Roderick T. Macdonald's Blog, page 28

The Writing Life: Aiming High

For me, aiming high in writing is to simply try to do the best I can, write as well as I can, and try to express my ideas in a way that satisfies both my potential readers and myself. But of course, there is always more to it than that, or this article could start and finish with that single sentence.

I write for an audience. An unread book is at best a doorstop, at worst an utter irrelevance. The goal has to be to write something that other people will read. The three en’s. (I just made these up, but I’m sure they’ve been used somewhere) As a writer of fiction I hope for readers to engage, enjoy, and be entertained. Those are my primary goals.

But is that all I do in my writing? Nope. Though I do devoutly want to attract as big an audience as possible, and so aim for the three en’s, I also, inevitably, write for myself. My own enjoyment of the written word, my own pleasure in words and phrases, and my own satisfaction in putting together the complex puzzle that is a novel: a seemingly simple creation comprised of a thousand moving parts, all hopefully hidden beneath the surface, away from the reader’s eye.

In the act of writing, as frustrating or tedious as it can be at times, I entertain myself. I enjoy the process (with the aforementioned caveats), and I engage fully in working ideas, themes, and motifs into my writing. I put those things in not because I think they “should be” added, or because I think they will help me gain more readers, but because for me, in writing, it is what I personally must do, because my fiction writing must include at least a nod in the direction of those things, or I cannot write it with any conviction. I cannot begin my stories, cannot finish the execution of a tale, if it does not have an underlying structure or theme that sings to me.

Back in university I noticed when struggling with essays that until I found a core concept or argument to hang my discussion of literature, philosophy, or history around, I tended to be lost and flail about with bits of information, my efforts disjointed. But when I found a theme, or angle, or motif that stimulated my thinking on the subject, everything flowed and I produced much more coherent work. My professors still noted a tendency for me to write like I was running for a train, but they let me off with a better mark if a central idea animated my discussions rather than the essay just being a collection of points without an organizing principle.

So it is with me in writing novels. Aiming high is to capture perfectly something that my readers can engage with, enjoy, and be entertained by, which at the same time I have organized around themes and ideas that flow and are exemplified beautifully through plot, characterization, dialogue and imagery, without ever getting didactic, or having the themes get in the way of the fun for the reader. That for me would be my perfect book, and something I will always strive for.

Why I Write Fantasy: Honouring Influences Without Being a Slave to Them.

I think many writers spend some time forging their own writing identity: the what it is they want to write, and how they wish to present it to others. For many a young writer there is a phase of aping the things they love, and it can be a very conscious process. It certainly was with me – my early stories are a testament to the books I loved at the time. My influences were very clear in those tales, though they do have the odd slice of originality here and there! However, I think that I, like many young writers, had to regurgitate some of our author heroes onto the page in order to move on and be free of them.

What things did I shamelessly reproduce in slightly different skins? In no particular order – a dragon with abilities eerily similar to those that exist on Pern, but with crystal skulls borrowed from a comic strip I read. The skulls had memories etched into them like a vinyl record, the memories activated by exposure to dragonfire. That was my slice of semi-originality, but now I think about it could also owe something to Rogue Trooper. 2000AD is a huge influence I have yet to discuss.

Shape-changers appeared because I loved the ones in the Riddle-Master series, but wanted them to be better (by my teenage self’s lights), because in my youth I thought the shape-changers should have won, and didn’t really understand why they hadn’t. In fact I should go back and read that series again and see how time has altered my perception of the events in those books – I blogged earlier this year about how that happened when re-reading the Wheel of Time in my forties versus my twenties, and it was quite revelatory.

I threw a necromancer into book two because they’re cool, there was one in The Hobbit and though I’d read The Lord of the Rings multiple times by then, I’m not sure I’d made the connection between Sauron and the Necromancer yet. Sometimes, often in the case of layered literature, you can read all the words and not catch all the meanings, especially when young and determined just to say you’d finished the ‘big’ book and feel all grown up. I also thought that Kalarr and the necromancers in The Horse Lord got short changed and wanted to give them a more prominent role, but as a reincarnated good guy, of course!

