5 Things I Avoid as a Fantasy Author

I have opinions.

This is one of my “get off my lawn” rants, so it carries a tone. I’ll apologize in advance.

Readers who follow my writing might notice that I tend to avoid certain tropes.

I avoid them because I find their presence in the fantasy genre as boneheaded, redundant, and dull.

Here at the five things that I try to avoid in my stories.

DRAGONS

Dragon tears, dragon blood, dragon venom, dragon people, dragon genes, dragon teeth, dragon gems, dragon wings, eyes of a dragon, dragon riders, blah blah blah.

If you think about it, a dragon is an apex being with no rival. Aside from others of its kind, just a clutch of dragons would decimate an ecosystem. The brood would have to spread out to find enough food to eat or gold to horde, so really, dragons shouldn’t be depicted as coexisting with nature but ravaging it. They’re an enemy of nature. If we’re to find a dragon, we should expect to find a barren countryside with all of its natural resources expended. After they’d consume everything, then they just fly right off and move to another until the fantasy world the author so diligently built is just mud and slag.

So unless the author places the dragon into a bleak wasteland where it’s consumed everything, why read the book? And even then, what’s there to write about because their species is dying. Perhaps if we zoomed-in on the moment when the last dragon inhaled its last breath so that nature could recover from the massive devastation it caused. Now there’s a good story!

The moment I start reading a fantasy book with a dragon in it, I get skeptical. I’m really tired of giant, anatomically-impossible, flying lizards with magical powers. Aren’t you?

ELVES

Groan. I’m so sick of elves.

They’re like Superman in the DC Universe.

Is there nothing that can stop them short of this super rare mineral that’s remarkably abundant on Earth?

In every respect, elves are so far superior to mankind that they should be a dominant species and enslave man (a la, “The Fey”, Kristine Rusch).

What’s this “friendship” between an evolutionary superior species and a bunch of lesser wanna-be’s? Did we see Homo Sapien and the Neandertal “get along”, go on quests together, have a pint of ale at the nearby tavern? No! Homo Sapiens came in with their larger brain and beat the smaller brains out of the neandertal if they didn’t outright fornicate with them to make them part of the “family”.

Elves are ridiculously overpowered critters. They’re so overpowered that, in the context of writing about them, their culture, art, scholarship, and instruments of war have no comparison. There are no threats, so, like Superman, you have to throw gods at them to create a conflict.

When you write about elves, you might as well be writing about demigods. In fact, in my writing, I do regard elves as demigods, and I don’t necessarily incorporate them into principal characters. The moment I introduce an elf protagonist, they’d steal the show; they have no flaws. They don’t even die appropriately. They, like, board a boat to go the east rather than just simply dying and decaying, like the rest of us.

Ugh! Elves! Really?

ROMANCE

I am so sick and tired of seeing “best selling” books capitalize on hyper-sexualized supernatural (read: werewolf or vampire) BDSM dominatrixes.

Further, why does the female protagonist, to be interesting, need to be something fantastic? Like, chosen to breed? A mistress? Part alien? Or own a “reverse harem”?

Can’t we conceive of a female protagonist with no special powers who doesn’t have an “off-the-rails” libido? Or desperate to find their one true love at the expense of living their own damned life? Who is simply a woman and a person all at the same time?

I’m also very sick of romance, as a genre, spilling into fantasy and eroding the search algorithms. If you’re going to write a romance, put it on a cruise ship with a bald captain and be done with it. Every romance everywhere should simply be on the Love Boat. Get out of my magical forests with bugbears, halflings, and unicorns; they don’t get a flip about your emotional needs.

I don’t write romance - I write fantasy! I want to escape reality, not lament about how bad my own love life is, and pine over the unobtainable.

USELESS DESCRIPTIONS

One of the biggest annoyances that I have about modern fiction is the outright need to explain things in seven pages that would take one paragraph.

I’m lookin’ at you Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin!

When you write about a meadow, you should say, “The protagonist entered a meadow,” not provide seven pages of description about the meadow since it has no bearing on the outcome of the story! It’s just filler! It’s like, how many ways can you say that the character entered a meadow? Just one! “The character entered a meadow!”

Same for food. Hey, I like to spend a few paragraphs explaining food in my work, true, but do we need a history of each meal to be offered as some rationale by the author as to why it’s being served? Do I need to know where the potatoes came from, who they were cultivated by, and how they were yanked out of the ground? No! “Baked potatoes were on the table, and they were hot.” That’s all you need to say!

