Drawing from the Well
Queries Sent: 3
Total Queries: 35
Rejections: 8
Scenes Mapped: 4
Total Scenes: 304
Got some done yesterday. I also ordered the current edition of the Guide to Literary Agents. It’ll be here in a week or so at which point my agent search should be supercharged. For now, I keep chewing through my ever-shrinking agent list.
Filling the Well
Bloodwitch: 33%
The Raven Boys: 87%
Got some serious reading time in yesterday too. Things are getting good in both stories and I can’t wait to see where Bloodwitch goes and how Raven Boys ends. Plus, the rest of the Raven Cycle(?) series is available on audiobook via Hoopla. I’m excited to see how the series develops.
Polishing the Well
My wife and I are working through Psych. It’s really funny and we’re both enjoying it. It’s great “noise” when we’re both doing things in the evening. Gotta say, USA had some great shows in the middle part of the first new millennium decade. Between Psych, Burn Notice, and White Collar, there was a lot of good TV out there.
Well Chat
High Points of my Favorite Genre
Fantasy is my all-time favorite genre, both to read and to write. I love it so much because the author gets the opportunity to rewrite the rules of nature however they see fit. The author gets to play god more than in any other genre. Fantasy is defined on Wikipedia as “speculative fiction set in a fictional universe, often inspired by real world myth and folklore.” The speculative portion basically means that the basis of the novel is made-up and usually encompasses fantasy and science fiction and select cases in other genres.
Fantasy envisions another world or another version of our own. Both Arrakis and Hogwarts in England are ways of building a fantasy world. When it’s a whole world, everything is up for grabs, but in fantasy novels set in our own world, authors can get really creative. Sometimes they create another place like the aforementioned Hogwarts or they lay magic overtop the existing world Percy Jackson or there is an alternate history where some major event has gone differently (like in 11/22/63) or happened which did not in reality (like The Fifth Wave). Either way, the author SPECULATES on a possible change to reality and goes from there.
My favorite aspect of fantasy, though, is magic. Now, magic is not a requirement of fantasy as is evident in the early Song of Ice and Fire novels, but it is common. Different iterations of magic interest me in their structure and implementation. Granted, in the end the magic is only as interesting as the characters are clever in its use. Magic is no Get Out of Jail Free card; that’s just dumb. But interesting magic and following the implications of its existence intrigues me.
So what are some common fantasy subgenres right now?
- High/Epic: My favorite which is concerned with big stories with big themes such as the end of the world
- Sword and Sorcery: Much lower scales than epic fantasy and usually includes a sword-toting hero
- Urban: Takes place in a city/metropolitan setting and tends to be of similar scale to S&S
- Contemporary: Set in the real, modern world with magical or supernatural elements overlaid on it
You’ll see most fantasy novels these days falling into one of these categories. I LOVE epic fantasy and seek it out the most. Tolkien. Weis & Hickman. McKiernan. Jordan & Sanderson. Those are all some of my favorite authors and they all write epic fantasy. Now there are some lesser-used subgenres of fantasy that we’ll cover tomorrow, but this is a good place to stop for today.
Welcome to the first series of June on this adventure I’m taking us all on.
P.S. – I know Dune is classified as science fiction, but the other world aspect feeds into the speculative fiction description so I went with it. We’ll talk more about Dune on Tuesday when I discuss science fiction.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG