Review!

Hey folks! I've been working with an independent publishing house (Kennebec Press) for a few months. They've purchased the right to distribute one of my books, originally called Haven, now tentatively A Darkness Long and Lasting.

I'm looking for people out in the blogosphere who are interested (or simply willing) in writing a review in exchange for a free copy of the book (in pdf format). Obviously, it would be for non-distribution and not for release or general sharing.

If you're interested, let me know here or email me over at kestar at gmail.com.

Libram Mysterium Vol. II

Ladies and Gentlethings, in time for halloween I present to you the Libram Mysterium Volume II, the Horror Collection. Featuring a tale by yours truly, Le Dieu Perdu. Buy your copy today!

Tome depicted does not represent actual tome delivered.

Telescoping the Middle Ages

STOP. Don't haphazardly combine things from 500 to 1500 into a single setting or story or image. It's been done, and it isn't pretty. We have a tendency to compress time periods that are farther away from us, rolling them all together. We would never dream of mixing the 40s and the 70s because those decades are so distinct to us. Because of their distance, the 1100s and the 1300s might appear to be interchangeable in terms of philosophies, modes of dress, architecture, you name it. But they aren't. If you're going to start combining things from various periods, at least be aware of what you're doing.

Here's a good place to start. That's the wikipedia category for medieval costume, where you can look at a period (usually lumped into a hundred-year group, so we still have to do some telescoping) and get a feel for its clothing. You'll notice that the changes are actually rather marked. A tunic is not a tunic is not a tunic, as it were. There is detail there to explore and mashing together different periods without really being aware of what you're doing sacrifices that detail for no real reason (and makes those people who know the difference cringe curiously).

For that matter, stop depicting shields of any type as being solid metal plates. At best they were covered in a thin layer of metal but were 90% simply wood with leather over them and a metal boss and rim. No one ever used a solid metal shield. No one. Don't do it. The only reason to depict a shield that way is ignorance and now you can't even lay claim to that defense anymore because I just told you.

And if you're thinking that because you're doing fantasy it doesn't matter, maybe you shouldn't be doing fantasy anymore. Or else stick to pulp stuff. Because honestly, how serious can you be if you don't care?

D&D and Writing

I think I may have discussed it before, but there are things that differ, fundamentally, from playing D&D and writing, and I think the reason I have such a hard time when writing novel-length endeavors is because I'm stuck in some kind of D&D mode. I finally finished my second manuscript (a clockpunk piece set in 1486 that follows the PoV of a Florentine spy and a Roman nun) and only now have I begun to break out of my DMing chains in writing long-form work. For some reason short stories and I don't have that problem -- maybe because I've written so many of them over the years that my style has been allowed to diverge from the way I run a D&D game.

The precise problem is easy to trace: an overabundance of descriptive words which hangs up the action. In D&D, every time you see something new you have to have it described in detail. Those details matter! They allow your players to make complex decisions (usually decisions that you never even considered) at a moment's notice. Is it important that the stones of the tower are unevenly spaced? Surely, in case someone wants to knock it over. Does it matter that the man you're talking to has a beard? It does if you want to set his face on fire.

Stories that define a World

Fantasy stories tend to get stuck into a particular kind of trope, namely defining the world in which they take place. As a nascent writer (I'm not very good at long form stuff, and some might argue that my short stories leave something to be desired as well) I like to think about these kinds of things. This isn't really related to D&D, save incidentally, but is more about the nature of fantasy.

So, anyhow, fantasy stories tend to take a world-definitive approach. When you read a fantasy story, you probably aren't going to read a second one set in the same world: the world has been defined and its heights and depths clearly staked out. If there are more stories to come, they will be set in a future time when the world has changed because, let's face it, you've seen it all already.

Fantasy, unlike most other genres, often seeks to exhaustively define every aspect of its setting. The heroes go to all the places and meet all the people. Every major event is incorporated. Everything changes at the end. Perhaps this is a hold-over of the mythic hero-journey. Here's what really interests me: most other genres of writing don't do that.

You wouldn't read a murder mystery and think "Huh, I've seen everything there is to know about earth now. I've pretty much exhausted all the places in it." That's because murder mysteries don't seek to define the entire planet, they simply exist within it. Fantasy tales are generally about big, world-changing, sweeping events. They must by their nature define the world they exist in both because their plots are about changing everything and because the reader doesn't really know what the setting itself is.

On Fantasy and Escape

Tolkien once famously said of fantasy literature: "Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? ... If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!"

I hate to disagree with the grandmaster of modern fantasy literature, but disagree I do. Not, of course, concerning his value of escapist literature (which I suppose is alright), but rather with his judgement that fantasy is necessarily escapist at all. George R. R. Martin, in an interview, explained why so many beloved characters died in ASIAF; he said it was not comfort literature. I would argue that Lord of the Rings isn't comfort literature either.

