Posts Tagged: Fantasy

Feature Article

Guest Post | “Is it cos I is a girl?” by Elspeth Cooper

By Elspeth Cooper May 9th, 2011

Songs of the Earth by Elspeth CooperI was in hospital recently (my gallbladder and I were in the middle of an acrimonious break-up) and as you do, I got chatting with my fellow inmates.

‘So, what do you do?’ asked the woman in the opposite bed, in the pink bunny slippers.

‘I’m a writer.’

‘Oh!’ Her eyes lit up. ‘Romance, is it?’

‘Er, no.’

‘Crime?’

I wouldn’t mind Val McDermid’s sales, I thought. ‘Actually, I write fantasy.’ I held up my copy of The Name of the Wind. ‘Like this.’

My interlocutor peered at the cover, but obviously didn’t recognise the name. ‘Is that like that Twilight, then? All vampires and werewolves and stuff?’

‘Not really. It’s more sword and sorcery.’ In the face of her blank expression, I fumbled for the one name I was sure she would have heard of. ‘Lord of the Rings.’

The shutters of indifference came down with a near-audible clang. ‘Oh. Stories for boys.’

I did try to explain, but apparently because I didn’t write about oversexed earls in pursuit of fluttering virgins, or ghastly Yakuza executions in grim grey cities, I was now off the lady’s literary radar. What she would have made of the longsword hanging up in my office I do not know.

The doctor who came to draw some blood asked me the same question, in a hearty, take-your-mind-off-what-I’m-doing-with-this-needle voice, whilst prodding my inner elbow for a vein.

‘So, what do you do?’

‘I’m a writer.’

‘Historicals?’

‘No, fantasy. Ow.’

‘My son’s into all that whatchamacallit, Assassins’ Creed, on his X-Box. I’ll get some gauze to wipe that up.’

A year previously, I’d had a similar conversation with my publisher. She’d just had a meeting with the fiction buyer from Waterstones, and the author gender vs target readership issue had reared its ugly head: boys won’t buy books written by girls, and it can affect sales by as much as ten percent – the horror! My publisher and I even went so far as to toss around some gender-neutral pen names like Alex Cooper before she decided that female was the new black for fantasy writers, and that was that.

Clearly, the publishing industry is well ahead of the curve here; for the rest of the population, fantasy is just not something that girls do. It is still perceived as a very male-dominated genre, the province of geeks and gamers and lank-haired Lurches in Slipknot hoodies. The likes of Jemisin, Downum, and Cashore have not yet penetrated the wider public consciousness. Meyer has, Charlaine Harris has, but we can’t all have big-budget TV shows and movies and enough with the damn vampires already! You’re giving us girls a bad name.

I was rather hoping that the Game of Thrones mini-series would start a few more cracks in the genre glass ceiling; if anything it seems to be reinforcing it, but that’s another issue, being debated elsewhere by minds more articulate than mine.

So, a question for the floor: if a woman tells you she’s a writer, do you assume that because she’s a woman, she won’t be writing about sharp edges, harsh realities? Does the gender of the author alter your perceptions of a book as you’re browsing in the store, and make you more likely to pick it up, or less?

Cover Art

Guest Post | Sam Sykes reinvents Cover Art

By Sam Sykes May 6th, 2011

If you’re at all familiar with this blog, you’ve probably realized, by now, one thing: Aidan Moher does not like my covers. Not since the discovery of the hooded man has Aidan Moher despised so thoroughly a creature. Perhaps this is something to take pride in: that man standing in water has overtaken hooded man as most despotic cover criminal. But I could not take heart in this, my friends. Not when I knew I had wounded Aidan so.

Admittedly, this was tragic news to hear when I first discovered it. It took some time, but I did heal. It took even more time to recover from when he kept raising giant, blown-up prints of Black Halo’s cover on my lawn and setting them on fire, but even then, my commitment to restoring my honor with Clan Moher did not falter.

