A Cautionary Tale

In the comments about my post regarding The Twilight Zone, Loren mentioned an episode called “A Nice Place to Visit”, about a crook who dies and wakes up in an afterlife where his every whim is catered to and he wins everything. At first he believes it’s heaven, but after a month he’s so bored that he asks to go to the Other Place, only to be told he’s already there.

That reminded me of an episode of another show I saw once. It was in color, so it might have been The Outer Limits. In it, a man gets a device which makes his every wish come true. He can wish for anything he likes – except immortality – and he’ll get it. So he does. He wishes for money, valuables and finally a grand castle all to himself, but like the crook in the first tale, he gets bored. And the single caveat, that he cannot wish for immortality, keeps gnawing away at him.

Eventually he can’t take it any more. He wishes for immortality. Instantly everything disappears and he finds himself in a quarry where people dressed in rags are laboring away with pickaxes. Someone shoves a pickaxe in his hands and tells him to get busy, because that’s what happens when anyone breaks the one rule of using the device. And there’s no way out.

“But how long do I have to work at this?” he says.

“You wished for immortality, didn’t you?” the other man replies. “Now hurry up. Some idiot just wished for a castle.”

It made me wonder what life would be like for writers if everything we wrote was praised uncritically and published without question.

Five baffling things writers do

I’ve done some ill-advised things in the past when it comes to writing – for instance, working on a lengthy series before selling the first book (when the first book wasn’t saleable in the first place). And there are a few things that I haven’t done but which I understand – signing up with a vanity press, or querying before the manuscript is complete. I don’t agree with them, but I can see why the writers would do them.

But there are a few things writers have tried which leave me baffled. Not only do these fail, they could never have succeeded.

1. Publishing fanfics.

Another Hope, by Lori Jareo, is a Star Wars fanfic that is no longer available on Amazon, although both the customer tags and the first pages can still be read. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is more entertaining. The author is one of the principals of the POD micropress which printed this lawyerbait, and she defended her decision to publish it by saying,

I wrote this book for myself. This is a self-published story and is not a commercial book. Yes, it is for sale on Amazon, but only my family, friends and acquaintances know it’s there.

Then there’s Austin P. Torney, who published Star Trek : The Death Wave, through Amazon’s own CreateSpace. I couldn’t even find the ghost of that one on Amazon.

2. Faking an agent.

I’ve heard of writers either doing this themselves or getting a friend/family member to do it. It comes off like something George Costanza might try. Editors aren’t likely to be taken in by a fake letterhead or a name they’ve never heard before. Of course, if this were a Seinfeld episode, the editor would call the fake agent, pretending to be taken in, and much Schadenfreude would occur.

3. Enclosing bribes with a submission.

The first time I ever submitted a requested full, I included three maps of various lands (thankfully I didn’t send the characters’ family tree as well). Some writers go a little further, sending flowers, candy, toys, photographs, glitter and even jewelry.

The impression this usually gives agents isn’t that the writer is generous, it’s that the submission cannot stand alone (therefore needing support from the props) and that the writer is not a professional.

4. Responding angrily to rejections.

It’s normal to feel disappointed or even annoyed at the nth rejection letter – especially if it’s something like a form letter rejection of a requested full. What’s not so understandable is why anyone would send angry or sarcastic replies to an agent or editor. Rachel Vater gives an example of such a letter here.

"Unless you have ESP how would you know what my novels
are about?

Thanks for nothing."

What goes through someone’s head when they send this – a hope that the agent’s feelings will be hurt? Don’t they realize that this only means the recipient of their ill-will is likely to recall them as unprofessional, to say the least? Sarcasm may help the writer feel better, but this can be done without dynamiting any bridges. Write some snarky reply on a piece of paper and burn it, for instance. That’s less detrimental to a career.*

5. Surprise visits.

In my line of work, I’ve often had to explain to people that no, we could not release their medical test results to them without their doctor’s authorization. In return I’ve been yelled at, sworn at and threatened with lawsuits (to which I say, Bring it on, because the company I work for has Deep Pockets and a Legal Department). But only once has someone said he was going to meet me in person. And when he learned that I was in a city three hundred miles away, he presumably changed his mind. I didn’t even get a chance to mention the access-controlled doors and security guards in the building.

Even if literary agents and editors have the same measures in place, that doesn't seem to deter a few people from dropping by, showing up or just hanging around in the lobby without an invitation. Never a good idea. Maybe that's why some agents and editors bring their dogs to work.