Fantasy does not have to be light-hearted, uplifting, or hopeful. What good is the escape of following Ned Stark? No good at all, in terms of escapism, I would argue. But the same can be said of poor Frodo, who is in essence a tragic hero: he wins only to also lose. While Middle Earth is saved from the machinations of the Dark Lord, Frodo himself is hollowed out and ruined by the experience. He sacrifices the things that make his life worth living in order to protect Middle Earth—he sacrifices himself.

This isn't escapism. Fantasy literature can be as true and vital and vibrant and necessary as any other genre. Just because it takes place in a secondary world doesn't mean that there are not truths about our world there. Indeed, Derrida would scoff to think that you could ever construct a document that was not riddled with hints and truths of the author's society and intention. Deconstruct Lord of the Rings and you will find the truths that Tolkien thought were essential to humanity.

I'm tired of hearing slanders made against fantasy literature. What exactly irks people about it? That it's not history? I'm sorry to say that most novels are not history. That novel you read about a love story? It didn't really happen. Not only that, but it probably couldn't have happened. What about the authors we most value as part of the English corpus? Shakespeare? Well, again, I'm sad to tell you that Shakespeare (while he didn't make up his stories, since he wasn't a great plot-author so instead had to take them from other sources) wrote a lot of things that didn't happen.

It seems hypocritical, strange, and almost unbalanced to rage against the fantastic simply because it is fantastic. Sure, you can be angry at bad writing (and I suppose fantasy has been an umbrella for poorly written work for a long time, due to the fact that critics simply dismissed the whole genre and refused to help sift through the shit) but to be angry at the genre of fantasy itself is as senseless as hating adventure, romance, documentary, or any other genre-style.

Fantasy itself is exactly as credible and as real as any other fiction.

The New Death (and others), a review

Start with some Ray Bradbury. You'd better have some H.P. Lovecraft on hand, and a heady dose of Robert E. Howard to compliment it. Of course, there's a place for some Essence of Vance in this recipe, and you'd do well to use a lot of it. Mix them just right, add in some extra cynicism and a healthy helping of Groucho Marx, and you'll be approaching the composition of James Hutchings' 2011 book of short stories, poetry, and flash fiction: The New Death, and others.

This collection is a truly enviable concoction, switching with ease and grace between tried and true Sword and Sorcery and postmodern humor, sometimes within the same story (such as the Jeweled City). Hutchings has a talent for writing in a classically fantastic manner, evoking the ancient Hyperborean worlds of Howard; yet he also captures satire and modern settings with the aplomb of Bradbury.

While it may be said he owes much to other authors that came before him, the new constellation of meanings is completely original. Witty, sometimes bitter, and knit together with a constant theme of sarcastic scorn, there are nevertheless truly heartfelt sections of the New Death. His reinterpretations of Lovecraft, Howard, Ashton Smith and even Dunsany, echo with an attention to poetic concerns that has been, in my mind, hitherto ignored amongst modern poets. Syncopation, rhythm, structure, and rhyme have been carefully arranged in a way that defies the modern-day fascination with blank verse.

The collection opens with a meditation on the theme: the Gods of the Poor, which introduces us to a host of anthropomorphized characters who will return again and again throughout the writing. If there was one thing I would change about this collection, it is that these gods and anthropomorphic concepts don't always seem to be the same people: in some shorts, Death is a woman. In others, a man; as these interstices seem to present the binding motif throughout, it would have been nice if, in addition to being standalones, they had also articulated a wider understanding of the characters.

That having been said, the collection in no means suffers by this lack. Each individual story, whether sharply political (the Enemy Within, the Face in the Hill, Rumplestiltskin) or simply wondrous strange (How the Isle of Cats Got Its Name, The Moon Sailed Sadly Through the Sky, The Bird and the Two Trees) is extremely evocative. Some of the satire may be a little light in comparison with the droughts of fantasy to be imbibed, but they offer a refreshing change of pace.

Indeed, if Master Hutchings can be said to excel at one thing above all others, it is the skilled way in which he mingles the classically fantastical and the hopelessly mundane. Elizabethan speech patterns share stories, sometimes share paragraphs, with the flaccidity of modern speech and both are improved by the relationship.

So, if you're looking for a satirical collection of fantastic tales, or a serious one that has some less serious elements, or even if you buy it solely for those stories that are all brooding and no jokes, the New Death is eminently worth it. Indeed, its meager price of 99 cents may be an insult to the matter within, as it is worth much more than that. So I urge you, if any of the people that went into the New Death's style interest you in the least, go out and take a look at it. Check out the sample at smashwords. Buy it! But whatever you do, don't let it pass you by.