I’d like to bend your ear about one of the most dreaded concepts of computer gaming: the Bad End.

When someone starts reading a story, then can end up in just about any kind of world. It could be a beautiful utopia, it could be a soul-crushing dystopia, it could be any kind of place in any kind of time. The reader is usually invited in some way to identify with the protagonist, the hero of the tale. Whatever conflict faces Our Hero(tm), the reader is there with him or her, facing the same problems. The most basic expectation is that Our Hero will win in the end. No matter the hardship faced, we want Our Hero to save the day and come through, perhaps with more scars than what he or she started with, perhaps a bit less perky and innocent, but still ultimately victorious.

What do the readers feel when that doesn’t happen?

Logically speaking, most people who try to fight giants should be turned into sticky red stains on the bottom of their enemies’ feet. Logically speaking, someone who tries to change the world is more than likely to be disappointed. But how many people pick up a book and expect the story to be governed by logic? Especially if the book is of the science fiction or fantasy themes? In horror, it is more common for Our Hero to suffer defeat, but even then, I think people are hoping for the protagonist to buck the odds and win out.

But in some stories, they just don’t.

I know I hate it when that happens. I really, really do hate it. Watching the character through whose eyes you saw die or otherwise fail at the end is upsetting to me.

But I do understand that in some stories, it is necessary. You can’t always buck the odds. Some stories were written not to have the reader cheer, but to wring a tear from their eye. It may not sound nice, but stories are created to evoke all sorts of thoughts and emotions from the reader. Some writers even specialize in negative endings, for whatever reasons they may have, and they are still read quite eagerly.

I am not a huge fan of the concept, and even I have used it once or twice. Of course it helps that you don’t have to make the end the absolute worst it can be. There are shades of Bad to every Bad End. Save the world, but lose the love of your life. Get the love of your life, but lose the crown and the respect of your followers. Get neither girl nor gold, but live to fight another day, even if that other day is never written about. I’m sure anyone who reads this blog will get the idea.

And so this blog post has a more positive end.

On the one hand, it is good if your creation is realistic. If people read your work and they find it believable. Using existing places that you’re familiar with is a good way to do this. A little research into local culture, or the sociological, political and economic situation in the time you’re writing about, it’s all good. Regardless whether you’re writing about something set on our dear old Mother Earth or on a fictional world of your creation, it is good to set the scene and achieve that feeling of realism.

But today I can’t help but remember how it can be bad to make it all too realistic. There is a certain author whose name I won’t mention. He writes little detective novels that you can buy for about ten euros a piece. While I found the main character to be rather unpleasant, I did admire the way the author set the scene and did his homework, constructing believable settings and conflicts.

Then one day I read a news article and I thought: “Hey, that happened in that novel, too.” I checked, and yes, the author had used real events as background for his own character.

Creating a feeling of reality is good, but what this man had done was basically to twist reality around his golden boy so he could crank out another book. And as it turned out, he’d been doing so for years. On the one hand, you have to admit he has the skill to weave fiction and reality together, and the dedication to do his cultural research. On the other hand, he was writing about real events, real deaths and misery, and then dropping his toy hero in the midst of it all and prevailing against great odds, tumbling a few supermodels between the sheets as he went.

I don’t like to read that author as much anymore. It just feels horribly respectless to use real events like that. People have died, families have suffered, and he makes a buck off of it. Writing about real events so that they won’t be forgotten is one thing, but this isn’t in the same league at all.

This is, of course, just my opinion. Fictionalizing real events feels a little icky, it doesn’t honour the real people and their feelings to my way of thinking. Giving an accurate account of a real person is fine. Creating a fictional character who is aware of great developments elsewhere in his/her world and having those be real events is fine. Now, I like ‘elsewhere’-scenarios. Thinking about the ways things could have gone differently is fine. But if you do that, make clear it’s an elsewhere. Having a disclaimer at the front of the book only takes a few seconds of your time, and I think it’d be easier on some people’s feelings.

Without further ado, let me ramble a bit about battles on Overshadowed Earth. I will assume that everyone who reads this blog post has been exposed to the concept of magical combat. Whenever there is more than one person with access to special powers, it seems to be inevitable that magical battles will erupt. This as as true in Star Wars as it is in Harry Potter. Magical battles are grand affairs, where the author can allow their imagination to run wild. Fireballs fly across the battlefield, allies from beyond are summoned to fight, walls of ice and stone arise to block enemy moves… You can go buck wild.

It’s not the only way a battle can go, however. One of my favourite authors of all time, Dutch Tais Teng, described a battle between two archmages. They agreed on a location, arrived there, said hello and went into a tent together. They talked a little, and a few minutes later one man came out while the other lay stone dead on the ground. This was still a battle of significant magic, but instead of it being a battle of spells of destruction, it was a battle of names and symbols. Just as deadly, but a lot easier on the real estate.

There are any number of ways that a magical battle can shape up, depending on the tradition used by the combatants. When magical battles erupt on Overshadowed Earth (this does not happen as often as might be hoped by readers, but more often than the natives find desireable), there are certainly mages who follow the philosophy that big explosions make for a great way to determine who was right and who was wrong. But a powerful Mage could just as easily fill his opponent’s mind with illusions, leave them trapped forever in a dream. Or they could try to control their enemy’s mind more directly, attempt to enchant and dominate their foes with spells. There are as many different strategies as there are different people.

Now you may wonder what happens if a magic-user takes the field against someone without magic powers. Is it an instant slamdunk? If the mage is powerful, smart and skilled, it might be. But it doesn’t have to be.

A physical combatant who is quick enough on the uptake could run at a mage and beat them up, dodging spells as best they can. It’s not a perfect method (some spellcasters have the willpower to pull off fairly impressive moves even when being beaten), but it’s better than just standing there while someone fireballs you.

A psychic has the advantage of speed over most mages, who need to chant spells and make gestures. An expert who has gotten to the point that they only need the right thoughtform to activate a spell might approach psychics, who by definition use their abilities at the speed of thought. Not every psychic is going to be powerful enough to hurt, frighten or even kill an opponent, but they can distract people and hide themselves, raise minor obstacles and read their opponent’s mind to anticipate the next attack.

And of course there is the great equalizer: technology. While spells and psychic tricks exist that can protect the user against many weapons, it is difficult to sustain a barrier that is being fired on by a machine gun. Anyone and everyone can pick up a gun, floor the gas pedal to a heavy truck or get on an aeroplane and leave for foreign parts.

Fights can be decided by superior abilities on Overshadowed Earth, but even an archmage is not wholly invulnerable. Preparation, experience and keeping a new trick up your sleeve for every new situation are more likely to yield success to combatants.

In writing terms, this means you need to get creative for every battle. Fortunately, this can be a lot of fun…

The Dimidians

Perhaps I’ll start with what I mean exactly by “unusual ‘mundane’”. Within the context of the real world, these things would be fairly unusual, though they aren’t too terribly different from humans. Within the context of the World in Shadow, they are a fairly normal thing to see on a day-to-day basis.

Dimidians are an umbrella term for the various sub-species of humanoids found on the Alternate Earth. Essentially, they are humans that have certain animal features. Most often, this means that they have similar ears and a tail like the variety of animal they are kin to. Sometimes it can include eyes and a nose, or more in extreme cases. Their outward appearance reflects some heightened senses, but otherwise they are almost identical to their human cousins. They make up between 5 and 9% of the world’s population and live among humans without trouble, in most areas.

The origin of the Dimidians is murky at best. There are several theories on their origin, but sadly little edivdence of any is available.
One theory states that the Dimidians are not, in fact, humans at all, and all share a common ancestor that ended up following a parallel evolutionary course as humans. The propenents of these claims use them to throw the Dimidian’s status as people into question and is still the most widely accepted theory of their origin.
Another theory states that they are a product of an extra-terrestrial experiment to combine the best parts of the most promising species on the planet into one creature. The main downfall of this theory is that the people who most believe in it also are the ones that are ostracized for their beliefs in aliens capable of performing such experiments.
A third theory, held among the magic users of AltEarth, is that several thousand years ago, shamans attempted to give their peoples a better chance to survive by magically enhancing themselves and their communities with magics. The communities were given some animalistic traits, such as sharper eyesight, hearing and smell in order to make them more efficient at gathering food to survive. Some more recent magic users have attempted to duplicate these rituals, but with limited success.