And who wouldn’t want to have a Balrog in their book? So I had my misunderstood-in-search-of-redemption-for-earlier-accidental-evils necromancer accidentally raise him from the dead, as you do. (I was pantsing for all I was worth at this stage, and so had to give my demon lord a vampire arch enemy, in addition to hating the shape-changers, because they were antagonists in my books too, and the Balrog had to be on what was obviously ‘my’ side in the story!) The whole series was to be five books long because The Belgariad, (my series of the 80s, constantly re-read), was five books long. As was the Amber series. I am a bit amazed I did not have Corwin just appear in my books, being suave. Maybe that would have happened in book three.

I named a magical artifact after a Dio album, (itself probably named after something else entirely) added in a scene based on the cover of one of my favourite board games, and generally just fulfilled my every toe-curling teenage wish in the form of fiction. Corwin did appear in a Fighting Fantasy game book I created, along with a Tunnels and Trolls play by numbers solo dungeon I designed. Both came complete with a laborious hand written reference randomisation process. Budding cryptographer, I was not. All are still with me, lined yellowed paper in old ring-binders.

The Thief and The Demon does not wear its influences as boldly on its sleeve as those early efforts. Rather than trying in some way to continue the stories of others in my own words, I’m telling my own story, one that grew organically over years and through many filters of experience. But those strong fantasy echoes from my childhood onwards have inspired ideas to build on, or kick against: reworking situations and dynamics into my own imaginative lexicon, not simply rehashing someone else’s narrative. Or at least that’s what I hope has happened! I think that is how you honour your influences without being their slave: you find ways to make their impact upon you your own, and transform it into something new. I hope I’ve done that, but it may well be that one day I look back on The Thief and The Demon much like I currently view my teenage efforts: as something necessary to finding my way to the best expression of my ideas in fantasy form. I’ll get back to you on that in ten years!

The Writing Life: Maintaining Focus, New Goals

It has been over a month since The Thief and The Demon’s release. A month to reflect on how much work has been done, and realize how much more remains to be done.

There is a lot to learn and to do online, social media can be an absorbing maze with a lot of new rules, and I’ve many more platforms to explore!

The main thing I have resolved to do is keep a steady pace. Walk, not run. Writing as a career is a distance event, not a sprint. So I’ll keep chipping away on social media where I can, when I can, and expand my presence and contributions as I grow more familiar and comfortable with the platforms I currently use.

I have read very good, if daunting, advice from Hugh Howey over the last day or so. I read part four first, then part one and parts of part three. What can I say, I’m a pick and choose kind of guy. It was inspiring in an “Oh my god that is a ton of work you are talking about there! Write a draft, twelve revision passes plus possible rewrites and look to get two books out a year? Is that even remotely possible??” kind of way. It is what it is, and I got a lot out of his hard earned insights, including the conviction that while I may not match his level of production, I intend to give it a solid shot.

The core advice is to keep writing, and I’m already there. Write, work to get better. That is my primary goal. I have started the first draft of my next novel, The Killer and The Dead. It is set in Aranvail, in the World Belt, just as The Thief and The Demon is, and there are some cross-connections, but both are intended to stand alone and be read independently. My goal is to have the one hundred and twenty thousand word draft completed by January 4th 2018. I am over twenty thousand in now. I have just celebrated an anniversary, because life does come first, (even before writing!), but upon my return home (via a couple of flights during which I shall be working) a new regimen begins, one in which I have no time to lose. NaNoWriMo began for many people ten days ago, it starts for me on 11/11/17, so I have some catching up to do!

I’m excited to be writing new material. In going first person narrative I’m trying something new, and I’m enjoying the challenge. My focus will be on the writing, but I shall find the time to keep experimenting with advertising campaigns, writing these blogs, staying in touch with old friends and new, and reaching out for more reviews of The Thief and The Demon. I’m toying with the idea of doing a narration for Audible. Or perhaps podcasts are in my future! More to learn. The business of writing rolls on, even when you are celebrating life events. It can seem like there are a thousand things to do, but it is useful to remember one thing: keep writing. Everything else can fall into place around that, rather than allowing everything else to get in the way of the thing writers should want to do first and last and always, which is write. It is very easy, judging from my own experience, to lose track of writing amongst all the other stuff, but I’m trying to hold onto that focus. So now I’ve shared my goals with you as a means to maintain that focus, because now I have to follow through!

