Here’s another episode of my youtube channel!
You are wrong about everything and so am I! This episode is much less about fiction and much more on human psychology. Why are we wrong? Why do we want to be right? How can we cope with the vast incomprehensibility of the universe? And why are political parties SUCH A JOKE?
My podcast just released another episode! This was about war and revolution, so I had fun, of course!
In today’s episode, we talk about war and REVOLUTION!!!!!!!! Good reasons wars happen, bad reasons, and a complex tale of some humans, some dwarves, two dragons, a whole lotta gold and a whole lotta death.
Backup link: https://soundcloud.com/4seasonsofepicfantasy/s3-ep1-war-and-revolution
In this episode, we start out talking about food as a key element of fantasy and scifi, then delve into genetic manipulation and cannibalism. So… it’s gonna be a crazy ride! Welcome to crazy town.
Backup Link: https://soundcloud.com/4seasonsofepicfantasy/sn2-ep5-food-and-genetic-manipulation
My Podcast did another episode! 😀
In this episode, we discuss using music as inspiration while writing. And when not to! Joined again by the fabulous David. Check him out at @crestsphinx (twitter) and his comic club podcast at comictradesmonthly.libsyn.com/
Backup Link: https://soundcloud.com/4seasonsofepicfantasy/sn2-ep4-music-as-writing-inspiration
I made another video up on youtube! 😀
Sometimes, the movie is better than the book! Often, it has nothing to do with how “faithfully” they adapted the source material. It more often has to do with just solid screenwriting principles.
In this episode, I talk about spoilers as a concept. Do they really ruin the experience? Most of the time…YES.
https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=psycuht
Gilmore Girls
Wheel of Time
Merlin BBC
Ender’s Shadow
Mythology by MusicbyAden https://soundcloud.com/musicbyaden
Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0
Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/_mythology
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/e48pGUx_cxU
This story beautifully captured two things for me: depression and dissatisfaction with the futility of life.
The main character, Quentin Coldwater, lives a lifestyle that he thinks will make him happy, but doesn’t. Drugs and sleeping around don’t bring him fulfillment, they only make him more miserable. One scene perfectly encapsulates this realization that his lifestyle is worsening his depression, and it is hurting those he loves.
The book also communicates just how HARD magic can be. I mean, every spell requires a set of hand symbols which are so complex, your hands ache after practicing them. Then, every spell must be modified according to the “circumstances”, ways that you must tweak your spells due to nearby factors. The nearest body of water, the political affiliation of the people nearby, the time of year, the location of the moon, whether your bladder is full (the last was a joke… almost), etc. There are literally books and books filled with tables and charts describing all of these.
Magic isn’t much explained, since you basically need a genius-level intellect to comprehend it at all (which is why the magical college only recruits people with such intellect as potential students). But Lev Grossman doesn’t use magic to solve crazy plot problems (and if he does, he quite efficiently explains THAT part of the magic). In fact, magic, or the ability to do almost whatever you want, causes problems in the protagonist’s sense of purpose. He can get almost whatever he wants, therefore he is depressed and feels like life has no point. The plot issues must be solved through different means.
People talk about hard-magic (rule-based) and soft-magic (mysterious). Other novelists use educating the reader about the rules as a way to solve plot problems, and I LOVE novels like that. But Lev Grossman doesn’t do this. As I said above, being able to do anything with magic, even though it’s really hard, does not solve the emotional and relationship issues of the main characters.
If you don’t mind f-bombs and a moderate amount of sexuality (he doesn’t go into pornographic detail, but these ARE promiscuous twenty-somethings), then I DEFINITELY recommend this book. It touches my own inner pains in a way that no other novel quite has. The part that suffers from anxiety and depression. And, most important of all, it gives HOPE for the future. Despite the truth of these sorrows, he gives you HOPE as a truth to top it all.
-Thomas Fawkes
p.s. It’s also a TV show on Sci-fi. I’ve watched part of the first season. It’s pretty good! More rushed, and they also add more events and change things. It’s different from the book, just know that and perhaps you’ll enjoy it too. 🙂
2 words: MAGE GUNS
Stranger of Tempest is an epic fantasy with a heavy dose of… modernish warfare? (due to guns). The mage-guns use element-based ammo forged by mages, who have been coerced into service by various religious military orders (think Knights Templars or other crusade-era religious armies).