Dimidians are an unusual part of the world that we have created and will appear in some of the stories that we are writing and will write in the future. I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into the World in Shadow.

Yup, today’s subject is retconning. When you write a series of stories – or books, even – that feature the same characters, you may well develop new ideas. You may look back and say to yourself: “I can’t believe I ever wrote such schlock. I wish I could go back and get a do-over. I can think of a million ways to make this story better.”

How powerful is the temptation, when writing the next instalment in the series, to do some retconning? To invalidate previous writings and present your bold new vision of your creation? Speaking for myself, I’ve been fortunate in that I tend to still like what I wrote a while ago later. That, and I know that retconning is a very dangerous thing to do.

When you retcon, you are in danger of destroying the whole continuity you spent so much time creating. That, and the enjoyment of your reading audience. Remember them, the audience? I know an author should write for themselves, first. But it behooves us to always remember that you are writing so that other people can read. Tick them off too much, and they’ll stop reading. That kind of takes the point out of the whole activity, unless you have no intention of continuing to be published.

Well. There are techniques that resemble retconning, but are not nearly so destructive. Showing the same events the audience has read about from a different angle can be very effective. An example.

Say that the first story or book tells the tale of a band of heroic adventurers, who fight their way through Goblin-infested land to reach the castle of the Duke of Doom, a man known to associate with monsters.

A later story could tell the story of a land of peaceful Goblin-settlers thrown into chaos and horror when a band of murderers appears out of nowhere and slaughters its way through the countryside in order to reach and assassinate the beloved Duke, founder of the Goblin lands. It’s interesting, it may bring the readers to view the story world in a new way – and if you do it well, you don’t need to contradict your previous work even once.

Don’t retcon. Don’t deconstruct your old work because you have new ideas. That’s what writing new and unrelated stories is for. Shaking things up is fine, breaking them and reassembling the pieces is not. I say this not just as an aspiring author, but as a fervent reader. Don’t. o_o

HTML and CSS is on the list of things that I can do, however, on the list of things I like to do, several things are ahead of it. On the list of things I need to get done, it’s practically at the bottom. Since the new version got released only a couple weeks ago, there aren’t really a whole lot of attractive themes suitable for us that support the new features, and since we don’t have our anthology available yet, it’s been a low priority. Once we get the final go-ahead from our publishers on the anthology, I’ll put the time in to find or make an appropriate theme. This is where I have to draw the line for now. Until then, enjoy the new clean (and highly customizable!) site.

When you read the golden old stories of science fiction, we’re kind of behind schedule, aren’t we? By now, we should have been zipping around in rocket cars, trusting our loyal robots to vacuum and fix dinner for our return.

Yeah, I know there are dozens of reasons why we don’t have all of that cool sci-fi stuff our ancestors expected us to have by now. There is no need to recommend I check out a couple of physics manuals to explain to me why we don’t have machines to teleport us to space colonies, I do not need to see the annual budget to explain why we don’t have space colonies.

While sci-fi’s great stories are still wonderful to read, I sometimes cringe a little at the comparison of the writers’ expectations with the reality of today. I have to admit, it’s rather tainted my own ideas of writing science fiction. How far ahead should I plan the cool teleportation, faster-than-light travel, robot butler-type stuff?

I don’t really have to plan it “ahead” at all. If the setting of a story is Earth, or at least a world reasonably reminiscent of Earth, all the cool sci-fi stuff could come from off-world. That explains how hypertech could be on ‘Earth’ despite the fact that I am still riding a bicycle to work, rather than my own personal hoverdrone that runs on orange peels.

Or I could make the hypertech be a carefully kept secret of an elite subsection of society. Who’s to say the great stuff hasn’t been invented yet, but it being kept secret by the rich, the powerful and/or the idealistic? (I’m very sure more than a few conspiracy theorists would agree with this idea, but alas, I’m talking about fiction today.)

