One of the joys of being a fantasy author is being interviewed about writing fantasy (which is, after all, my favourite subject). Nerine Dorman interviewed me for The Star (part of the Independent News and Media group in South Africa). We talked about Ametheus, my relationship with Twardy Zarost and Tabitha’s inspiring nature, as well as my favourite scenes and sources of inspiration.
Read the full interview on their website:
Enter South African fantasy author’s world of music and magic.
You’ve written your first fantasy novel. You’ve gone over it a hundred times, checked spelling, grammar and done all manner of editing tweaks with every fine toothcomb you can find. It is perfect. Ready to print, in your opinion. It’s practically burning a hole in the table, the magic is so hot.
But you’re a step ahead of the game. You know you don’t want a pile of books under the staircase, or another POD book in the sparkling obscurity of a bottomless online catalogue … you want to be on the bestseller lists. For that, you need a fantasy publisher. So how do you find one?
1. First, write up a synopsis (a summary in 2 pages), a query letter including what subgenre your novel is, like high fantasy or steampunk and a totally intriguing ‘blurb’.
2. Try to find a publisher in your own country that specialises in that kind of book and approach them. You have a much greater chance because you are a local fantasy author and can be promoted as such. Each country has a publishers’ association with a list of publishers. For instance, in South Africa, look on www.publishsa.co.za. To give you a starting point, find a book that is similar to yours on the bookshelf of your local bookstore, or online retailer. See who published that.
In smaller markets, the problem is that most of the fantasy on the bookshelves is published by UK or US based publishers. This is because of economies of scale – big markets support big publishers with big print runs leading to the cheapest end product which can be exported to small markets cheaper than any competing local products which are produced in small runs.
Now that Second Sight has been released, it’s time to take Tabitha and her crew on a blog tour to find some interesting websites and have some fun. What better place to begin than Fantasy Book Critic, a mighty fantasy book review site in the States. They produce in-depth critiques of the books they read and they’re not afraid to slate the books they don’t like. I follow their reviews on Goodreads to keep up to date with the latest developments in fantasy.
Developing second sight, with one eye on reality and one eye on ... somewhere else
After completing their book review of Second Sight, they kindly invited me to be a guest author on their website, so I posted something today about the value of creative writing, how the search for magic affects my writing method, and what I’m looking for in the fantasy novels that I read.
You’re going to read another fantasy novel? But it’s not true. What’s the point? By this dictum, fantasy novels fail spectacularly. Not only are the people invented; the whole world is. There will often be magic. Magic? Didn’t we emerge from that darkness when Davy turned on the light bulb?
But what if it was true?
Read the rest of this article here >
Reading fantasy fiction allows us to dream in a very vivid way. Writing fantasy fiction takes the dreaming to another level. You are the dreamer who leads the dream, the creator of the dreamworld. It is the most powerful kind of meditation, an experience of controlled psychosis that results in a prolonged experience of altered consciousness. In this article I will examine ways in which you can induce the receptive state, how you can deepen the intensity of the dream, and how to hold onto the vision for a more profound writing experience.
1. Hearing the music of the mind
Consider music. It is a patterned structure of sounds which you follow in your mind. You find pleasure and enlightenment by following the composer’s creation. The further the musical piece takes you outside of your body, beyond the mundane world, the greater the enjoyment. A masterpiece lingers in your mind leaving you with an altered sense of reality, if only for a while. You believe wonderful things are possible. You are inspired.
Fiction is very similar. Critics who insist on moral instruction, political messages or historical fact miss the musical aspect of writing altogether. A novel is a composition, a concert of ideas, a melody of story played within an orchestra of dreams. It is woven in a particular way by the author to bring about the mental crescendo and ecstacy. Some scornfully label it escapism, as if that means it is less worthy of literary merit than a stuffy book of factual realistic torment. I see escapism differently. If a book is capable of transporting me to escape my reality, then it is a mighty success. In a good novel you get to experience things beyond your world and in some delightful way your power of imagination can be challenged, you can be gripped by raw emotion, and you can find release.
As a writer, the deeper you can sink into the dream you are creating, the more powerfully this music of the mind comes through. Listening for it often means forgetting what you are trying to write (the plot) and to become swept away by the visions (the passion).
As you try to record your visions, you can enhance this receptive mental state by following the principles mentioned below.
AC&Black, Writer’s & Artists Yearbook
The complete directory of all the agents and publishers in UK (and also USA).
Carole Blake, From Pitch to Publication
Understand what an agent does and how the whole process of manuscript submission works.
Strunk and White, The Elements of Style
Write better. Simpler. Without extra words.
Most books within the fantasy genre are produced by a very few (big) publishing houses in the UK and USA. These are the houses that can afford to take the risk on large print runs because they have many other titles too. They also have significant advantages in economies of scale (cheap distribution, discounted printing, efficient representation to the stores). They produce a few fantasy titles (bad luck, authors) in big volume. Big volume is necessary for most kinds of book printing, but fantasy is the most critical, certainly within fiction.
The hunger for magic is universal, most people have it in some way or another. People pray, hoping their thoughts will influence reality (or hoping that God will intervene on their behalf, which is kind of the same thing, except that someone else performs the magic). The Secret (by Rhonda Byrne) was enormously successful, which mostly proves that people wanted to hear its message. It made over 1 million sales soon after the DVD was released, and its primary message is ‘what you think creates the world you live in’, in other words: your success is dependant on your visualisation of that success.
This is magic. There isn’t much science to back these assertions up. Yet people believe. Why is there such a hunger and need to believe? Read the rest of this entry »