Good luck to all writers participating in NaNoWriMo!!

Why I Write Fantasy: The Travel Begins at Home Edition

All writing, it seems to me, begins in your own head. Sometimes it will be written as a strong spontaneous reaction to outside stimulus – protest songs, polemical essays, critical feuds, a satirical impulse to start telling a particular story in order to hit a particular target, but for me, the story starts as a piece of idle conjecture: “What if?”

For a long time in my o’erweening youth, I thought that was it – my big old brain just conjured everything up out of the whole cloth. That certainly soothed my fragile ego.

But that cannot truly be so. We are all products of our environment, the climate, geography, and people that surround us. These things help, subtly or not, to shape our thoughts, and perhaps insidiously to guide our imaginations. So while writing may begin in your head, what and how you write depends a lot on where your head has been.

I was very lucky to grow up in Edinburgh – an unburied time capsule (well most of it, some streets have indeed been paved over!), where I could live in a house built in the 1920’s, go to school in a building from in the 19th century, visit the city centre designed at the end of the 18th century, and then travel to the High Street and Old Town dating back to the 13th century. The bifurcated nature of Edinburgh’s Old and New Town, and the very different people that lived in each section were the inspiration behind Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: confronted by a divided city, he created a schizophrenic character to reflect the strains in Victorian era Edinburgh, the buttoned up well to do in the New Town versus the seamy brothels, gambling dens and squalor of the Old Town, where men of means went to have their licentious fun in secret, away from disapproving eyes.

The city helped to foster in me a sense of time, of communal lived experience, and of the changes that set each era apart. Edinburgh is a living museum, and I think living there shaped my tendency to look at all the places I visit through time travel goggles: I’m so used to seeing layers of history in my hometown that I search automatically for it elsewhere, and frequently it helps me to uncover rich sources of inspiration wherever I go, a veritable parade of “What ifs?”

And Edinburgh has at its heart a gem of geological history: Arthur’s Seat, an ancient volcanic plug minutes from the High Street, the spine of the Old Town. The same basalt that Edinburgh Castle sits upon also rises into a rounded mount with a line of ragged cliffs – the Salisbury Crags. Just a short walk from the bustling city centre you can round two corners on a winding path and imagine yourself in the highlands, a landscape of gorse bushes and moor grasses. If you climb the mount, not high, but it always leaves me out of breath, (I like to take a steepish and rough stair around the northeast slope to get to the final climb from the south) you look down on the old city, the new, and the more modern that grew all round it, all from a fragment of wilderness kept at its heart. To the north snakes the Firth of Forth, a mighty estuary and gateway to a far wider world, to the east rises Berwick Law, ancient twin to Arthur’s seat, to the south lie the Pentland Hills, the first wrinkles into the lowlands that separate Scotland from England, and to the west the wide valley of the central belt beckons. I’ll be honest, I never looked much west. Ironic, considering how far west I ended up travelling.

I grew up surrounded by an embarrassment of riches. So, like most locals, I ignored them. But when you move away, that journey makes you reflect more on what you left behind, and your mind and imagination linger and retrace the streets where once you so easily roamed. I may not have created a fantasy Edinburgh yet, but the images, ideas, histories (and I haven’t even touched on the military, religious, or cultural history of the city), and visions of Edinburgh have without a doubt had an impact on how I look at every other part of this world, and how I may imagine new worlds. You can take the boy out of Edinburgh, but you can’t take Edinburgh out of the boy. I’d not want it any other way.

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The Writing Life: Travel as Inspiration

For a long time I did not travel. My memories of flight were fuzzy – laying my jacket down on the floor and sleeping between the seats on a flight across the Atlantic in 1974. The weird sensation of the ground I walked on not being solid, the vague bounce I had never previously experienced in my short life.

