The Continued Growth of Facets
Facets of Fantasy started out as a five-story collection and my aim in publishing it was practicality. At that time I hadn’t yet written a full-length novel (although I would be doing the first draft of the Harrisons the next year) and most published books I saw were long. I knew readers were more likely to buy something longer because they felt more pages = more bang for your buck. Of course that’s not quite true if the content in the pages is just bloated, repetitious, or poor-quality, but they’ll only find that out AFTER they read the book. So longer was more of a sell, initially.
I didn’t intend for the Facets stories to tell any sort of story together. Actually, I didn’t feel that was important. Short story and novella collections were groups of unconnected little tales, after all. But as the years passed and passed I grew to feel there was a similarity in the three stories that are now in Facets: Halogen Crossing, Jurant, and The Amulet of Renari. "The Trouble with Taranui" grew into a longer novel, City of the Invaders. And "Millhaven Castle" had originally been published in another book. The more I looked at it, the more I felt it didn’t really fit into Facets of Fantasy’s personality.
What is great about this is that the 3 Facets novellas have a distinctive tone, so you know if something belongs with them or not. This means they also have a distinctive audience who wouldn’t be interested in other stories like Millhaven. In fact, the readers of Facets of Fantasy are so distinctive they might not enjoy my other work overall. Facets of Fantasy, with its blend of three different kinds of fantasy types, has a tone unlike any of my other books—a crafted, elevated, broad-reaching tone in which strong characters grapple with a deeply structured world to which they belong. It’s a fantasy book for fantasy lovers. And although I write whatever ideas come into my head, I understand that love for fantasy, so I’m glad I have a book for the fantasy buff.
And there will be more updates.
I didn’t intend for the Facets stories to tell any sort of story together. Actually, I didn’t feel that was important. Short story and novella collections were groups of unconnected little tales, after all. But as the years passed and passed I grew to feel there was a similarity in the three stories that are now in Facets: Halogen Crossing, Jurant, and The Amulet of Renari. "The Trouble with Taranui" grew into a longer novel, City of the Invaders. And "Millhaven Castle" had originally been published in another book. The more I looked at it, the more I felt it didn’t really fit into Facets of Fantasy’s personality.
What is great about this is that the 3 Facets novellas have a distinctive tone, so you know if something belongs with them or not. This means they also have a distinctive audience who wouldn’t be interested in other stories like Millhaven. In fact, the readers of Facets of Fantasy are so distinctive they might not enjoy my other work overall. Facets of Fantasy, with its blend of three different kinds of fantasy types, has a tone unlike any of my other books—a crafted, elevated, broad-reaching tone in which strong characters grapple with a deeply structured world to which they belong. It’s a fantasy book for fantasy lovers. And although I write whatever ideas come into my head, I understand that love for fantasy, so I’m glad I have a book for the fantasy buff.
And there will be more updates.
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