The protagonist, a middle-aged war veteran, is a skilled sharpshooter. He was also on the wrong side of the war and was imprisoned when he called out his own army’s cruelty. Apart from a small handful of flashbacks, he is NOT in prison during this book, and I won’t reveal too many details of his past. I will say that one fascinating thing about him is his obsession with reading. Since he can only keep what he can carry, he always keeps one book. And once he’s read it, he sells it and buys another. An incredibly human trait in a person you might expect to be hardened.
The story follows Lynx (the veteran), Sitain (a mage he rescues from a militant order), and the mercenary crew known as “the Cards.” They’re on the run from the militant order that wanted to kidnap Sitain. Their chase leads them through a city, tunnels inhabited by a 3-gendered 4-armed race, and ancient ruins full of unholy terrors. It leans much farther toward adventurous than horrific, and YES, the terrifying behemoth on the cover does make an EPIC appearance.
Also, just look at that cover. There’s something psychologically stimulating about the man’s posture (it’s similar to Wanderer above the Sea of Fog which, in turn, inspired many movie posters).
Overall, a fine read. Some parts got a little too much on the sexual detail, and if you’re not paying attention the time jumping can get disorienting, but the balance between action, adventure, and especially empathy for these characters make it very much worth the read!
Booyah!
-Thomas Fawkes
Warbreaker is a wonderful stand-alone epic fantasy.
There are 4 main POV’s, two sister princesses (one refined, one irreverent), a god returned from the dead, and a mysterious vagabond with a talking sword and a mysterious agenda.
Brandon Sanderson does an excellent job building out his characters, who all sound unique and have their own strengths. Often, writers (mostly male) want to imply that “strong female characters” are well-written female characters, but often they just come across as “tough-as-nails, no-nonsense, butt-kicking female character.” (I also hate when male characters are written as 2-dimensional butt-kickers with little variance. Too much emphasize on the physical aspects of “strong.”)
V.E. Schwab (https://twitter.com/veschwab/) a female fantasy author, was asked in a panel “How do you write strong female characters?” She explained about how first, she hates that people ask her that question. “Do you ask how men write strong male characters?” and also how it’s not some magic mumbo-jumbo, just treat them like PEOPLE. Like fully-fleshed out human beings (not objects or plot devices, that should be obvious). She said “I treat all my characters as people. End of story.”
Sanderson does that here. The sisters and the god returned from the dead are not warriors. The sisters have very different strengths (emotional understanding, drive, talent for magic, a keen eye for detail), and they are placed in situations which at first seem opposite to their ability, but after some struggle and growth it turns out that their strengths are PERFECT for where they were put.
The last POV character, the mysterious vagabond with the talking sword, gets the fewest number of POV’s. He keeps you guessing about who he is and what he wants.
Sanderson masterfully executes a few paradigm shifts throughout the course of the novel. Characters question their faith, see things in a new light, and learn that nothing is as it seems.
I’ve talked at a very high level, which is mostly what I intend to do. The simplest way to describe it is that a princess is sent off to marry the God-king in order to maintain peace, and her sister goes to rescue her. While in the background bigger forces are at worth that threaten all kingdoms.
Great character development, great dialogue, great action. I recommend!
Quick note on employment…
It has been FAR too long since I posted on this blog! Granted, my contract ran out at my last job, and I was quite frantically searching for a new place of employment. After 2 agonizing weeks of unemployment (hint: I’m being sarcastic), I found a new position!
I now work for a company called Thomas Arts (no, I don’t own it) as a User Experience and Information Architect. Dang I love the work I do. I love researching, analyzing, mapping out, and improving the emotional experience a user/customer goes through. Even now, my position is kind of new, and figuring out how I fit into a marketing agency (vs. just a software or product developing company) has been a challenge. I’ve been moved from the digital team over to Strategy, which has been great.
Last year was actually a pretty decent year for writing, job search/new job drama considered. I finished editing ROBBING GODS and TWO MASTERS. Something I had intended to do in 2016. They both turned out wonderfully! I am now doing a final revision on both with some things I’ve learned from The Emotional Craft of Fiction. More about that below.