*********************

*When I was living at home, we had a system that operated any time my father wanted to send emails of complaint or remonstration, since when he got emotional, he was not the most grammatical or tactful person. First, I had to edit the email for spelling and grammar. Second, my mother had to check it for content. Finally, it would be sent. The system worked well until one night.

That night, my father came back from a church committee where an election had taken place, and his side won by one vote. Twelve Angry Men never got so heated. It was late, so everyone else was asleep, but he sat down before the computer and vented. He composed a scathing email to the pastor, denouncing the opposition, then felt better and tried to click “Save”.

Know what was right next to the “Save” button? You guessed it – the “Send” button. That email went out as-was and the church descended on him like all the horsemen of the Apocalypse. After that, I always composed sensitive emails in Word.

The Twilight Zone

So this Labor Day weekend, I decided to watch as many episodes of The Twilight Zone as I could manage, even though I’d often be using them as background sound while I wrote.

The show holds up surprisingly well for something that aired over forty years ago. All the women wear pearls and have their hair in bouffant ‘dos, while the special effects may be better left to the imagination. But many of the ideas behind the stories are so great that they overcome this, and I enjoyed the horrific or grotesque overtones. They’re like a Ray Bradbury tale.

I was able to spot a few of the shock twists coming (such as the one in “Stopover in a Quiet Town”), but “The Eye of the Beholder” scared the hell out of me, and the wishes in “The Man in the Bottle” had darkly funny consequences. The main character found a genie who gave him four wishes. He spent the first one on repairing a cabinet, to make sure the genie was real. For the second wish, he asked for a million dollars, which he got – but since he hadn’t specified a million tax-free dollars, he ended up with $5 after the IRS took its ton of flesh. For the third wish, he asked to be the leader of a powerful modern country, who could not be voted out of office. He became Adolf Hitler and spent the fourth and last wish to undo that.

“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, starring a pre-Kirk William Shatner, is a good story that’s also an excellent example of the plot skeleton. Start out with a sympathetic character in a difficult situation (a guy who’s had a nervous breakdown and who has to take a plane flight in a storm). Add an obstacle (he sees a creature clinging to the plane’s wing). He takes steps to overcome the obstacle (he tells a stewardess about the creature). The steps fail (no one else sees the creature and they believe he’s crazy). And things get even worse (the creature begins tearing up the plane’s wing).

There’s a reason this show is a classic.

Writing characters of the opposite gender, part 2

So the question was whether it’s difficult to characterize people of the opposite gender.

There are a few times when I’ve found this difficult, and after I thought about it, I realized that these times all dealt with situations that may tend to be gender-skewed. By that I mean a situation which is likely to provoke different emotions in men than it does in women.

A good example of what I mean by this occurs in the non-fiction Walking After Midnight by Katy Hutchinson. Her husband was killed by a drunken teenager, leaving her widowed and their four-year-old twins without a father. Hutchinson nevertheless forgave the teenager, worked with him to warn other teens of the dangers of excessive drinking and eventually came to consider him a friend.

There was a very interesting postscript to her speaking engagements and seminars, though: she said that women often told her that they understood why she forgave the person responsible for her husband’s death, but men would come up to her to say they respected her choice but couldn’t understand what she felt. Likewise, her son doesn’t seem to want much to do with the teenager (now much older, of course), whereas her daughter is comfortable around him.

Gender-skewed. Whether this is due to cultural expectations or biological programming, it has to be taken into account. I realized that this can be a stumbling block recently when I was working on the revisions of Before the Storm. I had a scene where the heroine, having made love with the hero, was discussing a tense political situation with him while she dressed. She mentioned a duke who had used her sexually in the past – not to bring up what he had done to her, but because she hoped to get him on their side to sway the balance of power.

GunnerJ pointed out that almost any man (especially a proud, conservative and insecure one like the hero) would probably not react well to knowing that the woman he cared about had been treated like a unpaid prostitute by other men. This was something that didn’t occur to me, because I was trying to make the hero accept her as she was and not condemn her for her past. But he would have come off as robotic if he didn’t feel in the least bit upset. I think I read somewhere that men react strongly to sexual infidelity, whereas with women, emotional betrayal is more important.

So there are a few situations where I’ll have to stop and carefully think through how my character will react in terms of his gender. I may also ask men how they would behave under those circumstances. “Hey, guys. Hypothetically, if you had, uh, assaulted a woman in the past, but you felt really sorry about it and another woman – guys? Hey, wait!”

