Call of the Creator: Fantasy Writing from a Christian Worldview

When I started my journey toward publication just a couple of years ago (and I mean barely started--at that point I had a manuscript that was in such sorry shape that you would never know it was the embryonic phase of the novel I'm now sending queries about) I started poking my nose around the idea of the e-book. Just two short years ago, the overriding opinion was that e-books sat in a tiny niche that made it so you couldn't lose the user's manual to a piece of electronic equipment, and that the publishing industry didn't see the e-book ever growing into a mainstream means of publication. Fast forward to 2010, and statistics show us that books sold in electronic formats have seen a 233% surge in sales over the past year. We've got the Kindle, the Nook, Sony's reader, and of course the iPad (which, by the way...the iPad's sales at its launch apparently dwarfed the launch of iPhone, and if you've been awake for even a few minutes over the past five years...

It's always a happy day when book-sized packages arrive on my doorstep. Granted, this does not happen with great regularity around here, but when it does, you can count on my being buried in whatever I've bought until I've turned the last page. Part of this latest shipment of books to my home included Jill Williamson's second installment to her Blood of Kings Series: To Darkness Fled. If you heft the book and its nearly 700 pages, don't let its length daunt you. It moves at a brisk pace...brisk enough that even this homeschooling mom who's trying to write her own serial as well as edit a novel (or two) managed to down the book over the course of a long weekend. To Darkness Fled continues the story of Vrell Sparrow, Achan Cham and their companions as they flee the usurper Esek. Both Vrell and Achan have their turns telling the tale from their point of view, which I think the author handles well. It took me a while to shake the cobwebs out of my cluttered brain a...

As everyone who suffers through my continual yammering about the progress on my novel, The Sword of the Patron , already knows, my book is currently sitting on the desk of the second agent I've queried about it. The wait for a response from the first agent wasn't so bad, but I credit that to the fact that for the 5 weeks it took the response to come, I was insanely busy, so I didn't have time to hover over my email like a hungry seagull at a picnic on the beach. This time, life is relatively calm, and I'm finding the wait much harder to endure. I'm questioning everything. Should I really have gone the route of querying agents on my first-ever novel? Or should I have gone with smaller presses, waiting until I have a book in print with decent sales numbers before I bother the big guys? Or am I deluded that it would be any easier to get through the gate of a small press than it is to catch the attention of an agent? Should I have entered some contests, like ACFW's ...

I admit, I don't read as much fiction as I would like. Not at all. So, that helps explain why it is I am just starting in on my discovery of Karen Hancock's work. One would think, as an aspiring female Christian Fantasy author, that Hancock would have been one of the author's I'd have tracked with all along. Well, finally, thanks to inter-library loan, I have finally begun her Legends of the Guardian King series, having just finished The Light of Eidon . I won't give a synopsis here, but here's a link: http://www.kmhancock.com/Eidon.htm in case you want to research on you're own. My reaction? World: Ms. Hancock created a convincing world with enough detail that I could visualize the locales in which she placed the characters, as well as the local inhabitants of those places. She took the time to create the macro-scale relationships between cultures and governments as well as to get down to the micro level so much as to mention the peculiarities of local cui...

When people are geniuses, they get leeway the rest of us don't. But what are we, as writers, allowed to do with the precedent these geniuses set? My current train of thought comes up over a single word I am debating over using (or not.) People like Shakespeare coined words all the time, words that have worked their way into our everyday speech. After all, according to Michael Macrone's Brush Up Your Shakespeare , the Oxford English Dictionary credits Shakespeare as the first to use these words, among others: "arch-villain," "bedazzle," "cheap" (as in vulgar or flimsy), "dauntless," "embrace" (as a noun), "fashionable," "go-between," "honey-tongued," "inauspicious," "lustrous," "nimble-footed," "outbreak," "pander," "sanctimonious," "time-honored," "unearthly," "vulnerable," and "well-bred." Now, if I...

Fantasy often presents the reader with not just fictitious cultures, but diverse races of creatures that all share the blessing of sentience. What is an author to do with this situation when it comes to deciding what these races believe about their origins and their eternal destination? Secular fantasy doesn't have any obligation to wrestle with this question, but I believe that fantasy that has a Christian sensibility at its core cannot overlook this conundrum. Biblically, we are told that God created man in His image, giving man a component that will live on forever, and differentiating man from all the rest of His creation with this eternal part of his being. So, what happens when a world has not only men, but elves, dwarves, gnomes, dragons, centaurs, and myriad other thinking creatures? (In reference to this question, I really ought to read Summa Elvetica by Theodore Beale, but in the absence of any insight from that book, I'll just have to ruminate on my own.) Does the C...

Hello friends and readers! Just wanted to blip a short message here to let you know that the February issue of Digital Dragon Magazine has hit the web. If you head over to www.digitaldragonmagazine.net, you'll find my ongoing serial, "The Windrider" in its seventh installment. The plot is getting thicker (or at least I hope you'll think so.) If you do get a chance to head over there, I wonder what you think about the format changes for the e-zine. They are publishing to a downloadable PDF in addition to their online format. What do you think of that? How's the readability? They are making a lot of other changes there as they ramp up to launch Diminished Media, which will handle print publications as well. For reasons I cannot yet disclose, I am watching carefully how the transition goes. Things could get pretty exciting for those writers tied into Diminished Media's offerings, should all go well. Also, if you do give the story(ies) a read, I'd love to he...