Pitching Deep Fantasy
My #deepfantasy #NaNoWriMo novel is still rolling along but the end is in sight. I took a bit of time out today to send my last year's #NaNoWriMo project #TheThirdMoon off to @AllenandUnwin's #FridayPitch. I hadn't thought about #FridayPitch for a long time, although it was how @TheKiraChronicles trilogy got picked up for publication.
There was of course the inevitable question about which book was a 'comparison title' to #TheThirdMoon, and the answer was 'none' as I'm unaware of other contemporary #deepfantasy works.
So what constitutes #deepfantasy? Firstly it isn't dystopic, which puts it out of favour for the time being, in fact, one of the elements of #deepfantasy is its overall impulse of hope. The second characteristic is that it has a relatively narrow focus on the hero journeys of a small group of characters. As a result of this, tangled political intrigues and sweeping and ongoing warfare aren't part of the genre, except as a distant background. Thirdly, #deepfantasy is set in secondary worlds which in my case are usually pastoral, but could be built-environments. Fourthly, and most importantly, #deepfantasy has a subtext that is spiritual and/or philosophical. This is not didactic but there for the reader to engage in either consciously or unconsciously.
The #LordoftheRings obviously has deep fantastical elements, most notably the movement of characters in and out of the liminal - that is the state between life and death, or one state of being and another. The Dead Marshes are full of corpses that are in this state, neither decayed nor animated, and Aragorn enters the liminal to draw Faramir, Eowyn and Merry back from the greylands, the place between life and death. More on #deepfantasy and its potential in another blog.
There was of course the inevitable question about which book was a 'comparison title' to #TheThirdMoon, and the answer was 'none' as I'm unaware of other contemporary #deepfantasy works.
So what constitutes #deepfantasy? Firstly it isn't dystopic, which puts it out of favour for the time being, in fact, one of the elements of #deepfantasy is its overall impulse of hope. The second characteristic is that it has a relatively narrow focus on the hero journeys of a small group of characters. As a result of this, tangled political intrigues and sweeping and ongoing warfare aren't part of the genre, except as a distant background. Thirdly, #deepfantasy is set in secondary worlds which in my case are usually pastoral, but could be built-environments. Fourthly, and most importantly, #deepfantasy has a subtext that is spiritual and/or philosophical. This is not didactic but there for the reader to engage in either consciously or unconsciously.
The #LordoftheRings obviously has deep fantastical elements, most notably the movement of characters in and out of the liminal - that is the state between life and death, or one state of being and another. The Dead Marshes are full of corpses that are in this state, neither decayed nor animated, and Aragorn enters the liminal to draw Faramir, Eowyn and Merry back from the greylands, the place between life and death. More on #deepfantasy and its potential in another blog.
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