It’s easiest to do what our predecessors have done, though: push the sci-fi goodies into the future. How to decide how far in the future to plot sci-fi goodness to happen? To avoid ridicule (or at least ridicule you have to listen to), I’d recommend a century or two. If you’re still alive by then and capable of understanding when your readers tell you that you got it wrong in your stories… Well, if you survived that long without going crazy or senile, I imagine you’ll have developed a thick enough skin that you can take a little hazing about not predicting the future correctly.

And then there’s the last option I’m going into right now. You can have it be an alternate Earth, one where the governments and scientists of the world got their collective hindquarters in gear and worked together to make their world a better place for everyone. The option may seem cheezy to some, but hey, it’s still there. Besides, I doubt there is any literary technique that isn’t seen as cheezy by someone.

Sometimes we have some trouble with not having explicit limits on length. Upon editing some of them, we have come accross sections of text that do little to advance the plot, and because we aren’t being pressed to a smaller space, some of them have slipped through our first round of edits. These then get picked up by our editors, much to our embarassment.
Don’t think that your favourite author has never made the same mistakes, even in novel-writing. Superfluous scenes, flat characters, extracharacters, all these things happen to any writer, possibly more often than they’d like to admit. This is why the editing process is so important. All these problems need to get fixed before you can start to polish a story for publication.

When the editors at PaperBox Books accepted our anthology pitch, I thought we would have the thing up and ready for sale in a couple months. My initial prediction has come and gone, now. Oops. Still, I think we’re still going to get this first anthology finished this year… The only tricky bit is when.

Still plugging away at it though. I’m sure that having 7700 kilometers between me and my writing buddy doesn’t make things any faster. Long-distance writing!

(Apologies for the typos – I wrote this post up  on my phone on the way to class this afternoon. I think I’ve got them all now…)

When you decide to incorporate magic into your stories, though, you first have to make some tough decisions. To paraphrase the wildly successful and well-known J.K. Rowling, “first you have to decide what it can not do.”

The temptation is great to have magic be a power that can accomplish everything you or your characters could ever desire, of course. But that way lies danger. If a character is given ultimate power, where lies the challenge in anything? What will bring tension to stories anymore? Who will be able to put up a fight against someone who has unlimited power?

There are many ways to put limitations on what magic can accomplish.

Divide the kind of powers that can be accessed into different, diametrically opposed schools, for instance. Put all the healing and protection power in the hands of saintly white wizards and sorceresses. Then put all of the scrying and death-dealing in the hands of blackhearted shamans who wander the planes, seeking old bones to suck evil magic out of.

Make it clear that every spell has a price. In one of the grimmest cases, the price could be having to deal with spirits and other creatures of varying foulness. Every spell could sap the caster’s lifeforce; I vividly remember an old Sinbad movie, in which a man had great spellcasting power, but each casting took a great bite out of his lifespan and aged him. Maybe magic require an arduous amount of setup time, like the High Magic dreamt up by Mercedes Lackey. Or perhaps, like Mercedes Lackey’s Wild Magic, it only becomes available by the decision of the gods and every spell costs a task. Installing limits to what magic can and can not accomplish also works. For instance, one could go right out and say that magic can blast things apart, but it can not heal people. Or, more subtly as done by Robert Jordan in his grand Wheel of Time-series, maybe the magic can heal others but not oneself. Subdivide magic into specific schools with unique powers, which can not be learned by a practitioner from another school. The possibilities are vast.

I like putting magic into the hands of my characters, I will admit. I like them having access to varied powers and abilities, this too I admit. For our Overshadowed Earth, it was necessary to apply some limitations.

To start, we subdivided the ways of causing wacky things to happen in three groups.

First is Science. No explanations needed here, right? On Overshadowed Earth, science can accomplish things it can’t do on our Earth (yet), but it is still basically the same thing. (Yes, I know that old saying that sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. Leave it be for now, okay?) Science has to obey the laws of nature and can not break them. Of course scientists are always looking for loopholes and hey, they do find them.

