S. K. Dunstall

I love reading about the practicalities in writing fantasy, like how far horses can really travel in a day.

Gillian Polack has done a similar thing with food in her guest blog Food is Just Fantasy Without Substance over at Voyager Online. Gillian talks about carrying pots and pans, and what travellers might eat along the way. Interesting stuff.

I know that even when I pack food for a long car trip how tedious it is and how much extra planning is involved. I do a 500km round trip roughly once a month to see my mother, who lives in the country. I love to take my own food, but the effort it requires to prepare and pack, and then remember to wash everything when you get home adds considerable time to the trip. Many times I just can’t be bothered, and buy food on the way.

After she talks about packing and cooking on the road, Gillian goes on to mention stews at those deserted way-out inns that our travellers always seem to land at, and how it just won’t happen. And I agree with everything she says.

Notwithstanding that, the poor old stew gets a pretty rough run in fantasy novels. It is generally considered capital ‘B’ Bad, and the sign of an absolute novice if you make your characters eat stew.

Is it really so bad?

I think of what I feed people here when I have a house full of visitors, and it’s generally some form of pot meal that I can cook up and serve out as required, particularly if people aren’t all eating at the same time. Stew is good, or pasta with a sauce I can leave heating on the stove.

So in a busy inn where lots of people drop in for food at various times, stews could be appropriate. They’re quick, because they’re keeping warm by the side of the stove. They’re easy, because there’s no extra cooking required, all you have to do is serve it onto a plate. They’re convenient, because you can cook them early before the crowds of drinkers arrive from their long journeys looking for beds.

So yes, the humble stew is not a good traveller, although you can use it under certain circumstances. Meantime, I might pop over to Gillian’s site and ask for that cubed soup she mentioned. It sounds fun. Like an old fashioned stock cube.

And for our next fantasy when the characters do a journey—they’re taking a frying pan, a billy and a (not very big) bag of flour.

I started this blog I because I thought it was a unique idea and that while there is lots of information about how to write, there is little physical evidence of the actual process that writers go through to change their work.

Not so. Brandon Sanderson, who has written a number of books but is currently famous for picking up Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga, has a lot of information about the writing process, deleted scenes, commentary on chapters and so on. It’s a great read. Settle in for the afternoon —or maybe the weekend, as there’s a lot there. It’s a real treasure trove of the writing process.

I actually got his site from a post Robin Hobb did on sff.net/My Space. Readers asked her how her draft process works, so she explained some technicalities with how she does her drafts. After which she posted portions of a sixth and seventh draft from the prologue of Dragon Keeper, her new book.

Both these sites are worth looking at.

A fellow writing-workshop member introduced me to the Mary-Sue test.

A true Mary Sue is a surrogate for the author. But not just any surrogate… oh, no, far from it. MS is not merely a stand-in for the author. Instead, she is the embodiment of all that is true, good, and holy. She immediately wins the respect and affection of all the canonical characters, and, if the story is a romance, the undying love of whoever the writer has a crush on. She is brilliant. She is beautiful. Her hair is never out of place, even when she has a flowing mass of (fill in the blank) locks. Her career, interests, and personal beliefs are eerily similar to the author’s own. She always holds the key to the mystery. She knows how to work the computer. The slavering, vicious guard dogs curl up at her feet and gaze up affectionately. If she dies, she does so bravely and for the sake of others. In various science fiction fandoms, she occasionally saves the universe while she’s at it.

Eshva, Whatever Happened to Mary Sue, based on a definition by The Divine Adoratrice [whose link was broken when I tried to look up the original]

There’s a good entry on Mary-Sue’s in Wikipedia, and they even point you to some of the tests you can take to see whether your character is a Mary-Sue or not. My favourite is the Ponyland Express test.

One of the things about a Mary Sue is that no-one likes them.

I find it fascinating that a character the author loves so much is so intensely disliked by everyone else, particularly when these characters are based on the author him/herself.

Mary-Sues originated in fan fiction. Most of the reason no-one likes them is because they’re too perfect, and they take over the story to the detriment of other characters. Not a good thing when a fan goes in to read fiction about their favourite characters and this perfect (in every way) stranger takes over the story.

I took the Mary Sue test. My character was not a Mary-Sue, but I was warned that I had to care a little more for my character.

A lot of sites lately have talked about the Penguin and Amazon Breakthrough Novel and Authonomy. While I can’t speak for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel—there’s a good discussion about it on Nathan Bransford’s blog—I can talk about Authonomy, as both Sherylyn and I have been on Authonomy since the start of the year.

