Fantasy Firsts Guest Post - Tor/Forge Blog

Interview with K. Arsenault Rivera, Author of The Tiger’s Daughter

September 28, 2017May 16, 2024torforge

opens in a new windowWelcome back to Fantasy Firsts. Today we’re featuring an interview with K. Arsenault Rivera on language barriers, outsider heroes, and why epic fantasy loves prophecies so much. Her first novel, opens in a new windowThe Tiger’s Daughter, is the story of a pair of exceptional women who are destined to face the evil forces rising out of myth. Read the first chapter here!

The frame narrative of The Tiger’s Daughter involves an epistolary unfurling leading to the main conflict. Does the format of handwritten letters hold any particular significance to you?

There’s just something so Romantic about long letters! I read a lot of Victorian lit in the year or two before I wrote The Tiger’s Daughter, and I think the most obvious bleed through is in the epistolary structure. Letter-writing in those novels was always something swoon-worthy and grand, and I wanted to capture that feeling between Shefali and Shizuka—especially given how shy Shefali normally is. The letter allows us to really see into her head, and to see Shizuka through her eyes.

How does the native language barrier and learned exchange between Shefali and Shizuka reflect their characterization? What made you decide to go that route, from a plot-based angle? Did it pose a particular challenge concerning plot structure or did it act as a guide?

Shefali’s inability to read Hokkaran reflects how she feels about Hokkaro as a whole: she understands what they’re saying but not how or why they’re saying it. That she spends so much time within the Empire proper is only for Shizuka’s sake; it’s not a place that will ever fully accept her. In a way, Shefali’s known that since she figured out she’d never be able to read Hokkaran.

Shizuka, on the other hand, has great talent with calligraphy from a very young age. She learns the simple Qorin letters easily enough but never bothers to learn the language itself. Of course, learning to speak the language would mean floundering in front of native speakers and opening herself up to mockery—so it’s not something that interests her. I don’t think that’s a conscious thought she has, but it’s there all the same. Actually trying at things is as foreign to her as the Qorin—but if she bothered, she might find a warmer welcome than she thinks.

Another important point is that most people in the Empire at least understand Hokkaran even if they can’t speak it, whereas Hokkarans only bother learning their own language. Sort of like how English is the presumed language of the Western world, but English speakers get uppity when wandering into a neighborhood that doesn’t cater to them.

Though O Shizuka and Shefali (and their mothers) are incredibly close, both are outsiders within their respective communities–communities that also happen to be at odds with each other. How does that dichotomy resonate with you?

I think that when you’re writing a hero, most of the time they’re an outcast in one way or another. Heroes are (usually, but not always) exceptional people, after all.

For me the interesting contrast is between the girls and their mothers in this regard: Burqila and O-Shizuru both made the conscious decision to break with their communities. Burqila murdered her own brothers to seize power and strike back at the Hokkarans; O-Shizuru decided to put her prized bloodline to use as a pleasure house guard. Both women eventually settle into mundane lives, and both women want the same for their girls.

But the girls didn’t get to make those choices. O-Shizuka is born into a life of politics and caution when she really wants to do is duel people all day and spoon Shefali all night. Shefali’s got to rule the Qorin some day, and she doesn’t seem to care about that as much as she probably should. By breaking with tradition, Burqila and O-Shizuru provided their daughters with much more stable, safe lives, and yet neither daughter wants to take advantage.

What was the process of creating these incredibly complex and strong relationships while integrating the cultural and societal conflict the characters go through as individuals?

The characters of The Tiger’s Daughter came before the setting. I always knew that Shizuka would be a headstrong firebrand, and I always knew that Shefali was her much quieter counterpart. While pantsing my way through the first draft of the novel I kept the characters at the forefront and let them react to the world around them. Shefali can’t quite make sense of Hokkaran society—and so she cannot read the language. Shizuru lived a violent life, and so she wants the opposite for her daughter, no matter what Shizuka actually wants for herself. Burqila married Oshiro Yuichi as part of a peace treaty—so of course she doesn’t care much for her Hokkaran raised son.

There seems to be a great emphasis on destiny, a predetermination of belonging to a certain path or person. I’m curious about your feelings on the permanence or self-fulfilling nature of prophecies.

Every fantasy fan loves a good prophecy, and I’m no exception to this. They’re a lot like magic tricks, I think, in that you know what’s coming but still get that tingly sense of awe when the inevitable occurs. Like a good magic trick, though, it’s all in the delivery and the execution.

Let’s talk weapons. O Shizuka’s, the duelist, weapon of choice is a sword. Shefali’s a bow and arrow. In what ways do these weapons reflect each characters personalities?

Shizuka is as brash and overconfident as she is actually talented. Her decision to use a sword in a world where, for safety’s sake, most people use polearms or bows and arrows, reflects that. She doesn’t mind getting in close because she doesn’t really believe she’ll be hurt. And of course there’s the family history aspect of it. Shizuka is, again, a product of old Hokkaro—and she’s using a weapon from a time that isn’t quite relevant anymore. Who wants to duel when there’s demons coming through the northern border?