Second are the Psychic arts. The psychic arts are powers that flow from inside, the powers of the mind. Telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, all that fun stuff. Depending on how powerful and how skilled you are at this, you can achieve amazing results. But this is not our focus for today. The psychic arts are only as powerful as their user is; you need to be able to conceive of what you want done, and need to have the power and the confidence to do it. By their definition, the psychic arts can only break such rules as their user believes can be broken – or is unaware of.

Third is Magic, which is today’s subject. Magic is achieving effects by taking in power from outside and shaping it through incantations, gestures, even through thought if the practitioner is very accomplished. Magic can not happen without outside energies. It does not matter whether these energies were gathered just this morning or last week, but they need to be taken in. Magic bends such laws of the universe as are inconvenient to its user’s purposes; as long as the energy invested in a spell or ritual lasts, the laws stay bent, to snap back into place once the energy runs out. Of course by that time, what the spellcaster wanted to do has already been done. Just because a fire spell has run its course doesn’t mean your house will be instantly restored from ashes…

We decided to subdivide magic into two schools: arcane and spiritual.

Arcane magic is powered by drawing in energy (Let’s go ahead and call it ‘Mana’, shall we?) from the world around the practitioner. Once absorbed, the energy can be formed into spells, which the practitioner either researches and studies, or has a natural affinity for. While arcane magic can be used for a dizzying variety of effects, it is aimed mainly at the physical universe from which it springs. Arcane magic can create barriers and illusions, allow the user to see far through time and space, to unleash powerful eruptions of force and more.

Spiritual magic is powered by spiritual energy (Duh! ^^). Unlike the Mana of arcane magic, spiritual energy can not be drawn out of the physical universe by the practitioner. It always requires a medium that connects the practitioner to the spiritual plane from which the energy flows. This branch of magic requires ritual and devotion to entities of varying forms. These can be deities, demons or concepts. Whereas arcane magic allows the user to draw in energy and shape it to their will, spiritual magic requires that the user make specific requests of their ‘patron’, which are rewarded with spells that will achieve the specific effect requested. Spiritual magic can heal and curse, release and enlighten. It is aimed mainly at the spirit, though it has its effect on the physical. (Psychosomatic magic ftw?)

Here’s a very important rule to remember, which is going to make it difficult for any character to have too much fun with the four/five different ways to change the world: They do not mix.

It is possible for a devotedly faithful person to also be a skilled scientist, but that doesn’t mean they can create a deus in machina. They can call a blessing down on their machines, but they can’t power them with the favour of the gods. They can not make a fully automatic summoning engine to call angels down to Earth.

A skilled and powerful mind can have a knack for the psychic arts and be strong enough to study the principles of arcane magic, but they can’t use mana energy to empower their psychic abilities, nor use psychic visions to aim an arcane death-curse.

Mana energy and spiritual energy are like water and oil. The forces they unleash can counter each other, but not support one another. Apply an arcane and a spiritual spell with roughly the same effect on the same person, and they will reject each other. In the worst case scenario, this causes unfortunate things to happen to the target; turning into a frog is the least of your worries. In second place is the possibility that one of the spells is ascendant and works, while the other is rendered quiescent. Or the two could cancel one another out.

And so on and so forth. The four/five methods do not mix. If you think that isn’t a serious limitation, just think about it a little longer. It makes cooperation between experts of the four fields very difficult, indeed. Just as on Earth, science fails to corroborate spirituality, psychic puissance and magic. Spells can’t replace plumbing – the kind of energy investment required would be beyond all but an army of wizards and/or priests slaving away 24/7. Psychics can not summon demons – though they might stir up a poltergeist or two. They could start up a car by telekinetically hotwiring it, but they couldn’t replace its fuel with psychic energy.

This is one of our golden rules. Overshadowed Earth is a world full of opportunities to upset the game, but they do not augment one another, and each has powers and techniques that are unique to it. See? Limits. I hope it looks interesting and gives you ideas. It gave us some.

