twenty, Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring was debuting in theaters, and suddenly, I didn’t have to hide anymore.
I think this new geek renaissance can be credited to both Jackson’s films and the Harry Potter phenomenon. Without either of these two creations, my fellows geeks and I would most likely still be part of a niche genre, something that the “wider world” looks down on with slight disdain. But because Jackson’s movies were incredible international hits, and because Harry Potter continues to be a straight-up juggernaut in the film and literature worlds, suddenly being “geeky” was cool. The media at large (and the people who consume it) are always gravitating towards what makes money, what sells. And starting with Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings movies, fantasy started to sell, and sell hard.
The success of the Game of Thrones TV show has cemented fantasy as a genre that adults can and should enjoy. Now we have TV shows like The Magicians, Vikings, and American Gods, (not to mention the Marvel and DC superhero shows), and no one is hiding their fandom for these SFF stories anymore. We are allowed to like (and even love) fantasy and science fiction in a way that was just not possible in the 1980s.
But we can’t dismiss the decade of my childhood. The golden age of geekdom that we are experiencing now is a direct result of the fantasy and sci-fi of the Reagan Decade. What do so many of today’s popular novelists, showrunners, and screenwriters have in common? We came of age in the 1980s (or at least, many of us did). We grew up soaking in the realms of Krynn and Fantasia and Thra. Our heroes were Conan and Molly Grue. We played endless hours of D&D and HeroQuest and Warhammer and turned all of those adventures into our first, fumbling stories and novels. Without the incubation of the 1980s, the golden age of today wouldn’t have happened.
For my own part, The Thirteen Treasures of Britain and the Merlin’s Last Magic series wouldn’t exist without the countless hours I spent reading Rosemary Suttcliffe’s Arthurian books, watching Excalibur when I was probably too young to be watching it, and playing Pendragon role-playing game (which, technically, I first discovered in 1990, but who’s counting). I learned to tell stories — and I learned to love telling stories — from reading MERP and RuneQuest and other fantasy RPGs, and then creating my own fantasy worlds in which to role-play. I fell in love with the realms of heroes by devouring books by Raymond E. Feist and Tracy Hickman & Margaret Weis. I became lost in the kingdoms of Faerie by watching Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, and Willow like they were on an unending loop.
The stories I write now are the children of the stories I wandered in during my childhood. We are in an incredibly fertile age for fantasy and science fiction. But we cannot discount the debt we owe to the 80s. The cheesy special effects, the cliche story lines, the underground and misfit-like nature of these movies and books are there for us to see, in the hindsight of 30+ years. But these things do not diminish the magic and sway these stories still hold over us. If the future looks bright for SFF, it’s only because our destinies were forged in the fires of the gloriously geeky 80s.
I am ridiculously excited about The Thirteen Treasures of Britain being available in paperback. Inordinately excited. Irrationally excited.
But holding it in my hands — feeling its heft and thumbing through its pages — makes being an author somehow more “real.”
Obviously, ebooks are real. I’ve read countless stories on my kindle, and they were all as absorbing and wonderfully mesmerizing as any physical book I’ve picked up.
But.
A real book. A tangible, physical, glossy-covered real book. It’s got me giddy.
I highly recommend you buy a copy (but then again, I am highly biased). I’ve set it at a reasonable price ($10.99). GO HERE if you’d like to pick it up.
Then when it comes, you can bask in its glossy glory.