That ties into Shefali’s bow and arrow well. She made it herself, as her mother and family made their bows themselves. To the Qorin a bow and arrow are more than a weapon—they’re important tools on the harsh steppes, and more important now that food is getting harder to come by. Shefali uses a bow because she has always used a bow—and because she knows it’d be foolish to attack a demon head on. (Not that her good sense stops her whenever Shizuka needs rescuing).

What are your writing rituals/how do you set out to write? Any procrastination tips?

Full-screen is your friend! It’s so much easier to tab over to Discord or Chrome when you can see them blinking on your taskbar. I mean, even full-screened, you can always hit alt-tab—but I find that out of sight is out of mind when it comes to distractions.

Curated playlists also help a lot (my best friend Rena is kind of a playlist god). Certain songs just make me want to write now when I hear them, even if they’re not on the playlist itself.

Persistence and discipline are the most important things. You don’t have to write every day if that doesn’t suit your needs, but I think you should have a plan for when you’re going to write at least.

Shefali’s culture prides themselves on their connections with nature and particularly their alliances with their steeds. If you could pick an animal to go into battle with, would you choose horses or eagles?

I’d choose an eagle. No one wants to ride a horse through NYC traffic, and eagles are just much cooler as mounts, even if heights terrify me a little. We’ve all got to overcome our fears somehow, right? Knowing my history with my tabletop mounts, though, I’d completely forget I even owned an eagle within a week.

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Follow K. Arsenault Rivera on opens in a new windowTwitter and on opens in a new windowher website.

Author Features / Fantasy Firsts

How many syllables was that again, or, “Can I buy a vowel?”

September 20, 2017October 26, 2017torforge

opens in a new windowWelcome back to opens in a new windowFantasy Firsts. Our program continues with a guest post on the difficulty of names (and names, and names) in a fantasy novel like Crown of Vengeance. opens in a new windowBlade of Empire, the next book in the Dragon Prophecy trilogy, will be available October 24th.

Written by Melissa Ann Singer, Senior Editor

At this point, Mercedes Lackey, James Mallory, and I have worked on seven books together. They’ve all been fascinating and fun but there were a couple of times on this last book, Crown of Vengeance, where I thought my head was going to explode.

Because of spelling.

The world that Lackey and Mallory have created is populated by many wonderful creatures . . . and a whole lot of elves. Not the “Shoemaker and the Elves” kind—the tall, beautiful, magical, warrior/artist kind. And they (and the places they live, and their horses) all have names. Long names. Multi-syllable names. Names that go on and on and on (Galathornthadan, Runacarendalur, Peldalathiriel, Aralhathumindrion) . . . .

As I was working on the final edits, I began to worry about the copyeditor who was going to have to cope with all those names—and would not have the advantage I’d had of reading the book several times. So I decided to put together a style sheet—a list of character names, place names, frequently-used words in Elvish, a list of the “books” mentioned in the novel, etc. And I decided to annotate that list a little bit so that the writers and I could use it as quick reference to make sure we had all the family connections right . . . and, as war and battle became the order of the day, to keep track of who died, and when, and where, and how.

Making up that style sheet just about drove me around the bend! But it was a useful thing. Because in a book of this size—Crown of Vengeance is around 200,000 words long (and all of them entertaining, even “a” and “of” and “the”)—a character might appear in chapter four and then not be seen again until chapter ten, and sometimes there was a slight change in the spelling of the character’s name between the two scenes . . . at one point, a married couple swapped names . . . and once or twice, the name of a character or a location added or dropped a syllable or two along the way . . . .

Emails flew as we worked out what was correct, because Elvish has rules about how things are spelled and what certain suffixes and prefixes indicate, so it wasn’t like we flipped a coin and said, “this should be an ‘a,’ not an ‘e’.”

I wound up with three separate style sheets. One for elves, demons, and horses (there are 16 named horses in the book), one for locations of various kinds (countries, places of worship, forests), and one for things like military ranks, job titles, noble ranks, numbers, and the names of months. About 16 pages in all.

Turned it all over to production and heaved a sigh of relief that I would no longer have to remember the difference between Denarcheliel and Dendinirchiel, or where the “u” belonged in Hamphuliadiel.

And then, weeks later, there was . . .

The Map.

A lovely map, created by Jon Lansberg, showing many of the countries and places through which the High King’s army travels as it attempts to conquer the world. And when I looked at it for the very first time, a tiny voice in the back of my mind said, “Isn’t that spelled Jaeglenhend, not Jaeglenheld?”

I can’t wait for book two . . . .

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Find Mercedes Lackey on Twitter at @mercedeslackey, Facebook, and on her website. Find James Mallory on his website and blog.

(This is a rerun of a post that originally ran on November 12, 2012.)

