Bad Fiction Breakout!

I found this video via the wonderful Denyse Cohen. I had to share because I can only imagine this was happening behind the scenes of some of my early novel ideas.

How to Survive Life as a Character in a Bad Work of Fiction -- powered by Cracked.com

In Writing, Patience Is A Virtue

I have a problem with waiting. I pace the kitchen waiting for cookies to bake. I skip ahead in a book to see if my favorite character makes it. And I know personally that a watched pot never boils, no matter how long and angrily you stare at it.

Boil, darn you!

With my writing I'm no different. As soon as I get a new idea for a story I want to dive right in. No plotting. No planning. Do the characters even have names yet? Ah, who cares? Jim and Biff will do until rewrite. When I was younger I would delightfully give in to these impulses and often end up with craptastic romps. Entertaining, but still utter drivel. I might post an excerpt one day. Maybe.

Now I've grown older as a writer and have come to realize that waiting a bit is good, not only for me, but for my story as well. Letting it simmer for a bit, like a big pot of soup, develops the flavor of the tale, deepens it. You can concentrate your story down from lofty ideas to something truly enjoyable.

No matter how great an idea may seem at its conception, take the time to think it through. Get to know your characters; flesh them out. Know your setting. Play with plot ideas. The time you spend with your new idea could be the difference between a story not worthy of seeing the light of day and a true gem.

Beyond the British Isles

My first fantasy novel. Yeah!

When I was a young lady of about 14, I was smitten with fantasy novels. I craved them like dark chocolate and Moo-llenium Crunch ice cream (best flavor ever). It didn’t take long for that love to turn to sword and sorcery. I read everything by Mercedes Lackey that I could get my hands on. She introduced me to familiars and gryphons. My first sorceress was Kethry who often bested the men around. Before I knew of Mongols and Huns, I knew Tarma, the chaste swordswoman from the horse breeding tribes of the plains.

I was satisfied with these stories then, but as I grew older I began to realize that something was lacking. Missing even. The stories were growing stale to me. They all seemed to be about the same knight on the same quest who encountered the same magical races. He fought against the same evil lord to fall in love with the same girl. Meanwhile, my knowledge and love of world mythologies had grown too vast to be contained by the traditional scope of the genre.

Then one fateful day I was introduced to the term Sword and Soul. Fantasy set in the myriad of kingdoms of Africa, the lands of my ancestors. I discovered authors who were bringing alive the fantasies I loved with heroes (and heroines!) that looked like me.

Which brings us to this blog.

It’s incredibly easy to find information on Northern European mythology, researching into African, and many other cultures’, mythology can be frustrating. In this blog, I hope to create a resource that those who wish to write high fantasy, adventure fantasy, and sword and sorcery in settings other than medieval Europe can come to for information and inspiration. Hopefully, we will have many more novels in the near future that have fantasies coming out of Africa, India, South America, China, and all the other places beyond the English Isles.