What’s funny about this is that I’ve always joked that my own novels would actually be about 10 pages long. The protagonist thinks this, does that, stabs this person, celebrates, end of story. I guess this is why I write short stories. Why take seven pages to describe something? I don’t get it. And it’s boring. Stop it!

MONARCHIES

Kingdoms… cringe. I’m so sick of kings. And their doms.

Why must a monarchy govern everything? Why is there a singular guy (usually white) in charge all things? And everybody answers to him?

I mean, why not have a perfectly acceptable fantasy setting that’s ruled by a council of old women? Or how about if people shake potato bugs in a jar to make decisions? Or, looking at indigenous cultures, are there committees or groups or people who make complex decisions over lifetimes? Certainly, in a fantasy setting, we can do better than monarchies.

I really like the potato bugs in a jar governance style. I think I’ll try using that.

Anyway, there’s my rant. Thanks for reading!

R

What is a Book?

As an author, technology professional, and digital native, I think it’s beyond time to ask ourselves what a book is, and how technology has broadly transformed the business of publishing.

What we traditionally identify as a book is a certain dimension and size; something that was physical and has pages that we manually flip through to read in consecutive, sequential order; that it has a spine; it has a cover and a jacket, requiring layout designers, typographers, and visual artists.

Because books were physical, there needed to be a process to edit it and make sure it was right. Errors and omissions couldn’t be corrected in the finished product.

In order to make a profit off the product of a book, it had to be economical to produce it. There had to be at least x-number of pages printed under certain constraints to make y-amount of profit. Historically, the profit motive is what filtered writers from being published at all. Publishers knew that, in order to make a profit off a book, there was a formula associated with the cost of production, requiring a minimum and a maximum number of physical pages, in specific dimensions and materials (paperback vs hardcover, for instance).

In order to sell the book, marketers knew that there was a formula that worked: a strong character-driven story with a three-act structure with lots of escalating, high-stakes action, in regards to a fantasy novel, for instance. They knew that a man had to write it; the fantasy demographic repelled female authors. They knew that the protagonist must be a human male to best identify with the reader, and in particular, a white human male. They knew it needed a splashy cover and vivid colors, and it needed to be between x-number of pages, otherwise, a segment of the market wouldn’t be interested in it.

Publishers knew how many units they needed to produce and sell in order to make a profit off the volume. Thus, they made exclusive arrangements for marketing and distributing a book. These exclusive arrangements allowed for a certain amount of time a book sat on shelves, and was calculated from the amount of loss they’d suffer if they didn’t churn the inventory quickly enough. In most cases in the latter half of the 20th century, publishers had to buy-back underperforming books from the retailer and eat their losses.

Authors of traditional books were disconnected from their readers because they had no way to speak to them at scale without the marketing muscle of the publisher.

And physical books suffered a long-tail problem: they’d need to be taken into the storeroom within eight weeks or so to make more room on physical shelves for more product, physically leaving the consumer’s sight and imagination. Only books at the forefront of the consumer’s attention and imagination are what sold; anything else in a store room or warehouse was inaccessible by the consumer.

Therefore, up to the year 2010, there was a lot of gatekeeping that went on in the publishing industry. Fantasy books were costly to produce, expensive to distribute, must meet a slew of criteria to be successful, and excluded female authors and protagonists that didn’t mirror their readers. Authors couldn’t cultivate their own marketing relationship with consumers, and books had an eight-week lifecycle at most.

Throughout the 20th century, those filters, the sheer risk of publishing a book, generated mountains - continents - of rejection letters because, if we’re to be honest, who’d want to be a publisher anyway? Tons of costs, lots of risk, and tiny profits. Publishing sucked as a business model, and retail wasn’t any better. Only scale made money; i.e., Barnes & Noble killing traditional booksellers - remember that?

So what happened in 2010?

Around 2010, a number of factors converged to destroy traditional publishing.

• The Internet had created a generation of consumers prepared to consume electronic content;

• Broadband - fast, inexpensive Internet access had been brought to most of the industrialized world, and used routinely by lower-middle-class consumers;

• The arrival of viable tablet-based computing platforms, allowing one to reasonably hold an electronic copy of a book in facsimile to a traditional book;

• Electronic distribution platforms for booksellers allowed retailers to produce print-on-demand products, build electronic products on their platform, and resell and distribute digital media at scale;

• Social media allowed authors to disintermediate the publisher and talk directly to consumers, to build their brand as an individual;

• The proliferation of secure, nearly costless, Internet-based payment systems enabling an author to sell directly to consumers.