Author Features / Fantasy Firsts

Cat Waxing 101

September 13, 2017October 3, 2017torforge

opens in a new windowWelcome back to opens in a new windowFantasy Firsts. Our program continues with a guest post from Elizabeth Bear, author of the Eternal Sky series beginning with opens in a new windowRange of Ghosts (and many other works of fantasy and science fiction), about the esoteric practices that make a successful writer. A new book set in the world of the Eternal Sky series, The Stone in the Skull, will be available October 10th.

By Elizabeth Bear

Over the years, I have written a great many articles and blog posts dealing with the nuances of the publishing industry, but there’s one topic I’ve never touched on before.

It’s one of the arcane secrets of the successful writer, jealously guarded. One of the secret handshakes of the clubhouse of publishing success.

Only now, with the cooperation of Tor, can I reveal it to you—and I’m risking my career and perhaps even my very safety to do so. It’s something every writer needs to know, and from time immemorial that secret has been passed down in back rooms and at two a.m. sessions in convention bars.

I speak of “How to wax a cat.”

I can’t count, over the years, the number of times a dewy-eyed young would-be author has looked at me in surprise and horror after overhearing a few casual lines passed between more established writers. “Bear!” they cry. “You are an animal lover! Why would you do something so terribly cruel?”

Well, Grasshoppers, I am here now to reveal a great secret. The cat is a metaphor.

Cat-waxing (also known as cat vacuuming to some) is something writers undertake in order to complete important research, to give the brain the time it needs to do the subconscious processing so essential to creative work. There are a number of techniques, but here’s how I handle it.

First, you must determine if you wish to wax your cat for shininess, or for smoothness. Both have advantages—reducing allergens, waterproofing—but if you are going to wax your cat for smoothness I recommend sedating it first—for the comfort of the cat, and the safety of the human.

In either case, before you commence waxing, you must first create a clean and dust-free environment in which to wax. Dust will adhere readily to a freshly waxed cat, and then you’ll just have to start all over again. To create a proper waxing environment, select a space that you can completely control, clean it thoroughly, and drape it in plastic sheeting. You’ll want to wear a freshly laundered white-cotton full-body coverall or perhaps a Nuclear-Biological-Chemical suit as well, to avoid getting fibers from your clothes stuck in the cat wax.

The television show Dexter provides an excellent model of the sort of environment that’s best.

Having prepared your waxing chamber, it’s important to secure a good wax. There are several dedicated brands of cat wax which do an excellent job, and a number of writers use non-proprietary waxes, such as Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax (despite the name, intended for surfboards) or Homer Formby’s furniture wax. You will likely wish to experiment with a variety of waxes before making your final selection.

Once you have secured the cat, the space, the sedative, and the wax, you will also require a source of warm water and some dust-free cloths. First, grasp your cat gently but firmly by the scruff…

…oh, I see we’re out of time.

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Find Elizabeth Bear on Twitter at opens in a new window@matociquala, on opens in a new windowFacebook, and on opens in a new windowher Patreon.

(This is a rerun of a post that originally ran on March 5, 2012.)

Author Features / Fantasy Firsts

Who are the American Craftsmen?

August 23, 2017September 15, 2017torforge

opens in a new windowWelcome back to opens in a new windowFantasy Firsts. Our program continues with a guest post from Tom Doyle about the crypto-historical past behind the heroes of American Craftsmen. The final book in the alternate-history series, opens in a new windowWar and Craft, will be available September 26th.

Written by opens in a new windowTom Doyle

In my new contemporary fantasy novel, American Craftsmen, a craftsman or craftswoman is a soldier or spy magician, usually descended from a family of such practitioners. Though my thriller plot doesn’t assume any particular literary or historical knowledge, I hope you’ll enjoy finding some Easter eggs of this nation’s past in this thoroughly modern story. One of the reasons I wrote it is that too often when we search for an interesting angle on the fantastic, we neglect the weird mythos waiting for us in our own backyard.

The magical rules of my special ops world are partially drawn from early American fiction, which, let’s face it, is awfully creepy. The founders of our independent fictional canon aren’t known for stage comedies filled with wordplay or for novels centered on the marriage plot. Nor did they master the simple pragmatic optimism that on the surface seemed to be the national zeitgeist. Rather, in tales filled with occult obsessions and morbid fascinations, writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne explored the shadowy underside of the New World’s psyche.

For my novel, I’ve imagined that these authors had written thinly veiled fictional accounts which, woven together, formed a cryptohistorical backstory. The family of my main protagonist, Captain Dale Morton, is full of homages to writers and stories from America’s past. I’ve modeled two of Dale’s evil, inbred ancestorson the twins from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” With a power inspired by Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the atheistic Dale can see the sins of others as glowing letters radiating from their bodies.

