Carol Rose
Basic
- Sep 13, 2014
Exactly.
This is a fantasy thread, after all. Non-linear time is no issue.
LOL!!
Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Exactly.
This is a fantasy thread, after all. Non-linear time is no issue.
It's interesting how first books are born, isn't it? I came relatively late to this writing game and my novel started as a bit of flash, written at the suggestion of a writer friend and submitted to an anthology. The editor rejected it but said he liked the character.I sympathise @Rich. I really do. I started out by deciding to go a walk with this writing- a- novel exercise. I was very unwell and it was getting me down, I'd had to stop work and needed a project. I'd had so much from books, I wondered, could I too, approach that shimmering pantheon, and produce a novel length story with a beginning, middle and end. Could I physically do it. Glue backside to seat and produce that word count, 60 K plus, even if I produced a pile of 'meh'. I don't say manure because manure is useful.
In terms of epic fantasy – the broad canvas stories, often medieval in setting and almost always involving magic, the ones that can be used as doorstops and sit squarely in the fantasy section of the bookshop – what have you read that subverts the tropes and takes the genre somewhere new? Game of Thrones made high fantasy gritty. Joe Abercrombie did away with good vs evil. Ursula Le Guin (writing in the sixties) had black protagonists in a bronze-age world. Lynn Flewlling, in her Nightrunner series – an otherwise standard bit of fantasy – had a gay love story between her heroes. And the Saga comics (not doorstops, admittedly) have a breast-feeding mother kicking ass.
You get the idea. Tell me about epic fantasy* that isn't centred around a poor white boy with a destiny.