Writing characters of the opposite gender

Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all

e. e. cummings

My critiquer, GunnerJ, once told me that he wasn’t certain of his characterization of women in his stories, since he’s male. He then asked me if I felt the same way when I wrote about men.

Until then, I’d never really thought of writing characters as male or female, but Before the Storm is the only story set in a world where there are rigid gender demarcations, so it was the only novel where I had to have women behaving and being treated differently from men. In most of my other lands, there’s no real discrimination, and so I just created characters without thinking too deeply about gender. So when GunnerJ asked me this, it really made me stop to consider.

Why do we make some characters male and some female?

Genre plays a role in this. For instance, if you’re writing for Harlequin Presents, your stories are probably more likely to feature “strong, wealthy, breathtakingly charismatic alpha-heroes who are tamed by spirited, independent heroines”, rather than, say, a wealthy alpha heroine who is tamed by a man. I checked out Harlequin’s Steeple Hill guidelines, wondering if an inspirational line might have different requirements for the heroine than the hero, but interestingly, I didn’t see any.

Likewise, a historical novel is going to have inherent restrictions when it comes to gender. It’s possible, of course, to have a historical fiction set in the year 1700 and taking place on a oceangoing vessel where the heroine is the ship’s doctor. But if an author does this and then glosses over the setup or consequences, the story can seem unrealistic and may require more suspension of disbelief. It may also look as though the author hasn’t done his or her research.

Conversely, the author could explain how a woman became a doctor, how she managed to get a position on a ship, how she manages on board the ship with a crew of men, and so on. While this might be intriguing, it also means the anachronism is bending the story around herself. Rather than being a tale of maritime adventure, it becomes the story of the female doctor. It may be easier to tell the story that the writer wants to tell if the characters operate within the gender roles of that time – but do everything possible and realistic and interesting within those roles.

It’s also easier to win sympathy for some characters if they’re female. For instance, Gone with the Wind is unlikely to have worked if Scarlett had been male. An impulsive, self-centered boy passionately in love with a woman engaged to someone else and who kept trying to dissuade him… not sympathetic. But since Scarlett began as a sixteen-year-old girl, her flaws were much easier for me to accept.

That’s one reason I made Morava in Dracolytes a woman – she begins the novel as a devoutly religious soldier who all but physically assaults a man for blasphemy. If she had been a man who ill-treated a woman for the same reason, I think she would have been impossible to like. You read about male religious fanatics in the news, but a female religious fanatic is still relatively novel and for me at least, more palatable.

I think this works for male characters as well. A cold, reserved, hyperintelligent woman who disdained men might appear frigid, but Sherlock Holmes came across as fascinating, the kind of person who could be thawed by just the right woman (or right man, judging by all the Holmes/Watson slash out there). There are some traits which are just easier to forgive and accept when they’re held by a person of one gender rather than the other. Which isn’t to say that they should never be applied to people of the other gender, just that this is one reason writers may (unconsciously) select the one over the other when creating characters.

Finally, it may simply be easier to write from the point of view of one gender rather than another. I’ve read several criticisms of romance novels where the heroes behaved unrealistically – for instance, they were more interested in talking about their feelings than in having sex – though this may also be due to the requirements of the genre or the publisher.

It was a very interesting topic to think about. So much so that only after I'd written all this did I realize I hadn't answered GunnerJ's question. Which I'll do in another blog post.

Five more things I don't want to see in sex scenes

1. The named member.

Probably the only novel where this worked for me was Lady Chatterley’s Lover. A few years ago, I picked up a romance where the hero named his penis Ambrose, and I kept laughing during the sex scenes when he referred to whatever Ambrose was doing. Ambrose isn’t what you name a rampant manhood, it’s what you name an elderly British professor.

2. The voyeuristic friend.

I’ve only come across this buzzkill once, in the film La Reine Margot, and the sex scenes between the titular character and her homme du jour were made even less arousing by Margot’s maid listening outside the door (with Margot’s knowledge). It was almost a menage a trois.

3. The mysterious cream.

I’ve read a couple of historical romances now where the first sexual encounter was less than consensual, and to make it a little easier on the heroine, the hero resorted to the use of “cream”. No indication what this 17th century version of K-Y Jelly is made of, or why the hero keeps a supply close at hand. Perhaps he’s accustomed to women who don’t lube naturally in his presence?

4. The animal impression.

Sex talk can be funny, it can be erotic and it can be touching. But when the characters discuss their lovemaking in terms of sheep mating – “Will you mount me like the ram mounts his ewe?” – and when the hero says “Baaa!” at the climax, I feel as though I’m reading about some woolly subculture.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

5. The clueless innocent.

I don’t mind the heroine being a virgin, or being inexperienced when it comes to sex, especially in a historical. But unless she’s grown up in a convent, I’d rather not read dialogue like this.

"What is this thing?"
"My cock."
"Is it attached to your body?"
"Yes. We're built differently."
"What is it for?"

This level of naivety just isn’t sexy. And it makes me want to say, “Now point to the dolly to show us where the bad man touched you.”

Outlines

A lot of writers don’t make outlines, and may even discourage their use. This may depend, though, on the definition of “outline” and maybe even of “use”. I personally like them, but that’s because the one book where I leaped in without any outline in advance was Redemption. I hit the ground running and enjoyed the writing, but the book now needs to be completely rewritten, because the final product could use some improvement.

So since I’m doing an outline for Empire of Glass, I thought of what I normally put into my outlines – and what I don’t include.

Character profiles

Most of those available on the web – character’s favorite color, pet, high school sweetheart, worst memory, etc. – can be a pitfall. For one thing, writers may feel they have to fill in all the blanks and answer all the questions, when these may not be necessary. I have no idea what any of my characters’ favorite colors are, but I know what they want most, who (or what) opposes them and what they do about this.

Secondly, coming up with this information might make writers feel they have to include it in the story, whether it’s relevant or not. I’ve never actually put time into filling out these character sheets, but if I’d spent half an hour on one, I just might look at it and think, “All right, what do I do with this now?”

Thirdly, the division of character traits into positives and negatives sometimes backfires. Charm and persuasiveness and intelligence can be used to either help or harm; to pigeonhole them at the start might make it difficult for a writer to see the shades of grey that can make characterization so much fun.

Maps

I like drawing maps, though the first map I ever drew looked like the continental United States, so I made a determined effort after that to be original. Then I showed a map of Dagre to my friend Susana (who’s from Spain), and she pointed out that it looked like the Iberian Peninsula. Oy.

I still drew maps, since I like knowing where lands are in relation to each other, and how long it might take the characters to get somewhere. These are relatively basic maps that don’t show every major geographical feature and town; maps which did show this would be good for novels where the milieu and setting were more important, like The Lord of the Rings. The drawback to them is that they can be so much fun that they’re a distraction from actually writing, and not all fantasies need them. Tanith Lee’s and Lawrence Watt-Evans’s and Terry Pratchett’s novels do very well in a mapless state.

The history of the world

When I first started writing fantasy, I did reams on this. How the gods created the world, how they made people, how evil entered the world, etc. etc. ad infinitum.

Two days ago I took a sheet of paper and a pen and wrote three paragraphs on the origin of the titular nation in Empire of Glass. That was all I needed to know. Best of all, rather than being a Silmarillion ripoff, the birth of that nation was set in motion by a character who would be appearing in the story. There’s more history behind the other nations who oppose the empire, of course, but all I need at the start is the foundation – the empire has conquered Rukcia, Avayne fell five years ago, Fairfell is the last bastion, and the Fairfellans are so ruthless that most refugees think they’ve just exchanged one nightmare for another.

So what does go into my outlines?

I do jot down notes about worldbuilding, but they don’t tend to be detailed at the start. And by the time I get to the writing stage, I’ve usually been turning the ideas of the story over in my head, so I know who the main characters are and what the gimmicks or motifs of the novel will be.

So my outlines are more to do with the plot, giving me a framework on which to build. For instance, in part 1, they go to the Sea for the negotiations which may end the war, in part 2, their enemies spring a trap laid at the Sea, but the protagonists have plans as well, and so on. Then I break it down a little further : in Chapter 1, the protagonists meet at a war council and set off for the Sea; in chapter 2, they arrive at the Sea and try to secure the area but their enemies reached it first, etc. It gives me an idea of what’s ahead, like a map into an unknown place.

Some writers don’t like outlines because they feel it restricts the story, but my outlines are never written in stone. I have an idea of what kind of end I want for the story, but the personalities of the people involved get them to that point. And in one case, they resulted in the death of a main character, which I hadn’t foreseen at the start.

Other objections to an outline are that they detract from the wonder and discovery, the surprise of what’s just around the riverbend, but I haven’t found that to be the case for myself. Writing is just as much fun, and makes me feel more secure, when I know what’s going to happen. I also think that the longer and more complex the story (especially if you’re aiming for, say, an epic fantasy trilogy), the more important it is to have an idea of what will happen. Diving into the world without a map or compass might result in something glorious, but it might also result in a tangled mess as each character does their own thing and runs wild, rather than doing their own thing within the overarching framework of a plot and a purpose that drives the story.