I created other abilities for my soldier-mages based on uncanny occurrences in military history. The primary power of the Mortons, the thing that makes Dale the most valuable solider-mage in the world, is the ability to change the local weather, for better or worse. Early in American Craftsmen, Dale uses this power to pursue a hostile sorcerer through a sandstorm. This magic was inspired by the number of times that weather completely altered the outcome of American battles. For instance, bad weather saved George Washington’s army at Brooklyn Heights, while an improvement in otherwise terrible weather allowed for the success of the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

But the most dangerous and readily available power that a craftsman has is over his opponent’s mind. I drew this power from those instances in war where confusion scatters an army or, as in the killing of Stonewall Jackson, causes death by friendly fire. My present-day craftspeople carry precautions against such psychic warfare, but these don’t save Dale Morton from an opponent’s curse, a curse that will by twists and turns lead him to the demonic horrors corrupting the heart of American magic.

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Find Tom Doyle on Twitter at opens in a new window@tmdoyle2, on opens in a new windowFacebook, and on his blog.

(This is a rerun of a post that originally ran on May 5th, 2014.)

Author Features / Fantasy Firsts

The Narrative Ape

August 7, 2017May 13, 2024torforge4 Comments

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opens in a new windowWritten by opens in a new windowCurtis Craddock

I am.

It’s the shortest story in the English language. It’s really the root of all stories and, by extension, the act of being human.

Biologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists like to argue about what makes humans people. How did we progress from planting crops to build cities, go to the moon, and build smartphones?

I put my money on storytelling.

A lot of biology underpins storytelling. There’s the evolution of the tongue and the palate. The adaptation of the brain and the developing capacity for language. But humans aren’t the only creatures to communicate with sound and symbol. Bees apparently do a bit of geometry in their hive dances, and whales have dialects of calls.

Yet even these sophisticated methods of communication lack the essential element of a constructed reality, the understanding that something can be true without being real. Ask anyone who has ever read the Lord of the Rings who Frodo is, and they will be able to describe him and his adventures in some detail, and will have opinions on whether his actions were good or bad, reasonable or not. At the same time the reader aware that the story is constructed purely from imagination and not a factual accounting of anything in the ordinary world. Even animals that are known to lie such as chimps and gorillas don’t seem to construct a persistent fictional narrative.

Thus while humans may not be the only ones with at least a rudiment of language, we do seem to be the only ones to tell stories, to communicate about things that never happened and never will, to dislocate ourselves in space and time, or to picture the world from behind another person’s eyes.

To be sure, the habit of spinning yarns probably developed over an extended period of time. It required the concurrent development of unique cognitive and physiological capacities, so there was no first storyteller in the same way there was no first dog. Humans just messed around with wolves for a few dozen generations, culling the undesirable and breeding the useful, until what had been recognizably a wolf was now recognizably not a wolf without any pup in the progression being a different species than its parents.

At some point, or rather span of points, the human mind expanded into something much larger and deeper, like a fresh water river emptying into the great saline sea. The abstract space of imagination gathered unto itself the greatest share of mental resources, burning precious, hard won calories, it provided us with an inner voice, a personal narrative, explaining the world and the mind’s place in it. Our ability to invent the world rises above the expectations of experience.

Scientists from disciplines as far apart as anthropology and neuroanatomy have speculated that this internal voice may have been perceived as an external intrusion, the voices of spirits or gods.

Regardless of how the source was perceived, humans now had storytellers inside their skulls. Experiences, emotions, and reason were translated into words, and every person became the narrator, however unreliable, of his or her own life.

So why is it so important to have a narrator? What’s the big deal with narration?

Narration is everything.

When I come home at night, after a hard day’s slog, I walk into my house, sit down on my couch, and get mugged by my dogs: two small, furry, lap-seeking missiles.

If you visualized that, it has become part of your story.

But the analysis goes deeper than that. How do I know this is my house? Yes, there’s a record of the purchase in my filing cabinet, but I haven’t looked at it in years. Nor am I merely expressing instinctive territoriality. I didn’t go around with my trousers down marking out a boundary. I know it’s my house because of the story I tell myself about it. My friends and family know it’s my house because of the story I told them. By and large, nobody questions the story of my house. Nobody demands to see the paperwork proving my ownership. More broadly, other people who don’t even know me understand the backstory of our civilization, and are aware of the common trope of home ownership.

In fact, if you back up far enough, it becomes clear that society itself is a narrative, something we collectively imagined into existence. Laws, customs, mores, and borders are things only humans perceive and only by virtue of their narrative we’ve built up inside our skulls. There is nothing outside of us to supply those concepts, no force compelling us to this end.

Terry Pratchett expressed it succinctly in Hogfather, when Death says, “… take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy.”

We impose on ourselves by means of a narrative what it means to be good or bad, morally right or wrong, ethically acceptable or not.

We humans are the stories we tell ourselves. More to the point, we wouldn’t be fully human without them.

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Author Features / Fantasy Firsts

“Why did you choose to return to high fantasy?”

July 19, 2017May 16, 2024torforge

opens in a new window Welcome back to opens in a new windowFantasy Firsts. Our program continues with a guest post from fantasy master Melanie Rawn about how fantasy is the genre she just can’t quit. The next book in the Glass Thorns series, opens in a new windowPlaying to the Gods, will be available on August 29th.