Near the end of last year (November) I officially started out on the first draft of a novel called THE BALANCE BETWEEN. I finished February 2nd 2018 at 140k words. The fastest I’ve ever written (I had 2k-5k days). It’s a story I’ve been brainstorming for years. It’s about a fallen star god who has to overcome his addictions to stop his cosmic grandmother from consuming the universe:
People with the lifecycles of stars. A galaxy of a hundred flat worlds connected by portals. And magic space-monks. Part of the inspiration of this story was watching Star Wars, where George Lucas totally missed the mark on Buddhism, and thinking: “I can do magic Buddhist space monks better!” I undertook a deep study of philosophy, religion, and physics starting with quantum field theory and going all the way astrophysics and turned it all into a unified magic system. Meditation, balance, and surrender are important aspects to using this magic system. It also gave me the roots for EVERY magic system I’ve ever written. This one can describe them all, almost like code. I even drew this cool chart (spent WAY too much time on it of course), with a little inspiration from Sanderson:
Last year I also discovered THE EMOTIONAL CRAFT OF FICTION. This is the single greatest book on writing fiction I’ve ever read. It’s written by Donald Maass, a fantastic literary agent. I’ve also read 21ST CENTURY FICTION (which is amazing) and several other of his writing books. But THE EMOTIONAL CRAFT OF FICTION takes the cake.
Why?
It teaches you what types of writing, what types of characters, and what types of plot turns have an ACTUAL emotional impact on your readers. Each chapter has a list of questions, and I went through many of them while outlining THE BALANCE BETWEEN, and now I’m going through all of them as I edit.
This book is one of the reasons I wrote THE BALANCE BETWEEN so quickly. It challenges you to reach inside yourself and find that which affects YOU the most. Because if you are passionate about it, then your readers will feel that. They might not agree, but they’ll feel it.
Some examples of questions:
To oversimplify, much of his book has to do with making the contrasts starker. Instead of someone’s arc being: “protagonist doesn’t think much at all about others” to “helps somebody once”. Make it so that she is EXTREMELY selfish, and the end state is like SACRIFICES herself. Take the elements of your story and PULL them to the extremes. One character forgives another? Make it both HARDER to forgive, and MORE IMPORTANT that they do forgive. The more impossible/more important you make something seem, the more emotionally powerful it will be when it finally happens.
His other book, 21ST CENTURY FICTION, tells you to do this:
So, THE BALANCE BETWEEN has those things. The deaths of loved ones and innocents. The struggles of addiction. Feelings of abandonment from family. The feeling of failing everyone you love. But it also has redemption, recovery, forgiveness, the promise that all the suffering in this life will pale in comparison to the healing in the life to come.
This year, I’ve been attending MANY Utah writing conferences, learning more, making contacts. Today I’m going to meet with some Epic Fantasy writers I met at a conference to try to make a writer’s group. I’ve been submitting a LOT more. I’m going through the BALANCE BETWEEN and revise with the Emotional Craft chapter questions. I plan on making a few edits to the endings of ROBBING GODS and TWO MASTERS. It feels great to be alive.
I’m working on my pitches and all of my submission materials. I’ve got to learn to be able to pitch on a dime, in person. Be excited! Those are my big emphasis’s this year. I hope it works out!
I’ve also gotten MUCH more involved on Twitter, not necessarily to get more followers, but really just to be more involved. One of the most important things I learned was at LTUE when one panelist said “You have to get 20k Twitter followers and network up the wazoo before publishers will even look at you!” and Myke Cole said he disagreed, he said “I spent a lot of time to network through SFFWA, made a great connection with an editor, and the first few books I sent him he said were terrible. My friend, who had been writing novels this whole time, honing his craft, got his book accepted by this same editor when I introduced them. The most important thing is to hone your craft. If you don’t have that, you don’t have anything.” (Not an exact quote, but you get the gist). I told him afterward I appreciated his comment. I even read one of his books! (He has like, 6-7 published works now). Will be writing a review on that too.
I’ve paid for Superstars Writing Seminars, in Colorado. Which will happen February 2019. High profile writers, agents, and editors will be teaching classes. And it ain’t a cheap conference (650$, even with a referral discount!), but it’s time I took my writing career to the next level. I’ve written 7 novels, it’s about time I start pitching and networking more. Donald Maass will even be there! I hope for the chance to pitch to him in person! He reps Brent Weeks, one of my favorite authors.
Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep honing your craft. Keep submitting.
Booyah!
-Thomas Fawkes
Thomas Fawkes 