This is how we did it, and what we hoped to get out of it.

There are two of us. We generally write together. We weren’t sure how two authors would go, so we decided that Sherylyn would ‘own’ the book. We were in it not so much to get a book published by Harper Collins (although that would be a nice bonus, of course), but to garner feedback from readers. In particular, we wanted to see whether a story like Potion would still work, or whether it was so old hat (elves, a journey) that no-one wanted to read it.

We both registered as Authonomy users. I registered as myself, Karen, while Sherylyn registered under our pen name, Rowan Dai. It was an easy decision. She had a lot more time over January and February to devote to it. Plus, she’s more outgoing and enjoys the forum chats. (The author name doesn’t have to be the same as the users, but that’s the way we planned it. Even so, if we did it again she would use Sherylyn.)

The book we put up was Potion, only on the forum we called it Not So Simple After All. Potion has always been a working title. We’re trying out Not So Simple, but we’re still not sure it’s the final title.

Sherylyn has spent considerable time on the forums and reading other people’s novels. She probably won’t be able to do it for much longer, but for the moment she has been doing a lot of work. It has been a really interesting marketing exercise. I recommend that everyone try it, just to see how much difference it makes by having a visible (and non-negative) presence makes.

One thing the commenters on Nathan Bransford’s blog said about the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award was that they met a lot of really nice people. Other writers like themselves. It’s the same with Authonomy. There are a lot of really nice people out there, and they all have the same interest as you. They’re all writing novels. How good is that?

The feedback we have got to date on Potion (Not So Simple After All) has been fantastic. We have learned so much about where the problems are in the first few chapters. People have said the same sorts of things—in general—too many characters, certain spots are confusing, and so on. Not only have people said what doesn’t work for them, they have also offered suggestions as to how we might fix the problems.

In fact, it’s been so good we’re going to put Barrain up too. Just to see how we can improve it.

When I was a child what I knew of elves came from English books written for children—these tiny little creatures with green tunics and peaked green hats who sat under red and white toadstools and sewed. I was never sure what they were sewing. As a young child I adored these little creatures, but I got older and left all the ‘fairy’ stuff behind me. Elves were for kids.

I’m not sure where these images came from, because elves have been around in folklore for hundreds of years. In most tales they are human-sized and human-like, with some powers. It took Tolkien to breathe life back into the old-style elf with The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Suddenly elves were fashionable, and Tolkien’s depiction of elves as more beautiful and longer-living than humans was the accepted elf-standard —or stereotype, as many people now say.

I loved these elves. Give me a stunningly beautiful elf with power and talent, and have him/her struggle with some truly human emotions like friendship and moral right, and I’m hooked. If I thought I could get away with it I’d write a lot more elf stories myself.

But anything that’s fashionable eventually goes out of fashion. Elves are out.

If you’ve even got a whiff of an elf in your story, then your story is doomed. Or so popular opinion has it. They’re old hat. No-one wants to read about them any more. But … but. I want to read about them. Am I the only person in the world who wants to?

I don’t think so, no.

But they’re stereotyped. They’re always beautiful. They’re always haughty. They’re always arrogant.

So. Tolkien’s definition of Elves is what we have come to know and expect. It is what we, the writers, bring to our books that makes our elves special. And it’s not the fact that they’re elves, per se, that makes the stereotype, it’s how we round out, or don’t round out, the characters to make them complex, multi-dimensional people.

I don’t mind starting with the stereotype. I’ll read a book about a long-lived elf who considers his race slightly superior to humans as much as I’ll read a book about a stiff-upper-lip Englishman, or a post-traumatic stress disorder war veteran, or a hairdresser who minces around the salon and talks in a high voice. (Incidentally, I have a hairdresser like this. He’s got an elegant, graphic artist wife whom he absolutely adores and they have a two-year old son called Benji he can talk about for hours.)

All I care about is where the author takes it from there and how they make the character someone I care about.

The mincing hairdresser and the stiff-upper-lip Englishman have gone the way of elves. Out of fashion. The ptsd veteran will go the same way. It’s fashion.

Fashions come and fashions go, but they usually come around again.

I want more books about elves. Maybe I’ll just have to wait until the next generation of readers comes up. The ones who haven’t read about elves before (because they were unfashionable and they were too busy reading about their own fashionable creatures—vampires and werewolves) and look on them as something new.

Maybe, because they’re so out right now I should start writing a novel about elves. It takes a long time to create a book. By the time I’m up to the fifth draft elves might be fashionable again.

I’ve got lots of ideas.

In Defence of Elves, part 1.