By Melanie Rawn

Who says I had a choice?

Touchstone knocked me upside the head. This is the second time this has happened to me. The first was Dragon Prince, and I remember it quite clearly.

Memorial Day weekend, 1985. I’d been reading The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Sa’ud, and my fancy was caught by a description of a group of princes going out hawking, with the flowing robes and the hawks on their arms…riding in Jeeps. I liked everything about this image (except for the Jeeps!) so I began playing with it, just to see if it would take me anywhere. Three days later I had the first four chapters of Dragon Prince.

This happened again with Touchstone. May 9, 2009, nine o’clock in the morning (this time I made a note of it). I’d gotten to sleep at about 3 or so, and woke up with this thing in my head. Didn’t even change out of my nightgown. Went into my office, fired up the computer, and I could scarcely type fast enough. The next time I was even marginally aware of my surroundings, it was well past noon.

Neither instance, of course, was entirely the gobsmacking it sounds. Things accumulate in your head; you’re squirreling away ideas and information whether you know it consciously or not. Eventually it reaches critical mass and demands your absolute undivided attention.

The Exiles series and the Spellbinder books were different; they developed over many months, and I was aware of the process. Golden Key was unique in my experience in that Jennifer Roberson, Kate Elliott, and I created a whole world and a lengthy plotline during a weekend at Jennifer’s house. We wanted to have everything we needed (or at least most of it) before we started writing our individual sections of the book.

But with Touchstone, as with Dragon Prince, the thing was just simply there. Plenty of details to be worked out, of course: the look of the characters and the places, a map, the names (always a problem, but getting worse these days—why is it that every new pharmaceutical on the market sounds like a planet or a city or a character in a fantasy or SF novel? I mean, wouldn’t “Ambien” make a great name for a province?), and all that sort of thing. Still, the characters and overarching concepts were there, and, in my agent’s term, I went into “berserker mode.”

The thing that startled me most was that none of these people are in positions of power within their society. They’re working-class gits, teenaged boys with a chip on each shoulder and more stashed in their pockets. Cade, the certified tormented artist; Jeska, the instinctive actor and enthusiastic ladies’ man; Rafe, the solid and reliable strength behind them all; and Mieka, the key to their success and gleeful purveyor of lunacy. I’ve never written people like them before, and I’m having an indecent amount of fun.

So it’s not that I chose to do something new in the high fantasy genre. It was just suddenly there in my head. And now that it’s in your hands, I hope you have as good a time reading it as I’m having writing it.

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(This is a rerun of a post that originally ran on March 5, 2012.)

Author Features / Fantasy Firsts

Why Dinosaurs?

July 12, 2017September 17, 2017torforge

opens in a new windowWelcome back to opens in a new windowFantasy Firsts. Our program continues with a guest post from Victor Milán, author of the opens in a new windowDinosaur Lords series, about the enduring allure of dinosaurs. opens in a new windowThe Dinosaur Princess, the final book in his series about a world where knights ride Tyrannosaurs into battle, will be available August 15th.

Written by opens in a new windowVictor Milán

When I was discussing possible topics for this post, my pal Larry Hays said, “‘Why dinosaurs?’ Duh—dinosaurs.”

Yeah. Pretty much.

I love dinosaurs. I’ve loved ’em since I was an infant in the 1950s, when one of the first books my Mom read to me from was The Golden Treasury of Natural History. Many of its brightly-colored pictures captivated baby me, but none more than those of dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs have been kicking the public in its imagination at least since 1831, when English paleontologist and obstetrician Gideon Mantell published a paper called “The Age of Reptiles,” based on pioneering work done by Georges Cuvier, Mary Anning, and William Buckland on mysterious monster fossils that had been turning up for years. Sir Richard Owen named the taxon Dinosauria in 1842, helping Dinosaur Mania snowball so much a that in 1853 Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins pitched a gala New Year’s Eve dinner inside a sculpture of a (mistakenly quadrupedal) Iguanodon he was creating for London’s Crystal Palace.

In the late 19th century US the rivalry between Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope to find, name, and publicize dinosaur species out west got so crazy it was dubbed the “ opens in a new windowBone Wars.”

The public love for dinosaurs ebbed and flowed throughout the 20th Century. But it never got killed off, even by the dominant paradigm that they were inert, cold-blooded, tail-dragging lumps, some so huge they had to live in water to support their own body weight—some even so dumb they needed helper brains in their butts to help work their hind-sections. I was taught that as a child, and believed it for years.

It was all wrong.

The 1970s revolutionized dinosaurs, with the then-heretical realization that dinos were really active, vigorous, and largely warm-blooded. Jurassic Park’s runaway 1993 success popularized that vision, and the dinosaur love has built ever since.

Nowadays, thanks to technological advances in detecting, handling, and analyzing dinosaur remains, we know more species, and more about them, than ever before. We’re in Golden Age of Dinosaur Paleontology, learning things about their physiology and behavior that, when I was a child, it was “known” we never could learn.