I did not fly internationally again until I was 29. I went to Egypt. Climate, Culture, Cuisine and Architecture were all so very different. (I could say Construction, as a stretch to keep it all C’s.) When I travel now, those are my touchstones, the points of comparison and contrast.

The incredible thing was total immersion into an environment utterly different from the only one I had ever known. The heat I had never met before in Scotland. The sounds of worship filling the air. The smell of sweet flavoured tobaccos. Making my way solo across Cairo in various taxis that looked like demolition derby entrants, on roads that had no discernible rules, where traffic lights (those that functioned) were merely for show, the real rule being to hit the gap before the other guy. All in all I was amazed at how few collisions there were. Cars shared the road with camels, sheep, or goats being herded hither and yon. I learned enough Arabic to direct my cab the last few streets home to the house where I was staying. It being expected that I could do that!

And of course, flowing through it all, the massive weight of history. The pyramids, the temples at Luxor, which I reached at the other end of a long and interesting train journey, with some toilets that horrified the French ladies I shared a carriage with. The first class toilets, mind you. The dutch lads who talked books with me for hours. The Valley of the Kings, the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, the constant calls for baksheesh, a felucca ride on the Nile where the two gents taking me out onto the waters extolled the virtues of various nations’ women, after having a very loaded conversation with me in which I wondered if I could risk swimming to shore if things went south. The irony of visiting my friends in a 5 star hotel in Luxor as Pink Floyd’s “Money” played over the sound system. (I stayed in a pension across town). The hospitality of another family that was wonderful, playing soccer in a dusty field with Egyptian children who laughed at Scottish football as “kick and run!” The cryptospiridium I suffered for the last week, probably as a result of eating their food. And then for another two weeks after I got back home – that gave me time to read all the existing Wheel of Time books I’d taken, but not touched when on my travels, as there had simply been too much to take in.

I adore and absorb as much as I can from travel and history shows on TV. I read articles and do research on different cultures, now and in the past, and these activities provide a great deal of inspiration, and fire my imagination, as well as making me somewhat jealous of Anthony Bourdain (except when he is eating unmentionables); but actually going to places, experiencing their food as far as you dare, and seeing ancient sites in person, feeling the human scale of them, envisioning how people once lived in those environments when they were new, is irreplaceable. Everywhere I go I seek out inspiration, I look for locations or traces of lives that can feed my imagination, and can be transformed into realms fantastical. Churches, castles, graveyards and catacombs are catnip to me. Ruined towns or temple complexes are heaven. Egypt is so old it has roman graffiti at its ancient sites, which made me daydream of roman tourists (or a couple of bored legionnaires who always seem to have London accents), being equally impressed by ancient statues of Rameses II, and sharing the same instinct we still see today to leave their name on structures far older than they. (Black pen marks on stairwells in Parisian churches spring to mind). These things tie us together, despite distance and time, the human experience has some universal aspects, and travel has helped me feel those connections, just as it has illuminated how differently we can lead our lives, right now across our world, and even more so as we drill back through time. All of that is incredible grist to the writing fantasy fiction mill.

So if you can, travel. If you can’t travel: read, and watch, and try to put yourself in the shoes of those strangers living in strange lands. It is amazing how often story ideas grow from that single activity. Keep feeding your imagination, and hopefully those vivid ideas that become great stories will arise.

Why I Write Fantasy: The Christmas Presents Edition

In the late 2000s there were two years in a row when my sister sent me fantasy novels for Christmas. These are always welcome, and the choices both years were excellent and made a lasting impression on me, enough for me to consider them contemporary influences: books so good they raised the bar, made me realize I had to put a lot more work in if I was going to step into the same arena.

I regard the two books, and the authors, as halves of an intensely intimidating whole that I read back to back, as I managed to ignore the 2007 bookish present until after I had read the 2008 present.

2008 brought me Brent Weeks and the Night Angel Trilogy, a masterclass in relentless plot development. The narrative did not let me go. The cliffhangers seemed endless and forced me to keep turning pages. I simply had to know what was going to happen next! The acknowledgements pages were so wittily written I decided immediately to not bother with any of my own. I liked his honesty in the interview lodged at the back of the paperback, and the fact that Shakespeare was an influence – how can he not be?