I’ll talk more about magic later. And about science. And the psychic arts. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

I’ve always been pretty laid-back about… well, pretty much everything I do for me. Now, I’m starting to change that. Slowly. I’ve been pretty good about making long bus rides productive by bringing my netbook along with me. It’s an Eee PC 1000, and if I turn WiFi off and the monitor brightness down, I can get about 5 hours out of the battery. It also has an SD card slot which is currently populated by a 16MB sample card they give you when you buy a new digital camera. It’s plenty of space for text and word documents and lets me transfer my stories between my netbook and my desktop easily. It’s also small enough to stop me from saving … interesting things onto it, like longcat.

Last year at SiWC, I got a chance to pitch my book to an agent – except I didn’t really have anything to pitch, so I just asked a few questions about sending queries and pitching in general. After that I had a ‘blue pencil’ session with a published writer. I brought in 3 pages of my work and got a brief critique on it which was fairly positive overall. In anticipation of this event in October, I’m thinking of getting some chapters from one of the longer things I’ve been working on polished up. I figure it might be a pretty good idea to actually have SOMETHING to show for it when I pitch to an agent this time around. After all, I can’t see this conversation going very well:

“That sounds great! Can I see the first 4 chapters?”
“Uh… I haven’t started writing it yet.”

They haven’t posted their Friday/Saturday/Sunday workshops yet, but whatever they are, I’m sure there will be a couple (usually in the same time block @__@) that will be interesting and helpful for me in some way.

Welcome to my little rant about another staple of fantasy. From George Lucas’ Star Wars to the David and Leigh Eddings’ Belgariad, from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time to the lamentable exercize in decline that is Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth, there are predictions that shape the world. And these are only a few modern examples.

Prophecy is such a staple of fantasy literature, of science fiction movies, of all kinds of fiction, that it is difficult to imagine a total absence thereof.

If used well, prophecies of future events can add tension to a story. In Tad Williams’ excellent Memory, Sadness and Thorn-series, a cryptic prophecy is a source of great hope and much activity. In The Wheel of Time, it is equally so. Prophecies up the ante from seemingly small, local conflicts to grand quests of global or even universal importance. This much is good.

Prophecies in literature can easily go bad, though. I’m not just talking about someone using prophecy and other forms of prediction like a hammer, handing their characters clues and an itinerary for free and stopping just short of patting them on the head. This is a nasty trap to fall into; it’s so easy to make things too easy for your favourites. Did I mention that before? ^^

 Another trap that awaits is the one of debating the validity of prophecy. It’s one thing to say “Gee, I don’t like that we’re forced to follow prophecies made centuries ago by people I don’t know”. Going into pages and pages of blather, debating free will versus predestination, is fine for high school philosophy texts. Using it as a subplot of your story is fine, but don’t derail your story so your precious Mary Sue can give a pompous monologue to showcase their supposed mental superiority, based on their rejection of the idea of prophecy – that way the disappointment of readers who wanted a story and not propaganda lies.

Okay, enough of traps. Let’s talk more prophecy. Do we all know there are various forms of prophecy? A few examples: 1) Absolute prophecy. This and that will happen. If you use this kind of prophecy, for pity’s sakes make it cryptic enough, or encode it in some dead language, so that people can’t be sure what it means. 2) Twinned, conflicting prophecies. These are prophecies that are in direct conflict; one has to come true, but when it does, the other is falsified and becomes invalid. See the Eddings’ couples Belgariad and Malloreon for a prime example of this. 3) Falsifiable prophecy. Even without a conflicting prophecy, a series of predictions can be fought against, counteracted. Splendid material for a story about an epic struggle against rigid fate. Let’s see, an example… Dune, I seem to recall, has a few examples of this. Leto, son of Paul, manages to avert a terrible vision by making a supreme sacrifice – and setting a whole new prophecy in motion. 4) Interactive prophecy. “And lo, if ye do this, then shall that come to pass”. This kind of prophecy is closely linked to the falsifiable and twinned. It is not just a series of guideposts along the way, like the absolute, which only allows people to prepare. It demands that people perform specific acts at specific points in time and space in order to achieve a result. Cooking with destiny, anyone?