That thrills me. Millions of other people, too.

So what strange secret do these ancient animals possess?

Real. World. Monsters.

We love scary thrills. We love monsters, from the physically smaller, more intimate threats posed by vampires and zombies, to lumbering natural-disaster-sized daikaiju like Godzilla. Who, like so many of his Fifties Lizard Fear Cinema kindred, started life as a pseudo-dinosaur.

Dinosaurs, and the bizarre flying and swimming reptiles who shared the Mesozoic Earth with them, were monsters: fabulous, alien creatures, some literally monstrous in size and sometimes menace, who actually existed.

Some people don’t like the New Dinosaurs. They don’t think they’re as scary as the old model. And what’s with the feathers? They’re just big birds!

(Not really. But birds are dinosaurs. I love that too. Then again, I also always loved birds.)

It’s okay to like what you like. But here’s the deal: I spent way longer believing in the old model than most… and I say: do you really think the snarling monster in the picture is less intimidating than a guy in a rubber suit?

Even if he’s covered in feathers, you’re gonna tell me you wouldn’t be scared of a forty-foot long meat-eating dinosaur animal that weighs more than a Humvee and has teeth the size of axe blades?

Careful not to trip on your cape, there, Superman.

Dinosaurs: they’re monsters! Who were real! And we can even meet (and eat) their less-threatening descendants! How is that not cool?

I love dinosaurs. You too, I hope.

That’s why dinosaurs.

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(This is a rerun of a post that originally ran on July 6, 2015.)

Author Features / Fantasy Firsts

Worldbuilding at the Natural History Museum

June 6, 2017May 16, 2024torforge

opens in a new windowWritten by opens in a new windowCora Carmack

When I set out to write Roar, I knew I’d set myself a bigger writing challenge than I’d ever undertaken. I’ve been coming up with cool fantasy book ideas for a decade, and I’d even dabbled in writing them. But I’d never developed an entire world from scratch. Tor Teen bought my book on proposal, and I can remember during the drafting process thinking they were crazy to let me do this without any proof that I could actually do it. So I took my world-building very seriously. I sat down and drew multiple versions of my own map– one with cities and territories, one with biomes and climates, and one with storms. I did tons of research, but in the end, the thing that I found most helpful in building the world of the Stormheart series was something I stumbled upon by accident.

It was April of 2015, and my parents were visiting me in NYC for the first time. We did all the typical touristy stuff, and one day we ended up at the Museum of Natural History. I was in the plotting and planning phase of Roar, and as I wandered through the various exhibits on different cultures from all over the world, it began to influence the way I thought of my own fictional world.

I looked at the valuables that different cultures preserved, the things they left behind that allow us now to infer things about their lives. And I began to think about what might be left behind of my world, what the characters in it might cherish. I thought about what it might be like to live in a land oppressed not by a government, but by nature itself. And I worked backwards, bit by bit, to piece together a complete culture. I imagined ruins of cities and monuments built to gods for protection from storms. I thought about superstitions and folklore and children’s songs. I thought about what kind of technology they might develop and how much or how little communication there might be between cities. I thought about what kind of artwork and literature would exist in such a place.

I literally pulled inspiration from different cultures all over the world. I treated my Stormlings like the Pharaohs of Egypt, as if they were one step below gods themselves. I took the idea of ceremonial headdresses from tribal cultures and religions and the importance they placed on different life events, because in a world so violent, I imagined that each milestone of life felt like a victory. And when I wandered into the Hall of Gems and Minerals, one of my biggest concerns in regards to world building practically fixed itself. I’d known that I wanted my storms to have tangible centers, or hearts, but I hadn’t figured out what that would look like. Walking through that hall, I began to picture the hearts of storms manifested as brilliant crystals and gems, and something clicked – these were my stormhearts.

So if you’re brainstorming and planning a fantasy novel, I highly recommend checking out a history museum. Wandering through the museum helped me truly create my own unique world, rather than patterning it off one specific time or place in history. Also… I always wanted to be an archaeologist as a kid, and exploring and “excavating” for a fictional world is probably as close as I’ll ever get – and it’s far less dusty.

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Follow Cora Carmack online on opens in a new windowTwitter, Facebook, and her website.

Author Features / Fantasy Firsts

Sincerity Is the Watchword

May 17, 2017May 17, 2024torforge1 Comment

opens in a new windowWelcome back to opens in a new windowFantasy Firsts. We’re featuring a post by Every Heart a Doorway author Seanan McGuire about the importance of embracing sincerity, no matter how silly it seems.

Written by opens in a new windowSeanan McGuire

I watch a lot of horror movies. However many you’re thinking right now, I regret to inform you that you have woefully underestimated the number of horror movies that I have watched in my lifetime. I watch a lot of horror movies. My earliest cinematic memories involve horror movies—Alien when I was three years old, sitting on my uncle’s lap in the living room of our old apartment; The Blob after a midnight trip to the emergency vet to have a cattail removed from my cat’s eye; Critters in my grandmother’s living room, elbows buried in the plush beige carpet, dreaming of marrying the handsome red-haired boy in the lead role. So many horror movies. The only form of media that has arguably had more of an influence on me than the horror movie is the superhero comic book (which is a whole different kettle of worms).