But back to the books. The trilogy did a fantastic job of introducing its ideas, building on them, and using them to fuel the fire of further dramatic twists and dilemmas. I have not read them in a long time now, but the bones remain ingrained in my memory. The characters live, the problems are immediate, the storytelling infectious and, beneath the hood, brilliantly structured. I really wondered after reading the trilogy if I could possibly match his achievement.

Then I picked up the gift from 2007,   by Patrick Rothfuss. Damn. The writing is beautiful. The world just so alluring. The framing deceptively simple. But the writing, the writing is just exquisite. I don’t often weep at the greatness of a sentence, but when I do, it’s probably from Patrick Rothfuss. If Alan Moore is correct, and artists and the tellers of stories are magicians, that the power of words is in their ability to alter the consciousness of others, and that power is not something to be abused or treated lightly, then Patrick Rothfuss is a magician. His words are placed together with utmost care for absolutely maximum impact. His prose is magical, making reading a joy even as challenging ideas are sprinkled innocuously through the text. He can take as long as he wants to get Kingkiller Vol. 3 right, because outside of Conrad and David Foster Wallace I have not encountered a writer who so perfectly crafts his work.

The combined effect of these two writers upon me was quite profound. I didn’t write for over a year. I didn’t see the point, they had every base covered between them, and I could not hold a fricken’ candle to the monster that those combined books became in my mind. I forgot that every voice has its place, and the choir of humanity welcomes many voices . Eventually I remembered, when I looked over a two page fragment of an idea I had written in 2005, and it sparked something in me, so in one afternoon I turned it into a 34 page outline for The Thief and The Demon.

As a result I consider these two authors to be strong influences upon my own work. I had to recover from them, and learn again to have faith in my own voice after being so thoroughly blown away by theirs. It was difficult at the time, but I am a better and stronger writer for it.

The Writing Life: Letting Go of Your First Love

The first love you wrote, I mean. Of course, many authors successfully publish their first loves, and do astoundingly well. For others there is another story, of a first, or first and second and more novels written and discarded, before a book is released to the reading world. I’m guessing that one of those discarded novels was The One, and setting it aside was tough for those writers to do.

I had a few stabs at writing longer tales before I wrote my own first true storytelling love. The story of Lyn, lost in the mists of memory. It involved stone circles, maybe, but no time travel. The chronicle of a resurrected evil wizard that was not exactly a complete rewrite of the story of Kalarr cu Ruruc from Peter Morwood’s The Horse Lord, except with Kalarr as the hero. (He was such a great villain! He shouldn’t have died so soon! For the second time!) Then there were the two actual novels I wrote as a teen, but only after all of those attempts came The Crystal Fruit, my first true writing love.

I’ve read that passion projects, the story you have always wanted to write, should not be your first novel, and I can understand that advice: you often need to learn your craft before being able to do your passion project justice. I spent fifteen intermittent years on The Crystal Fruit before putting it into mothballs. I hope someday to retrieve it. So, as you can see, I’m still not entirely over it.

Just like a first love, I think that in writing nothing is ever quite the same as that first novel you pour your heart and soul into, even if you never publish it. It remains, shining in your memory as a dream of what might have been, or as a nightmarish reminder of what can go horribly wrong.

As a novel, The Thief and The Demon is like a relationship where you get it right, work at it, and see it through. The unanticipated rush of first love isn’t there, but the passion ignites just the same, the thrill and excitement, but this time the lasting joy of a real love gets forged. This time the book can stand alone when you’ve finished it, not collapse under its own weight like a badly built card house.

But how did I let go of my first literary love? I submitted it to agents. In my heart I knew I was done with it, it had occupied my mind for too long and had grown stale, but I couldn’t quit it. So I needed others to reject it for me, external voices I could not persuade to give me six more months to make it right. A variety of agents very politely did that for me. The tricky part would have been if someone had been interested! I’d have had to show them my high-concept/what the hell? ending! That would have been an interesting day!