And then, joy of joys, he delivered me this terse, brusque invitation to do a guest blog for A Dribble of Ink. And thus, a child of opportunity was vomited forth from the womb of fate, cleaned by the doctor of second chances and delivered squealing into the heaving bosom of mother friendship to nurse at the teats of–

Well, you understand where I’m going with this, anyway.

So this blog post, Aidan, is my wedding present to you. Inspired by the elegant simplicity of the Criterion Collection series of DVDs, I create, for you, a re-imagined set of artistically tasteful covers. May I present…the Moher Collection.

Black Halo by Sam Sykes

Tome of the Undergates by Sam Sykes
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Feature Article

Article | On Genre Diversity (or, Why Mark Charan Newton was Right)

By Aidan Moher October 5th, 2010
Nights of Villjamur by Mark Charan Newton

This article was originally written for and published at SFSignal. Go check it out!

Recently, Mark Charan Newton, author of Nights of Villjamur, as he’s wont to do, stirred some feathers when he challenged several bloggers to diversify their book coverage, to shift focus from all the frontlist new releases and give more coverage to the wonderful backlist of the genre. Long story short, the blogosphere can only handle so many reviews of Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson and The Black Prism by Brent Weeks. Authors and novels of high profile get a huge push from their publishers, and that results in coverage from every blogger under the sun; Newton argues that it would do everyone (reader, author and reviewer alike) some good to look into the past.

Myself and Larry Nolen, from OF Blog of the Fallen, disagreed with Newton, at least in part. We agreed with Newton that diversification is a good thing, but that true diversification means so much more than just dipping your toe into the forgotten classics of the genre; rather, it’s about stepping outside the boundaries of the frontlist books (you know, those ones that are shoved down your throat through blogs, twitter, Facebook, newsletters, bookstore promotions and heft marketing budgets) and explore what else the genre has to offer, regardless of whether it was released today, a month ago or before the Toronto Maple Leafs won their last Stanley Cup (1967, for all you non-Hockey fans reading this). The Speculative Fiction genre has so much to offer that you could pick books out at random and never run out of good reading (granted, there’s an equal share of bad reading in there, but it’s good to experience that from time to time, to keep perspective), so why are we bloggers and reviewers often obsessed with keeping up with the times?

Of course, discussions on the ethics of bloggers are boring. But this call for diversification is something all readers might consider, whether they end up taking Newton’s advice or not.

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Feature Article

Guest Post/Article | On Capsule Reviews and Egotistical Bloggers

By John Ottinger III April 27th, 2010

Last week, I ran an article about one Librarian’s experiences as a buyer for a library chain. It was a nice look at a side of the industry that doesn’t receive a whole lot of coverage online, yet is a very powerful influence on everything from cover art to which books publishers are buying from authors.

* Professional Reviews: I spend time diligently going through Library Journal, Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and other professional review journals. The majority of my selections come from there, and that’s probably what you’ll catch me perusing at the reference desk.

In the article, I was put off by the above comment, which seems to exclude reviewers like myself (bloggers/amateurs/essayist reviewers/etc…) from being useful to this librarian, citing capsule review (short, paragraph-long reviews) from publications like Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly as being part of the determining factors. This came as a surprise to me, as I’ve always felt these capsule reviews were more or less useless. A little egotistical of me? Sure. But a valid curiousity. One tongue-in-cheek comment from myself led to some interesting discussion in the comments section.

As one librarian points out, I’m far from an authority on book buying, with any influence I have swinging towards the enthusiast crowd, so I went to someone I knew had experience writing both as a long-form reviewer and a ‘capsule’ reviewer for Publisher’s Weekly. John Ottinger, from the lovely Grasping for the Wind to drop by and give his insight into how both styles of review benefit the industry in different ways.

The Article

 

About a week ago, Aidan linked to a librarian who posted an essay on how she chooses books for purchase at the local library. It was a fascinating read, but of even more interest were the comments that Aidan’s post generated from several librarians and reviewers on the effectiveness of capsule reviews versus the long and/or more in-depth reviews one can find online.