Outlines are just one of the tools available to writers, so the use of them is personal. I just find that they work better for me than no outlines.

Burned out on vampires

I thought I was burned out on vampires. After devouring as many of Anne Rice’s novels as I could find, way back in 1995 after Interview with the Vampire had first come out, I didn’t want to read more about either the sad, conscience-stricken vampires (a la Louis) or the glamorous loose cannons (i.e. Lestat). I loved Lestat up till The Tale of the Body Thief, and after that I hoped he was resting in peace.

I tried one of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake novels, but the vampire Jean-Claude didn’t really appeal to me. Maybe it was all that ma petite-ing. And somehow the very fact that vampires are so popular in urban fantasy and chick lit and YA fiction these days put me off them even more (I’m often the type of person who digs their heels in against peer pressure and goes in the opposite direction). Besides, there’s plenty of other reading material out there.

Then a week ago I was browsing music videos on YouTube, looking for songs by E Nuestro, and I found a great one called “Lucifer”, which seemed to have been used for an anime music video. I kept the music on in the background while I replied to some emails, since the video seemed gory – dark when it wasn’t dripping with blood. Plus, there was some gunman in a long red coat. How strange. The name of the video stayed in my memory, though, since it reminded me of Van Helsing from Dracula.

So the next time I was at work and didn’t have anything to do, I plugged the anime’s title into Wikipedia and read up about it. And this weekend, I made a cup of tea and settled down to watch a few episodes of Hellsing. Well, all right, nine episodes and counting. Did I say I was burned out on vampires? Hellsing is evidence that enough imagination can overcome any burnout. I like Alucard’s striking clothes, weapons of mass destruction, fanatical loyalty to Hellsing and utter are-we-having-fun-yet attitude (pretty much summed up in the psychotic grin that lasts even when he’s being shot to shreds). He’s a great example of what I love about fantasy per se – something which is both accessible and alien, familiar and strange.

The worldbuilding is good too. I’ve always been interested in religion, so I like the two orders of undead-hunters – the Hellsing Organization, which is Protestant, and the Iscariot Division of the Catholic Church. The latter has its own champion, the paladin Father Alexander Anderson, and if I hadn’t already known about Alucard, Anderson alone could have made me watch the anime. The blessed bayonets held in a cross shape, the bible pages skewered to walls… where were priests like this when I had to take catechism classes?

Hellsing isn’t the kind of show that’ll have me obsessively scouring the web for more. But I enjoyed what I saw of it. And it’s good to know that no matter how burned out on something I think I am, originality can still cure that.

”In the name of God, impure souls of the living dead shall be banished into eternal damnation. Amen.”

Five red flags in claims of publishers

These are claims made about publishers – either by representatives of the company or by authors - which I would personally see as warning signs. Maybe not warning me to run, but definitely suggesting that I investigate further.

1. “We don’t charge upfront fees.”

Firstly, it should be a given that a commercial publisher doesn’t charge fees, upfront or otherwise, so to produce this as a positive is like a bank trying to attract customers by saying, “You will not be embezzled here”.

Secondly, there are so many more ways for scammers, amateur micropresses and vanity publishers to defraud authors that they might very well trumpet that they don’t charge upfront fees. The now-defunct Rain Publishing, for instance, didn’t charge upfront fees, but it took the authors’ copyright. So the truthful declaration of “no upfront fees” may be enough to set writers at so much ease that they don’t ask further questions, like “What kind of distribution does the publisher have?” (And the correct answer is not “Our books are listed online at Amazon.com)

2. “We are a family.”

The claim that authors become part of the publisher’s “family” is a great way to blur the lines of what should be a business relationship. Warm fuzzies feel nice, but they’re rarely a good substitute for professional treatment, and authors who are repeatedly told that they’re part of one big happy family are less likely to evaluate their treatment objectively and to identify when a publisher isn’t doing what publishers should do.

And in commercial publishing, authors aren’t defined as belonging to one publisher's "family". I love George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, but I can’t remember who published them. Bantam Spectra maybe? I’d have to look at the books to be sure.

3. “We do everything our contract says we will do.”

This is one of the primary defenses that PA authors use when their vanity press/author mill is criticized – the fact that PA does everything its contract says it will do. I’m sure this makes PA sound very honest and responsible to anyone who doesn’t ask exactly what the contract specifies PA will do (answer : not a whole lot).

