If you have been with me on my blogging journey from the very beginning you will know that my focus back then was the novel that I was writing called “Tempting in Shade”. But over the past year I have written progressively less. Why is that?
No, I have not abandoned this project.
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The thing about fantasy is, it does call for some form of suspension of belief. Magic (and some would argue, the supernatural as well) doesn’t exist in reality, however it is a common tool in many fantasy stories. In fact, it wouldn’t be a fantasy novel without such tools, it would be a fictional historical piece, I think. There’s a real art to finding the right balance of suspension of belief within a fantasy story while adding real world facts and events. Not everyone can do this easily, but for those who do manage to pull if off (example: JRR Tolkien), this is how timeless masterpieces are born! I wish you lots of luck with your novel. ^_^
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I’m holding back on a lot of projects so that I can combine them all or at least find the common threads to exploit. Keep at it Greg, you are my path finder.
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Ooh, I can relate to over-analysing, especially when it comes to how societies work!
In all fairness, though, you can have 17th century and stone age next to each other. I mean, there are _still_ so-called primitive societies around, and if you went back a few centuries, there’d be a lot more. It’s just the matter of figuring out how they came to be next to each other and why the more “advanced” one hasn’t yet subjugated the more “primitive” one. Maybe it’s not worth the trouble. Or they have some incredibly high moral standards they actually stick to. Or maybe they have – and we’re now talking colonization. *Forcibly silences the inner history buff*
Anyway. That was a very thought-provoking post. Thank you for sharing your process, and good luck with the novel!
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Thanks for reading and replying 🙂
The thing about having societies with extremely different levels of technology close to each other is, as you say, there has to be a valid reason. All through history we see technology and culture exchanges. To have two societies at vastly different levels close to each other and not even hint at a valid explanation is disrespectful of the reader. So if there is a moral or religious reason, then the author should show it somehow. Anyway, that’s what I feel as I read 🙂 I’m a bit of a pedant.
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Definitely agree about the reason having to be there 🙂
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It all just means you are a good writer and not one of those shameless exploiters of popular topics, like those stamping out endless “magician schools” and “fantasy romance” novels.
I don’t know what it’s like in the other parts of the world, but in Russia the disparities happened historically. Peter the First “europe-ised” the higher strata, and the peasants kept the “Slavic” traditions. These groups even looked incredibly different. The rift hasn’t ever gone away. In fact, it has been reinforced in certain ways during the Soviet times. You will run into very “medieval-like” communities a few hundred miles away from Moscow. And the disparity in income is creating even new rifts inside any given big city here, where a given immigrant will dress in rags, sleep on floors in crammed cellars and pray to their god, and two steps away a glamorous hipster atheist will leisurely be typing away on their $1000 iPhone.
Given that fiction – especially genre fiction – is something like a magnifier lens, there is inherently nothing wrong with the “mix” of technology levels, religious beliefs and even political systems (Sweden is a socialist monarchy; a novelist can take it further to create God knows what).
I’m not saying that randomised placement of those “islands” is “the” way to write stuff. The author does have to give it some thought (the more the better, including the metaphorical meaning). But!
The explanation as found in the text itself should be emergent, not didactic. Like what you have been doing a lot regarding other aspects of your worldbuilding in the draft pieces you have shown. Those “hints” should never look like hints.
This method implies that the author thinks the reader has brains and will be able to figure stuff out.
It’s the didactic way that is disrespectful, IMO. And it’s also boring.
Now, how do we intelligently break the law of conservation of mass? It’s actually not that difficult: remember that mass is the same as energy. By turning a person into a mouse, you need to dispel that energy (if it’s an irreversible curse) or somehow anchor it to the mouse (if you want to keep the possibility of going back).
Then we can have a number of possible consequences, depending on the assumptions we have about the general structure of the world: for example, if we maintain that consciousness is strictly a function of the biochemistry of the brain, the mouse curse means the resulting mouse cannot be intelligent. But if we allow some dualism (souls etc), the mouse can keep the personality of the original human. Then, for the reversible version, we need to decide how the anchoring works. Will the extra mass influence the mouse in “our” reality (it will be as heavy as a human, ouch), or will it be hidden in some pocket universe / fifth dimension / etc? Will this mass (or the spacetime anomaly connecting the mouse body to the pocked universe etc) dissipate in time, gradually making the process irreversible?
“Complex”? Yes, but this is what “author bibles” are for =)
I believe that it’s also one of the reasons why there are so many novel series (and I mean good series): the authors have spent a lot of effort figuring out their “complex” worlds, and they find these worlds offer unlimited possibilities for storytelling.
Of course, Sturgeon’s Law still holds and will likely hold forever. But it also means that those 10% of non-[SEHT] will always exist.
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WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What an incredible reply! 🙂
Yes – I agree with you in everything that you say and also envy the way you express it. Even as you say with the mouse example, there has to be a logical rationale for dispersal of energy. So it is not as easy as some wizard waving a wand and whammy – a person becomes a mouse. 🙂
Some series do manage to get past me being pedantic. I absolutely love the Malazan series, for example. But generally too many authors create something in a lazy manner.
Thanks so much for you response 🙂
Greg
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Oh, but thank you =)