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The Prequel's Progress: WP's count: 17,863; reason for stopping: characters stopped cooperating for the night, so I wandered off to play Diablo II. (And found one of these, so at least it wasn't a complete waste of time.) The fiddling about with floorplans is already producing dividends in the form of more than one scene-fragment getting kickstarted by having a clearer sense of physical location to hang it on...
Woke up today thinking, "I don't especially feel like writing it, but I'd certainly love to read a book where the concept is 'after defeating the Dark Lord, heroes discover that what they've actually succeeded in doing is martyring the bastard'..." Which is what I get for falling asleep in front of the news too often, I guess, but I do think it would be an interesting take on things. The Dark Lord schtick is a big part of what makes fantasy-by-the-yard so obnoxious; it certainly could use a good skewering or ten.
I don't think I believe in the concept of Evil, which may be a strange thing for a writer in the fantasy mode to profess. After all, Dark Lords are the genre's backbone, the trope that the average schlub on the street willl name if you were to ask what "fantasy" involves: Sauron wants to wreck stuff, and it's not much deeper than that (well, okay, it is, but you really have to dig for it, and who does that anymore?). And this resonates with the average American, who by and large has been brought up with some background in the cosmic Judeo-Christian God-Vs-Satan-on-Pay-Per-View tradition whether they formally adhere to it or not, simply by living within the dominant culture. The good/evil, spirit/flesh tendency to see everything as mutually opposed dualisms has been an integral part of Western thought-traditions for at least the last millennium, depending on whom you ask about the dating; it's so ingrained by now that everything from Robert Jordan to the "Left Behind" pulps uses the same metaphors even as their respective clientele accuse each other of reading trash or worshipping Satan.
I find in my own reading that the books that don't pass undigested through my gullet like the proverbial grain of corn through a chicken are generally ones that go the hero-against-himself route for their dramatic tension instead. Duane's "tale of the Five" series sprang to mind as I was pondering this; the first volume in particular is very much a psychological struggle within the protagonist, and even the climactic appearance of a Nasty Critter serves more as a catalyst to his own inner breakthrough than the traditional fantasy Dramatic Showdown With The Bad Guy. In my own work, I note with interest, I've chosen as Bad Guys a main antagonist who's more clinically insane than deliberately morally Evil, and a secondary antagonist whose issues with the protagonist are personal; it remains to be seen whether this will fly in the marketplace, of course, but from my own philosophical standpoint it feels more genuine than simply playing out one more iteration of "black hat/white hat".
I guess I want to see the fantasy equivalent of Vietnam once in a while, instead of the endless WWII good-Allies/evil-Nazis sort of puffery -- which might be dreaming the impossible dream in today's America, I suppose, trapped in a cheap western as we are intellectually speaking. Is anyone out there right now writing against the tide of easy answers, either seriously or satirically? Does it come off? Does it sell? Inquiring minds want to know...
Woke up today thinking, "I don't especially feel like writing it, but I'd certainly love to read a book where the concept is 'after defeating the Dark Lord, heroes discover that what they've actually succeeded in doing is martyring the bastard'..." Which is what I get for falling asleep in front of the news too often, I guess, but I do think it would be an interesting take on things. The Dark Lord schtick is a big part of what makes fantasy-by-the-yard so obnoxious; it certainly could use a good skewering or ten.
I don't think I believe in the concept of Evil, which may be a strange thing for a writer in the fantasy mode to profess. After all, Dark Lords are the genre's backbone, the trope that the average schlub on the street willl name if you were to ask what "fantasy" involves: Sauron wants to wreck stuff, and it's not much deeper than that (well, okay, it is, but you really have to dig for it, and who does that anymore?). And this resonates with the average American, who by and large has been brought up with some background in the cosmic Judeo-Christian God-Vs-Satan-on-Pay-Per-View tradition whether they formally adhere to it or not, simply by living within the dominant culture. The good/evil, spirit/flesh tendency to see everything as mutually opposed dualisms has been an integral part of Western thought-traditions for at least the last millennium, depending on whom you ask about the dating; it's so ingrained by now that everything from Robert Jordan to the "Left Behind" pulps uses the same metaphors even as their respective clientele accuse each other of reading trash or worshipping Satan.
I find in my own reading that the books that don't pass undigested through my gullet like the proverbial grain of corn through a chicken are generally ones that go the hero-against-himself route for their dramatic tension instead. Duane's "tale of the Five" series sprang to mind as I was pondering this; the first volume in particular is very much a psychological struggle within the protagonist, and even the climactic appearance of a Nasty Critter serves more as a catalyst to his own inner breakthrough than the traditional fantasy Dramatic Showdown With The Bad Guy. In my own work, I note with interest, I've chosen as Bad Guys a main antagonist who's more clinically insane than deliberately morally Evil, and a secondary antagonist whose issues with the protagonist are personal; it remains to be seen whether this will fly in the marketplace, of course, but from my own philosophical standpoint it feels more genuine than simply playing out one more iteration of "black hat/white hat".
I guess I want to see the fantasy equivalent of Vietnam once in a while, instead of the endless WWII good-Allies/evil-Nazis sort of puffery -- which might be dreaming the impossible dream in today's America, I suppose, trapped in a cheap western as we are intellectually speaking. Is anyone out there right now writing against the tide of easy answers, either seriously or satirically? Does it come off? Does it sell? Inquiring minds want to know...