As someone who writes capsule reviews for Publisher’s Weekly, and who also writes more lengthy, semi-in-depth analyses of different books at my blog, I bridge the gap (at least in terms of what I write) between the two schools of thought, namely, that capsule reviews contain too little information to be of use and online reviews would be a better choice for finding out what readers really want, and that capsule reviews are essential to the industry and without them, librarians could not make decisions about what to buy.

Both types of reviews have value, or I wouldn’t write both. But each has a different sort of value and to expect one to perform as another does is to walk a path of frustration. To my mind, capsule reviews have more value to the librarian due to their format and nature and “online/lengthier reviews have more value to the reader.
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News

An Aside | Steven Erikson talks about writing & The Crippled God

By Aidan Moher March 25th, 2010

Gardens of the Moon by Steven EriksonThough he has no website of his own, Steven Erikson is in the midst of blogging over at Life as a Human. In the latest in his series of articles title Notes on a Crisis, Erikson digs deep into his craft.

What’s neat is that he does so by taking an excerpt from his upcoming novel, The Crippled God, the final volume of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, and breaks down what one short scene can reveal about the structure and thought process necessary to build a much (much, much, much) longer piece of fiction.

In a general sense, I write elliptically. By that I mean I open sections with some detail I want to resonate throughout the entire section, and through the course of writing that section you can imagine me tapping that bell again and again. Until with the final few lines, I ring it one last time – sometimes hard, sometimes soft, depending on the effect I want, or feel is warranted. It’s become such a habit now that I often do it without conscious thought.

On a most basic level it shows up in paragraphs (and no, there’s nothing unique to me in any of this). Look two paragraphs upward on this screen. The opening line talks about multiple points of view; the last line describes the many ways of seeing the world. But that last line isn’t just reiterating the first one. Something is added (in this case, a personal comment on my desire to experience every one of them). It’s probably the only structural lesson I learned in school that I still use on occasion – the whole introductory and concluding sentences to frame a paragraph.

Anyway, extrapolating this pattern is how I write — within a scene, from section to section, from chapter to chapter, from novel to novel. While the narrative infers something linear, as in the advancement of time and a sequence of events, in fact the narrative loops back on itself again and again. And each time it returns, the timbre of that resonance has changed, sometimes subtly, sometimes fundamentally.

I read somewhere that Scott Bakker has recently complained that I’m repeating myself in my series, but he’s missing the point. It’s more that I return again and again to particular themes, from as many perspectives as I can. Maybe it still rates as a flaw in my writing, but it’s also my whole point in writing. Forget the conceit of hunting for the right answers – let’s start with trying to find the right questions. Personally, I doubt I will ever get past that stage; for me, the more ways I discover of looking at something, the more humbling the whole exercise becomes (Think you got the answers? Sorry, don’t believe you. Never will).

Elliptical. Looping back. It can be an image, a detail of setting, a mood or flavour, a particular action, or an idea. There’s countless ways of coming round back to where you started, and I admit I like the sly ones, though sometimes it pays to be more obvious.

Erikson’s comments on Bakker’s observations are interesting (in no small part due to the fact that Erikson was a large influence on Bakker first being published), and reveal a little bit about why his series encompasses ten massive volumes. As he says, some readers consider this repetition to be a flaw in his writing (which is somewhat my issue with the Malazan books, though I’ve only read two); but if it’s the point he’s trying to make, then how does one judge whether the Malazan books are a success? Do you care if he achieves his personal goals of recursive reflection if it gets in the way of proper storytelling? Do you like his novels because of the themes and the similarities in the characters’ internal battles? Or do you like it because even the weakest of his characters could rend the world in half on a cranky day?

Whatever the case, Erikson goes into a fairly in-depth analysis of the excerpt, picking apart the structure and language he uses and gives rather lucid and insightful consideration to the nitty-gritty decisions made by writers almost every day. Will it be useful to everybody? Maybe not, Erikson has a very defined style. But it’s certainly a revealing look at the process behind one of the most complex, convoluted and, well… huge fantasy series on the market today.

You can read the whole article, and the excerpt, HERE.