The standards of horror have changed with time, of course. The things we’re afraid of now and the things we were afraid of fifty years ago are not the same, and neither are the avatars we choose to face those fears. We’ve gone from jut-jawed heroes to final girls to clever kids to slackers who somehow stumbled into the wrong movie, and when it’s been successful, it’s been incredible, and when it’s failed, we haven’t even needed to talk about it, because everyone knows. But there’s one ingredient to a really good horror movie that has never changed—that I don’t think ever will change—that I think we need to think about a little harder.

Sincerity.

There’s a point in Creepshow II where a beautiful girl has been grabbed by the oilslick monster that lives on the surface of an abandoned lake. It is eating her alive. She’s awake, aware, and screaming. Her friends are freaking out, because that’s the reasonable thing to do under the circumstances. But none of them are refusing to commit to the moment. The monster is there. The fact that the monster looks like an evil pudding doesn’t change the fact that the monster is there.

There’s a moment in Slither where the mayor of the small town under siege by alien invaders loses his temper because there’s not a Mr. Pibb in his official mayoral car. He has seen people die. His own life has been threatened. He may not last until morning. He just wants his Mr. Pibb. It’s one of the most fully committed, most human moments I have ever seen in a horror movie, and it did more to sell me on the terror of the situation than all the overblown confessions of love in all the sequels in the world.

Sincerity. Completely committing to the situation, no matter how silly. Whether chased by giant snakes (Anaconda), or super-intelligent sharks (Deep Blue Sea), or a flesh-eating virus (Cabin Fever), or even Death Itself (Final Destination), sincerity can be the difference between a forgettable Saturday night special and something that you’ll find yourself going back to. “So bad it’s good” is a phrase most often applied to horror movies with the sense to be sincere.

I find this is true of most mediums. The Care Bear Movie holds up surprising well, because it had the guts to completely commit to its source material; so does the original V. Some newer material falls apart on re-watching, because it never figured out how to be sincere. Fully committing to the topic at hand, on the other hand, gives you something worth revisiting a time or twelve.

We scare because we care, after all. Caring counts.

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Follow Seanan McGuire on Twitter or stay updated on her opens in a new windowwebsite.

(This is a rerun of a post that originally ran on April 4th, 2014.)

Author Features / Fantasy Firsts

Interview with Cora Carmack, Author of Roar

May 16, 2017May 16, 2024torforge

opens in a new windowWelcome back to opens in a new windowFantasy Firsts! Today, we’re excited to share an interview with Cora Carmack, talking about her upcoming young adult debut. opens in a new windowRoar, available June 13th, is the beginning of a brand new series, about a land where magical storms rage and those who can control them control the power. opens in a new windowPreorder Roar now for a special bonus offer, and read the first four chapters opens in a new windowhere!

Will you tell us a little about Roar and what inspired you to write it?

Absolutely! YA speculative fiction was my first love. I used to run a popular YA book blog, and writing YA fantasy was my biggest dream. So while I’ve been writing full time and publishing for the last few years, I’ve been longing for the day I could dip my toes back into the YA Realm. And Tor Teen gave me that chance.

I first had the idea for Roar while doing a radio interview for one of my romance books. The interviewer asked if there was something I really wanted to write that I hadn’t yet. So I mentioned my desire to write YA Fantasy. Then I also said I’d always wanted to write a book about storm chasers, but hadn’t yet because I didn’t have time for all the research it would require. I remember thinking… I suppose I could write a fantasy book about MAGIC storms, and then I could just invent all the research. The interview continued, but all the while my mind was whirling, filling in the gaps of a world that suffered from violent, magical storms. As soon as the call ended, I sat down and typed up everything that came to mind–a black market that sold storm magic, a princess with a dire secret, and a band of storm hunters who battle tempests to steal their magic. I was OBSESSED.

Technically, Tor Teen had already offered on a proposal for a different fantasy book, but I went to my editor and pitched her this new idea for a world plagued by sentient storms, and thankfully she was totally on board. And the rest is history.

What’s the most bizarre thing you learned while researching Roar?

Great question. Remember when I thought writing a book about magic storms wouldn’t require much research? Wrong. It required even more research because I had to write, think, and plot a book about storms wherein radar and computers don’t exist. So I dug back into early records and writings on weather to see how they thought about storms, what they had observed, how they attempted to predict the weather, etc. In the midst of that, I found all these crazy superstitions and signs that people thought could help them predict the weather. Here’s a few of my favorites from The Book of Signs by Theophrastus (A greek philosopher who was a student of Aristotle):

It is a sign of rain or storm when birds which are not aquatic take a bath.
A dog rolling on the ground is a sign of violent wind.
It is a sign of storm or rain when the ox licks his fore-hoof; if he puts his head up towards the sky and snuffs the air, it is a sign of rain.