So maybe some of you are struggling to let go of a project you know in your heart isn’t working. Maybe your writing group has analyzed it to death and you still can’t settle on a final form. Or maybe you are too close to it and have lost perspective. You know what? Research query letters, polish the opening’s basic grammar and submit it! Either way you win – if it gets rejected, you can move on with a clean slate. If someone is interested – then you know you were being too hard on yourself and have the external validation to press on and make it happen. Score.

So thank you agents: there is another role you perhaps accidentally fulfill in the writing world, helping tired authors like me put their first loves behind them!

Why I Write Fantasy: A Suitcase of Treasures, Part 2

Last week, I wrote about the green suitcase in our garage that yielded two world-changing books, the first of which was Nine Princes in Amber. The second book I found in that fateful suitcase (and now that I write about this, it is such a strange happenstance to have so impacted an impressionable child) was not the first in a classic series, but the second: Patricia McKillip’s Heir of Sea and Fire. I read over and over again about land rulers, a dead king wanting his skull back, wizards who spent hundreds of years as trees, Ghisteslwchlohm, (If you need to find a reason for my own multi-syllabled wizards – look no further than big G.) and shapeshifters of mysterious intent. And Riddlemasters, in a college that managed to make all the arts into a riddle course – which, to be honest, sometimes seems fair, except there should never be a single answer.

As with Nine Princes I searched in vain for the other books in the series, and then, five years later I was in John Menzies on Princes Street in Edinburgh and I found it: a new edition of the Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy sitting on a shelf, with Heir of Sea and Fire set between these two other books in an unfamiliar cover. I thought – who is this Riddlemaster of Hed? Raederle is the heroine! Then I remembered all the references to that Morgon guy. He seemed a bit dull, but did show up with powerfully gathered muscles and a cool sword at the end of Heir. Raederle was where it was at for me, facing off absentee dads, dead kings, and people made of shells and seaweed! Who was this Morgon guy? In my mind I had created pre and post stories for Raederle and Morgon, and in a sense had been quite happy with them. I think that’s what the kids nowadays refer to as ‘Headcanon’.

Patricia McKillip’s world, filled with arresting imagery, strong women, powerful minds, and allusions to long histories not always explained, utterly enchanted me. The wizards and dead kings especially hung in my memory, but also the leading lady front and centre. My original main character, in a story I think I began even before my first attempt at a novel, was a young woman called Lyn. I think that can be attributed to Raederle more than anything else, though the leading ladies of Pern will also have been an influence! (Was Dragonflight also in that suitcase, I wonder? I begin to suspect so.) I have no idea now what happened in Lyn’s tale, but I have it somewhere, 30 odd pages of scrawl on UK A4 sized paper, wide ruled. (I graduated to using the narrow ruled for writing later. I felt very grown up!)

The writing in Heir of Sea and Fire is so evocative, like catching a dream on paper with images of flashing light and liquid shadow, poetry in prose so alluring it makes your mind drift and dance to its rhythms at times, that it was and is for me an intoxicant. And Patricia McKillip has only grown more skilled as a writer with the passing of time, a vivid economy of word, idea, and emotion that I can only admire, and seek, one day, to begin to emulate. Not in her style of course, that is all her own!

Two books, found in a musty suitcase at the back of a garage, have had an outsized effect on my imagination, and along with the core influences of fairytales, Tolkien, and Lewis, are inescapable influences on my writing life, for which I am very grateful. Reading them in isolation, away from the context of their companion novels, led me to a great focus on the detail of each, and that focus has lingered in the way in which I approach fantasy, I think. My imaginings (all forgotten now) of how their stories could have gone were very different from how the authors resolved them, but the shards of those thoughts and memories may still have an effect on what I choose to write, or how I employ certain characters and images. I wanted so much more on the Lungold wizards – so I have created a world full of them! Other striking books and authors have come along, and I shall mention them in future columns, but when I look at what I write, it is easy for me to see the traces of Nine Princes of Amber, and Heir of Sea and Fire. I consider that no bad thing.

The Writing Life: Being True to Your Instincts

As I’ve said in other articles, I’ve known forever that I would be a writer, and that I would write fantasy stories. Apart from one cathartic journey into writing nursing fiction, which still had elements of the fantastical (how many nurses find themselves talking to the devil and questioning their own sanity?), all of my stories have been straight up fantasy with high, dark, epic, or grim twists. Those are just the stories I find myself drawn to tell, and the form of expression that comes most naturally to me.