These influences are ongoing and erode the power and profitability of traditional publishing. Very soon, the traditional publishing world will be reduced to just a few players for, in a world where you make < 5% on printed products, scale is everything. M&A like Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster must happen, otherwise, there is no scale, only efficient competitors, eroding each other’s market share and driving prices to the bottom; nobody will make money, and there will not be any more traditional book publishing business. It simply costs too much and there’s no money in it. If consumers don’t mind paying a premium for a book ($30/unit vs, say, $10/unit electronically), then not a problem. I’d be willing to bet, though, that sentiment will not last, no matter how people like the physical feel of a book in their hands.

So, what is a book?

Today, it a book is digital media - it’s an electronic product.

• A book can be created by anyone with a computer.

• Books are software. They can be edited and changed at any time, providing instant updates, and released through versioning - just like software.

• Authors can grab an ISBN directly electronically; they can manage their own catalogs and meet reseller requirements for inventory and distribution; they can print-on-demand, doing one-off unit-based printing at practically zero cost to them, eroding maybe 2% of their margin.

• An electronic book can be distributed at zero cost to anyone, anywhere, in the world, and run off any digital device. There is world-wide distribution of a book at zero cost with no licensing intermediary eroding your margin.

• It doesn’t matter what size a book is - how many pages or words; in this case, size doesn’t matter. The costs of production and distribution are exactly the same. A book can be replicated a zillion times at no cost.

• The longtail is overcome by filters, social media, and search. Consumers can dig into catalogs with millions of titles and find what interests them, and social media can help market titles to new readers.

• A book can be marketed directly to consumers by authors, allowing them to make their own brands and relationships. No longer does a publisher get to intermediate that relationship, allowing anyone, anywhere, to create a following of readers.

• Its typesetting doesn’t matter. The consumer, not the publisher, can choose their own preferences for typeface on their digital readers.

• In an electronic format, books are extensions of digital assistants like dictionaries, thesauruses, note taking and research/citation tools, and Internet search. A single in-narrative click can help inform a reader or lead them to more engagement with the author online.

• Editing and art assets are increasingly cheap - most of that labor can be outsourced using Internet based freelancing - allow authors to access quality talent at increasingly lower costs. And one day, AI-generated imaging will offer authors free high-resolution artwork at zero cost.

• The development and publishing of a book is highly automated. If you can learn how to press a couple of buttons, you can move data between - what used to be - complicated formatting changes.

In essence, the author is their own publisher, editor, and marketer, and they have direct access to the market and consumers from which to create and maintain their brand. This is simply the dream of authors like Richard Brautigan - we are all publishers.

I am fortunate enough to live in an amazing time of transformation in this industry. The nature of what a book is has radically been transformed.

I generally write short stories (~10,000 words) and distribute them world-wide at no cost, about characters and settings that’d usually be gateway’d out by traditional publishers. But with today’s model, I can write and distribute anything of any size. Who’d want to read novellas about Halflings anyway? Well, I’m lucky enough to just do my own thing and improve my art to connect with audiences and build my own brand. What an amazing time!

The era of waiting around for someone to validate you as an author with an acceptance letter is over. You are an author; you are a publisher. Even traditional publishers vet authors based on their skillsets in developing their own work - they’re more likely to hire someone who comes in with an audience of 10,000 readers and an established catalog of content, than someone who doesn’t already have it. Why put a risky bet on someone who can’t do it themselves?

Even as I write this, though, I’m very much aware that another transformation is in play concerning AI (Artificial Intelligence). In the very near future, most of what readers consume will be written by automation - computers trained on writing specific forms of content, creating amazing works of art that will compete with even the best of us human authors. So the ability to be seen, hired, read, and compensated as an author will continue to meet headlong forces. I write because I like telling stories; not because I think I’ll make any money at it, and that concept of making money is probably unrealistic.

In a world where computers produce written content, only a miniscule percent of authors will actually make money in this business. True talents will own their own brand, disintermediate publishers and booksellers, and go directly to their audience, who will circulate their work in social media as to attract new readership; all the while, they’ll be under constant threat from AI that can emulate their unique style at a drop of a hat.

What is a book? And what is an author? Well, both are rapidly changing.