Do you identify with any of the characters in Roar?

I’m a very character driven writer. I think it stems from my days doing theatre. I like to really inhabit my characters and understand what makes them tick, and let them lead the story. In order to connect that deeply with each character, I have to identify with them. So many of my characters have a small kernel of me in them—some fear or hope or secret or insecurity that makes them feel real to me. Aurora has so much of my teenage self in her. She’s restless and feels stifled by her surroundings and longs to make her mark on the world. Growing up in a minuscule town in the middle of nowhere in Texas, I felt that same longing intensely as a teenager. Another character that really sticks out is Novaya. She (like me) suffers from anxiety. But unlike me, she has volatile magic that must be contained and kept secret at all costs. So glad I don’t have to juggle anxiety and deadly magic.

What do you enjoy most about writing?

Writing is hard. There are days when I identify a bit too much with the myth of Sisyphus. Like I’ll never reach the end of what I’m working on. But my favorite parts of writing are what come before and after the endless boulder-pushing that is drafting and editing. First… I love the moment of genesis—the spark of an idea and the mad dash to flesh it out. But my favorite moment of all is when my book finds its perfect reader. We all have our favorite books, the ones we wish never had to end, and we gladly reread again and again. It’s such a joy to find those books as a reader. But it’s nothing short of remarkable when your book becomes that for someone else.

Where do you like to write?

I get restless easily, so I have to move around a lot when I’m writing. I’ll start out at my desk and write for a bit there, and then move to the couch, then maybe move downstairs to the other couch for awhile. I recently got a treadmill desk, so I’ll work while I’m walking on that. When the weather is nice I’ll write on my porch. And this might be a little TMI, but I actually write in the bathtub a lot! My dad made me this awesome desk-thing that goes across the tub so I don’t have to balance my laptop precariously on the edge anymore. And it makes for a great place to focus and relax.

Which books are currently in your to-read pile?

I just recently finished Frostblood by Elly Blake, so I’m eager for the release of the sequel Fireblood. I do most of my reading via audiobooks because of some vision issues, so next up in my queue is The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco, The Alchemists of Loom by Elise Kova, and A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas.

If you could only recommend one book, what would it be?

This is brutal. My current go to recommendation is The Tairen Soul series by CL Wilson. It’s a complete, 5-book fantasy romance series. And guys, this series is everything. I laughed and cried and stayed up late in the night unable to stop reading. It currently sits on the top shelf of my bookshelf which previously had been reserved only for Harry Potter. That’s how much I love these books. They made my HP shelf!

Who are your literary heroes?

I mean… Not to be cliche, but J.K. Rowling is pretty much queen of my life. But I figure she’s like half the world’s literary hero. I also adore and admire Libba Bray. I first fell in love with her words as teenager with A Great and Terrible Beauty. I stalked her on livejournal for a while, and realized we had a lot of things in common. She grew up in Texas, got her start in theatre, and moved to NYC on a hope and a prayer. I actually sent her a long angsty email as a teenager asking for advice about life and college and writing, and she wrote me back the most heartfelt and compassionate response. She made my dreams feel like a tangible, possible goal, and I’m not sure if I’d be where I am today without that reply she sent.

What’s your favorite method of procrastination?

Oh man. I am the queen of procrastinating. The Internet is usually my biggest distraction – so many times I’ll be like “I’m just going to look at Twitter for a minute” and then suddenly I’m rage-scrolling for an hour. Also Snapchat, and those voice-changing filters…my friends and I will often use Snapchat instead of texting, telling each other random stuff while having a cat face. It’s the best (and the worst). And like so many other human beings, I have a Netflix problem.

Do you have any writing rituals?

I mean, we just talked about procrastination…does that count as a ritual? LOL. I usually write on my computer, but whenever I’m stuck on something I’ll write by hand in a notebook or journal. It makes me slow down, and sort of gives me the permission to suck because I know I can always fix it while I’m typing it up later. That method always seems to open things up for me. I’d say I’ve probably handwritten a substantial section of all of my books at one point or another.

What’s next for you?

Well, in the immediate future, I’m headed to RT Booklovers Convention in Atlanta and then Jay Crownover and I are taking a month-long trip to France, Germany, and Norway. So get ready for a ton of ridiculous Instagram posts! 😉 Then I get back in to the states about two weeks before the release of Roar, during which I will likely subsist on caffeine and food delivery for days. As far as books go, All Closed Off (the fourth book in my Rusk University series) is set to release on July 18. And I’m hard at work on the sequel to Roar, which I’m so excited for. We’ll get to delve deeper into several characters, plus there’s a rebellion, and more romance (for both Aurora and other characters). The storms also kick it up a notch in this book, so all in all, I’m pretty pumped to work more on that.

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Visit Cora Cormack online at opens in a new windowher website, Twitter, opens in a new windowInstagram, and opens in a new windowFacebook.

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