Moving on. There are so many forms for prophecies to take. There are ancient texts, cryptic marks on the ruins of the ancients, the readings of palm, card and stars performed by priests, carnies, gypsies and amateurs. Like any storytelling tool, it can take so many forms. It can be so useful. But you need to wield it with subtlety. You have the power to script the events of past and present, you determine the way they flow into future. Adding a little prophecy can set the mood you want to achieve, can move the plot. But using it too strongly, too pervasively, is just bragging about the absolute power you have over your creation. In my humble opinion, anyway… And I have to admit I’m not too fond of using prophecy as part of my creations. It’s not an absolute necessity; I have plenty of other ways to instill a bit of weirdness into my tales.

Well, that’s it for now. Be seeing you next time!

Performing edits as soon as you get them is much easier than waiting.

The editing group got the stories in a bit of a backwards order: second first, and first second. I did the edits for the first story that week, and now I’m starting on the second story’s edits only now. It might be because it’s been so long, or because this particular story had more issues (the first one I wrote, there were a whole 3 pages untouched by ANYONE. And yes, they were the same 3 pages. Obviously I did something right then) than this one. I suspect it’s because I put it off for so long. Well… I did have some classes and exams eating up my time, so I’m going to use those as a handy excuse. Yes, I know that I’m terrible at keeping to schedules and stuff.

I’ve still got a way to go before my stories are ready to hit the virtual shelves, but I’m getting closer. One thing that one of the editors over at PBB keeps asking us about is which order our stories should be printed in. Is it important to preserve chronology in an anthology of shorts, where each one should ideally be able to stand alone, or can we decide to put them in alternating by author? I suppose it’s something we’ll have to consider over the next couple weeks as we get closer to the end.

Could someone please hit the pause button? These weeks are going by far too quickly.

Just about anyone and anything can be a protagonist these days, and the author usually finds some way to make them sympathetic.

In the old days – *the author grows a long white beard, his shoulders hunch over and he holds a cane* – of admittedly wonderful authors like J.R.R. Tolkien (one of my all-time favourites, I might add), creatures like vampires, demons, orcs and goblins were part of The Enemy. Just about every insight into any culture they might have, their backstory, their life when they were not engaged in combat with the hero, served mainly to prove how horrible they were, how utterly deserving of the death and destruction that would soon be unleashed upon them in the name of goodness, rightenousness and Mom’s apple pie.

Now look at T.V.-series like Angel. Read books like the Vampire Diaries or glitter boys – beg pardon, Twilight. Vampires, once poster boys for Big Bad Evil, have become tormented heroes. (Some of them, anyway.) Then try Stan Nicholls’ Orcs: First Blood-series. Or Jim C. Hines Jig the Goblin-series. The rank and file of Evil’s armies are getting culture, their stories are being told, some of them are becoming protagonists. Heck, check out Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books for a very refreshing view on Trolls! Of course this is an established phenomenon, which has been going on for a while now, but it is worth mentioning. (Or seems that way to me.)

Of course not everyone is going to go for this kind of thing. Having ‘disposable enemies’  is… useful, after all, and most people would not like a moral quandary with their afternoon read. If every creature in a story evokes that lovely old feeling of resonance (“gosh, they’re not actually all that different from me, I can really understand them”), yet they are thrust into a situation where death is inevitable, some people are going to get upset and stop reading. Can’t help that, wouldn’t want to: if everyone were the same, the world would become rather boring. Me, I like it. Disposable enemies are good for computer games where you need to level up, I like a story with some meat on its metaphorical bones.

So how does this translate into my own work? Of course you need to have great villains, I’ve written a little on the subject in this very blog. Depending on the kind of setting you work with, there are going to be races of creatures traditionally defined as evil. But I also wrote that it’s good to make the villain a three-dimensional character, right? The same can go for the monsters of old. Yes, the vampire wants to – needs to – drink fresh blood every night. Yes, the big old Troll will kill and eat anything that crosses his bridge. What if the vampire spends the time he’s not trying to inveigle himself into the bedroom of young ladies with underwired nightdresses composing great music, trying to find the perfect song that escaped him in life? What if the big old Troll drags each kill into his lair to feed his starving children, who he’s raising alone because adventurers killed his mate?