Take advantage of change. You, as an author, no longer need to wait around for someone to tell you you’re good enough. That’s crap - go publish now! And publish every day.

Thanks for reading my work.

R

Why I Write Stories About Halflings

Like most everyone, I was first exposed to Hobbits reading Tolkien’s work.

The Lord of the Rings movies produced by Wingnut Films didn’t come out until I was in my thirties, so my earliest impressions were from actually reading the books, and, the Rankin Bass‘  productions of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

When I started playing role-playing games in my teens, D&D helped to inform more about halflings, particularly images drawn by Jeff Dee.

At the root of it, what I love about halflings is their appreciation of hearth and home. Tolkien’s adaptation of the word to develop an 18th century culture of charming portly naturalists - who value connection, family, friends, and food ahead of monetary gain - gives us (as readers and authors) an opportunity to reconnect with those values.

At the same time, I like writing about Halflings that do the unexpected. I like writing about characters who went beyond the stereotype and expand on Tolkien’s concepts.

Jeff Dee’s images of svelte, muscular halfling adventurers took those original Tolkien concepts portrayed (lovingly and accurately) by Rankin Bass into something different. It took the original pallet and expanded on it, and I really loved that idea.

As a gamer, I often played halflings because they had that interesting dichotomy of wholesomeness and home blended with luck, curiosity, a bent for exploring, and an intense desire to go back home; Weis and Hickman’s Kender in their Dragonlance saga only pushed that envelope farther. I loved playing those kinds of characters and expanding on what Tolkien originally gave us.

In writing about halflings, I enjoy the fact that they’re a literary shortcut that builds off of all of these other ideas about them. It’s shorthand: a way of describing something the reader already knows, and it allows me to cut back on writing lengthy descriptions of characters, scenes, or motivations. Shortcuts are really necessary in writing serialized fiction because you don’t have the time to elaborate on details.

Finally, I like writing about halflings because they’re often depicted as sidekicks to protagonists. They’re more likely to facilitate an outcome, or be comedy relief, than a central hero. I think that’s what really motivates me to write about them because, like Bilbo and Frodo, halflings do represent the hero. They portray the idealistic who doesn’t want to fight but must to protect heart and home, or, the undaunted, child-like exploration of the world.

Either way, halflings offer a quick way to jump into these ideas in Aevalorn Tales.

R

How Things Started

Hi - thanks for stopping by, and thanks for reading my work.

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in 1980. I was ten. I had already started reading sci fi and fantasy; at the time, I don’t think there was a young adult fantasy genre, rather just serious fantasy (Tolkien, Brooks, Eddings, McCaffrey, Moorcock) and what I’d call light fantasy (Weis and Hickman, Salvatore, Pratchett, and numerous “Choose Your Own Adventure” books). I adored both.

But as a kid, I really found myself pulled towards the latter because those stories had a hook into role-playing. I guess I could relate to it. I enjoyed picking out gameplay elements of D&D from I was reading - no doubt due to TSR’s brilliant marketing - and I so I kept buying new books. Back then, spare cash and I were often parted due to my D&D habit.

The White Stands, the Free City of Trelalee, Fenwater Abbey, Gaelwyn, and Aevalorn were concepts created for a D&D 5E campaign I developed in 2013. Having finally reached a place in my life where I could devote time to write, I decided to explore these ideas again under a serialized fiction platform, Amazon’s Kindle Vella.

So maybe a part of this is to reconnect with my childhood. It’s something like that for me, yes, but it’s also a “do or die” thing. If I don’t start writing now, I’ll likely die before I get an opportunity. Now is better than later.

It also turns out that I’ve created a ton of stories for role-playing games over the last 40 years. I’ve so many worlds, characters, and ideas sitting idle in old notebooks and electronic files that it’d be a shame not to leverage them. Sure, world-building and story-writing for role playing are apt skillsets for novelists and writers, but I’ve also a technical background that lends to modern self-publishing. Further, I’ve enough idle time to write. Therefore, I guess it’s just a confluence of happy coincidences.

Today, when I write about Trelalee and Gaelwyn, I feel that same connection that I’d felt as a kid between playing RPG’s and reading fantasy novels based on those settings. It’s still a real kick for me. I can’t say that I spend a lot of time rule-mongering and checking my writing against game mechanics, but I will admit that the 5th Edition rulebooks are nearby when I draft my outlines. I’ll also say that those older, more dusty books written by serious fantasy authors are nearby, too; they’ve always been a part of me.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.