A publisher or vanity press that didn’t do what its contract said it would do probably wouldn’t have lasted long before being sued for breach of contract. But being able to write a contract that allows the publisher to do very little, and then abiding by the terms of that contract, don’t seem like good enough reasons to sign up with that publisher.

4. “We’re not interested in making money.”

An editor for the now-defunct micropress Luna Brilliante said here,

“Our goal was never to get rich off this endeavor. We want to create great works of Speculative Fiction. We want readers clamoring for our books. We want our authors to become well known and do well. If we can at least break even on every book we create, then we're doing just fine.”

This one would send me running, but I’m kind of a mercenary practical person at heart, not to mention concerned about Filthy Lucre money. I once knew a writer who believed art (and the production thereof) should not have financial considerations and restrictions attached to it, so he might have been more at ease with statements like this.

What bothers me about such claims is that if a publisher thinks breaking even is fine, how much does the author earn? Or maybe I should say, does the author earn? I’m a firm believer in writing for love, but publishing for profit, so if I had to choose between a publisher which talks about making authors happy and one which talks about making money, it wouldn’t be too tough a choice.

5. "We want to make your dreams come true."

As a promoter of Rain Publishing once said here,

"Rain Publishing is not producing books; it is creating a mental voyage. A magic carpet ride to escape reality for a moment in time and become one with the written world of thoughtful illusion."

That is very pretty advertising copy. But I'd prefer a publisher which produces books (as well as editing, marketing and distributing them), and I'd rather hear details along these lines than talk which reminds me of "A Whole New World" from Aladdin.

Anything about making my dreams come true turns me off. I want to know about cover blurbs, distribution, print runs, catalogs, advances, royalties and subsidiary rights instead. Magic carpet rides are fun, but they don't pay the bills so well.

Further reading on ripoffs here.

Fantasy and technology

Like many fantasy writers, I was heavily influenced by Tolkien – not so much the quest and Dark Lord aspects of the story as the setting. The Shire and the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood were fascinating, since I was growing up in Dubai, in a city of buildings and pavements, sand and parking lots. I often dreamed of unexplored fields and hills stretching out to a limitless horizon.

Then I started writing. And eventually I realized that I wrote more happily about cities than about the bucolic countryside – partly because I was more familiar with the one than the other but also because technological developments are more likely to occur in a big laboratory in the city than in a Little House on the Prairie.

What’s the appeal of technology in a fantasy, though – especially if it’s not an urban or steampunk fantasy? For me, technology is one way to make a fantasy novel stand out from the crowd. There are hundreds if not thousands of fantasies which take place in the same world, one where all the siege engines are catapults, all the weapons are swords and all the aerial transport is done by dragons. I love tossing a spark of scientific progress into this world, whether that science is chemistry or microbiology or physics, and watching events suddenly turn in another direction.

Technology is one way to make a country change. I don’t mean just from a wasteland dominated by a tyrant to a paradise ruled over by the rightful king, but a more realistic and intriguing evolution, like what’s happening in Ankh-Morpork in the novels Going Postal and The Truth. Inventions could have fascinating effects on societies. Imagine, for instance, two competing and equally powerful families in a city, one of which has invented the printing press while the other has developed gunpowder.

Actually, no need to imagine too much – check out Harry Harrison’s Ethical Engineer, also published as Deathworld 2. And cities seem more capable of absorbing that change and growing in response, whereas environments like the Shire, for all their beauty, seem essentially static to me. They’re like paintings, frozen forever in time.

Even though fantasy seems to be moving away from the “pastoral farms and countryside GOOD, technology and cutting down trees BAD” atmosphere that was pretty strong in the The Lord of the Rings, there’s still a lot of untapped potential in the nomansland where technology and fantasy meet. Real applications of science require research, whereas when I first started writing fantasy, it took no effort at all to have my characters living in villages, traveling through pseudo-English countrysides and fighting with swords. I just hope they didn’t eat lembas too.

Finally, much as I love to imagine waterfalls and lush forests, I had the experience of actually visiting one – a rainforest in Sri Lanka. Although it was beautiful (and I may write rainforest settings into my work some day), it was also crawling with coodallo, or leeches. Just remembering them makes my skin crawl as well. I’m so grateful to be in a clean dry room instead.

(The picture is from the film The Cave Dwellers or Ator the Invincible, best known for its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I love the scene where Ator builds a hang-glider in five minutes)