It’s the old saw about making your creations three-dimensional again, I think. Maybe it’s not just artists growing up, but also the art of storytelling? I know, I know, the idea of showing both sides of the story has been around for a while, but I think it is a bit fresher in fantasy. Anyway, the dispenser of old saws is done ranting and rambling for this week. ^^ Now get off my lawn.

Writing is like lying.

It’s a little bizzare, but think about it for a bit – They both tell stories that aren’t true. I suppose it doesn’t count if you’re not writing fiction, but for anyone who does write fiction, it certainly holds. Of course, the stories might be based in truth, but so are lies – the good ones, anyway. Works of fiction, like any good lies, contain grains of truth. Certain types of characters behave in particular ways on paper and in life. If you write using a fictional setting, it is very probably similar to the world we know from day to day.

A good liar, like a good writer, has the ability to make their audience believe anything. They know the extents of what their audience is willing to accept, and don’t push it too far. If they do, they are able to produce evidence to support it. If you’re writing a fantasy, the bounds of what your audience is willing to believe are nearly limitless, but unless the setting is consistent with the fantastical claims you make, you lose their attention as they get yanked out of the story to consider: “Hey, that doesn’t work!” That’s the point where they cross their arms, start tapping their foot, and you know that you’ve lost and are on your way to a long time-out because your parents don’t believe that your brother broke the vase after all.

Consistency is also important. To a writer, like a liar in the midst of weaving a story, contradicting yourself is another way that the audience gets jolted out of the story. And when the audience is outside of a story, they can clearly see all the cracks. If your main character is ultimately making his way towards a particular place, and halfway through the story he’s on his way to somewhere completely different for no apparent reason, you’ve just lost your audience unless they know for a fact he’s had a change of plans for watever reason.

One big difference is that writers have the chance to go back and revise before their work gets to the audience. It’s important that we take advantange of that chance. There are many books on editing, and everyone has their own opinions on how it’s best done. Taking the time to go back and make sure you’re being consistent and not going outside the realm of what’s plausible within your setting are two steps you can make to make huge improvements to your story.  When someone picks up your book, or opens your website, they want to be told a story. Once they’ve started, you’ve got one shot to give them your best.

Without further ado, my rant for the week. This one is about a literary theme that baffles me. Why, oh why do people still seek out ghosts for information and advice? Now I know this concept is older than Homer’s Odyssee, wherein Odysseus seeks out the shade of the blind seer Tyeveras in the abode of Hades. There’s even a mention of this kind of thing in the Old Testament. Look at modern day literature, and we have Harry Potter seeking out ghosts for their knowledge.

Okay, so there are times when it can end relatively well. But then there are the scores of times when it goes utterly wrong. I liked what Ursula LeGuin said of it best when describing a kingdom where necromancy had run rampant and the ghosts of ancient sages were summoned to be advisors to the kings of today: it didn’t work because they were being asked to comment on a world and a time which was not their own. Ghosts. Are. Stuck. Even the most lively specter is stuck, not just between this world and the Great Beyond, but also in its own memories. If you believe some of the lore surrounding ghosts, they’re nothing but memories, an imprint of a moment on the world. It’s like talking to a polaroid, really.

Even in cases where the ghost seems to be lucid, aware of and capable of interacting with the modern world, it’s still not a good idea to go to them. It usually takes a great amount of emotional intensity to create a ghost, and most ghosts are powered by very negative emotions. If you go talk to the magic polaroid and ask it for advice, it may steer you wrong or try to hitch you to its own cart and use you up without even a hint of remorse. Or it might attack you. Is it any consolation that the ghost trying its damndest to add you to the ranks of the living impaired may not be doing so out of malice, but because it’s stuck in its own memories and perceives you as its murderer, or is endlessly reliving its final battle in a war you’ve only read about in history books? Will you get a warm glow of accomplishment if a ghost makes you the tool of its revenge and you grant it rest by pitching yourself into the abyss?

Yes, yes, I am familiar with series like Medium and Ghot Whisperer. I quite enjoyed Casper, the friendly ghost. Fine shows, each in their own way. But I still don’t think it’s a good idea to talk to ghosts. Let them move on and let’s have us get on with life, hmm? Both in literature and the real world. ^^