Call of the Creator: Fantasy Writing from a Christian Worldview

"Supposed to" is a terrible phrase in the world of creativity. I find myself wrestling with it all the time when I write. We're "supposed to" show, not tell. We're "supposed to" stay away from adverbs. We're "supposed to" make sure something significant wrenches "life as usual" from beneath the protagonist at the end of act I. Who knew so few words could exert so much pressure on a writer? Currently, I'm working on the sequel to Curse Bearer , a book I'm tentatively calling A Voice Within . Whether that name will stick through the completion of the book, who knows...since I've taken what the book was in rough draft form and demolished it, and am now fairly certain I will only retain the vaguest plot markers from the original. But I'm wrestling currently with the big "supposed to" of character development: The main character is "supposed to" undergo a paradigm-shifting change of attitud...

OK, so maybe "revelation" is a bit of a strong word. More of a "huh" would probably be accurate. Anyway, I was looking at the  Publisher's Weekly blog post  that Marcher Lord Press shared, where PW gave a little press to Kerry Nietz's new release Amish Vampires in Space . Now, I'm glad for any press Kerry is getting--it can only help his visibility, and even if people are mocking (which PW wasn't) it generates traffic. Good for him! The PW article was talking about genre mashups and how authors seem to be unabashedly having fun with them. I can support writing for fun. It's generally what I do. The other three books in the PW article included romance as one of their genres pulled into the mix, and in the midst of my moment of mirth over the ridiculousness of making a character a werecuttlefish (like werewolf, but yes, shapeshifting to a fish) I had that "huh" moment. The three covers in the  article  (yeah, you should probably ...