I have read that it can be a mistake not to research your market in advance of writing your novel, and I can see that could be true if your aim is to catch a popular wave and find many readers quickly. Despite this undoubtedly wise advice, it never occurred to me to try to write to a specific market, or to aim at an open niche.

Instead, I worked hard at creating The Thief and The Demon, something I strongly believe in, and that I think many people will enjoy. (Some already have!) And I believe very strongly that for me, this was the right thing to do, that if I was going to produce and share my best writing, I needed to stay true to my instincts, the choices of subject and expression that made the most sense to me, and that I was best equipped to bring to life on the page.

With that same philosophy, I’ve already started to write my next book, The Killer and The Dead. It is not upbeat. It’s a grim story, set in a slum of people condemned to feed the dead. It’s a story about family, and sacrifice, and hate becoming something else, something better, if not actual love. This book, also set in the World Belt, is the one that demands to be written right now, and if I tried to write something else, then that other story would be poisoned by my thoughts returning to The Killer and The Dead, over and over again.

It is the spirit of Roger Zelazny telling me to experiment with my writing, to challenge myself, to become a better writer going forward. I want to try a first person perspective, so I will. Part of me would love to jump on to something else brighter in tone, and the book I plan to follow TKATD with hits that mark, but right now this is what draws and excites me, and to do anything else would be foolish. I need to stay true to my instincts, and own them, and accept that maybe The Killer and The Dead isn’t the wisest business choice of next book in my writing career, but it is the one I’m called to do. The bottom line that we are so often told in the maelstrom of writing and publishing advice is to write a great book, tell a strong story. Everything else is built upon that foundation. I think I have that in TKATD, so I’m pursing it with everything I’ve got.

I hope you all can find your way to the best expression of your selves in writing and in life, and find it filled with power and meaning, because that is the greatest feeling in the world. Good luck!

Why I Write Fantasy: A Suitcase of Treasures, Part 1

In the mid 70s I lived for a couple of years in the USA. When we moved back to Scotland, a large green suitcase came with us. This piece of luggage lived in our garage for years, and when I eventually explored it, I discovered that among the many odds and ends it housed were quite a few books. Two in particular caught my eye, and came to have a lasting effect on me. Both were parts of a series, and for years I did not have access to the other books in those series, and so read and re-read these books in splendid isolation.

The first was Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny. I was utterly captivated by it. Like Tolkien and Lewis, he offered a vision of our world connected to something much grander, filled with mystery and magic, just the turn of a corner, or a page away. Corwin is just the most fun to be with as he tells you his tale, a rich saga of betrayal, heroic failure, (the assault on Kolvir with Bleys is just immense!) and the beginnings of revenge. Because I only read this first book in the series for about six years, I spent a lot of time imagining what was going to happen next, how Eric was going to be defeated and what Corwin would do once he had triumphed. For years I searched in used book stores for more of the series and came up empty. Then I happened into a Forbidden Planet shop in the early 80s, idly looking yet again, and was shocked and incredibly excited to find all five books (I had no idea there would be five) sitting there on a shelf, waiting to be bought! One mad dash home to collect my saved paper-round money, and they were mine! Little did I know I was going to meet a bird who discussed Schopenhauer, or how many years would pass before I understood the reference!

Roger Zelazny’s writing sings to me. “I saw the Old Moon with the New Moon in her arms…” That line stuns me every time. There are so many more. His willingness to experiment inspires me. His ability to pack so many ideas, actions and adventure into relatively few words (his novels, for all their incident, tend to be short), is intimidating. I love his humour, am dazzled by his intelligence, awed by his facility with language, and feel grateful to have found his writing and been so transported by it. My desire to create undersea cities is entirely down to him and Rebma! He is one of my literary heroes, a master from whom I hope I have learned much.

But what of the other novel I dug out of that suitcase, shoving aside multiple books by Lobsang Rampa to get my paws on an intriguing cover of a woman in white emerging from the sea? That can wait until next time!