Hand me my sword! A female writer’s thoughts on writing fantasy

Guest post by author M.A. Chiappetta

If you look at the list of fantasy and science fiction authors from the past 50 to 75 years, a majority of those names belong to men. Take, for example, NPR’s list of Top 100 SFF books—85 of those books were written by men. 85 percent!

As you can guess, being a female writer in a world once dominated by men is sometimes a strange place to be. But I wouldn’t change it for anything. I love being a woman who writes fantasy. And that will never change. It doesn’t matter if it’s hard.

You see, the realm of speculative fiction—science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism—is filled with possibilities. It’s a place where magic is real…where you can fly to the moon or Mars. Real-life boundaries like the law of gravity can be bent, changed, or defied. Anything is possible.

I love that!

As a child, I fell in love with fantasy (and to a lesser degree, science fiction)—not only because it introduced me to a view of the world as more wondrous than everyday reality, but also because it reminded me that despite appearances, anyone could end up a hero. You could start out as a poor assistant pig-keeper, yet you could grow up to be High King of Prydain. You could begin as an orphaned girl struggling just to stay alive and end up a dragonrider and Weyrwoman.

Who wouldn’t want that?

And so, I write fantasy now because I remember the enchantment of believing that I could not only achieve great things, but that I could be heroic doing it. I could do something good in a world that is often filled with bad things. That’s a message I believe in sharing.

I do this knowing that there are a lot of people in the world who have problems with women. There is still a significant portion of the reading audience that says: “A woman wrote that? Well, I won’t buy it then. I won’t like it.” It’s a prejudice that doesn’t make a lot of sense. But it exists.

What, some women disagree with the
functionality of a chainmail bikini?

On top of that, there are some ugly stereotypes in the fantasy genre. There’s the “helpless pretty face”—the woman who can’t rescue herself because rescuing is a man’s work. There’s the Disney princess—whose life doesn’t have meaning unless there’s a Prince Charming (a man) around. There’s the chick in chainmail—the woman who wields a sword but does so in a metal bikini because she’s nothing more than eye candy. And there’s the “Strong Female Protagonist”—the girl who is so strong that she never needs anyone’s help.

The truth is that people­ are much more complicated than any of those stereotypes.

One of my goals as a writer is to make sure that all the characters in my stories—male, female, alien, dragon, other—all reflect the complicated traits that make people both maddening and lovable. It’s not easy to create characters who defy stereotypes. But I’m committed to making my character complex, because I think my readers deserve it. And frankly, so do my characters!

So, every day, I approach my writing boldly. I wield my pen as if it were a sword, determined to cut through the stereotypes and prejudices…as well as the self-doubts that plague all artists…and I go forth to write.

It’s a hero’s job, in its own way. And I’m glad to do it.

M.A. Chiappetta is a fantasy writer, copywriter, educator, and blogger with past publications in Blue Shift, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Chat, and Mensa Bulletin. Her most recent short stories are found in the anthology, Dark and Dangerous Things II, available on Amazon. She shares thoughts on writing at Purple Ink Writers and muses on creativity, SFF, laughter, God, and geekdom at The Chipper Muse. You can also find her on Twitter as @chippermuse.

Book launch: Inferno

Book 2 in The Drone Wars
by Frederick Lee Brooke

When 19-year-old Matt Carney saved his girlfriend, Raine, from the crossfire between the government’s increasingly ruthless Homeland Security and March22, a terrorist group taking steps to strike a new, legitimate path, he thought his work was done.

Was he ever wrong.

Kidnapped by the brutal Dark Fiber militia, Matt is shocked to discover he’s been betrayed by those he trusted most. Stranded in an isolated location in the middle of Michigan, far away from the girl he fought so hard to regain, Matt is made March22’s point man in a plot to get control over a cache of thousands of stolen ground-to-air missiles. As time runs out, he’s their last—and best—hope of sparing the country of a heinous attack on commercial aviation that could quickly turn the United States into a permanent war zone.

In this action-packed, explosive follow-up to Saving Raine, the first book in Frederick Lee Brooke’s The Drone Wars, Matt Carney finds himself at the center of a firestorm of stolen missiles, stolen drones, and stolen dirty nukes, tormented by stinging betrayals, clinging to a last hope for love. Sure, he was able to save Raine—but as the inferno rages around him, can he find a way to save the country from further violent chaos…and a way to save himself?

Inferno is available on Amazon now.

About the author

Frederick Lee Brooke launched the Annie Ogden Mystery Series in 2011 with Doing Max Vinyl and followed with Zombie Candy in 2012, a book that is neither about zombies nor sweets. The third mystery in the series, Collateral Damage, appeared in 2013. Saving Raine, the first book in Fred’s entirely new series, The Drone Wars, appeared in December, 2013.

A resident of Switzerland, Fred has worked as a teacher, language school manager and school owner. He has three boys and two cats and recently had to learn how to operate both washing machine and dryer. He makes frequent trips back to his native Chicago.

When not writing or doing the washing, Fred can be found walking along the banks of the Rhine River, sitting in a local cafe, or visiting all the local pubs in search of his lost umbrella.

Steven Montano: shaking up the genres

An independent author interview

Most authors strive to stay within a genre, occasionally mixing horror with romance or science fiction with mystery and throwing in a love interest for good measure. I've never before come across an author who aggressively tosses as many different genres into the mix as Steven Montano, whose Blood Skies series mixes military science fiction, war, occult horror, modern vampires and witchcraft, and animates the mix with supernatural energy. I had to ask him about it.

Steve Montano has published five novels, two short stories and a novella, all set in his fantastic, futuristic and horrific future timeline called Blood Skies, or the World After the Black; he released his latest, Book Five in the series, The Witch’s Eye, just last week (launched on this blog, among others), and he’s hard at work on completing the projected seven-novel cycle.

It’s a demanding self-imposed challenge for a man who is also a full-time professional accountant, a husband and a father of two. On top of that, he blogs regularly and maintains a presence on all the social media.

I had to find out more about his creations and his creative process.

Blood Skies is set in a post-apocalyptic world, but the apocalypse is different from any other I have read: a change in the physical laws that lets magic work and makes once-imaginary creatures like vampires and warlocks real. What was the inspiration for this unique, dark vision?

The idea originally began as a steampunk vampire novel, but I quickly grew tired of trying to write steampunk and instead searched for a way to make it so I could write an “anything goes” world and have it seem believable. Since the single most dramatic change I could think of in regards to how the world worked involved the presence of magic, I started with the notion of a magical apocalypse, and just built on that. I’ve enjoyed developing the setting, as it basically allows me to include whatever “real world” elements I want and just make up the rest.

 

Is there any aspect of your world that you hope readers will recognize in the current one? In other words, are you sounding a warning about anything in particular, or is this just whimsy, total imagination?

I use real-world war events and military history as inspiration for some of the horrors depicted in Blood Skies, and the way that magic is simultaneously feared and relied upon could probably serve as a sort of metaphor for nuclear power, but for the most part I try to play things straight. Maintaining some semblance of realism is important — perhaps even more important when dealing with an entirely fantastical world — so even though my stories deal with vampires and magic and fictional civilizations, I try to keep the characters and the way they behave in their insane surroundings grounded in reality.

 

Your books feature a lot of characters, and are told from multiple points of view. Tell us more about your favourite characters.

That’s difficult, because I’m fond of all of my characters (even the secondary ones) in some form or another. Eric Cross has always been the primary protagonist in the series, but it seems that in every book I come up with a new character I’m partial to, which is usually why I end up extending the narrative and making it so I can tell some of the story from their POV. Danica Black, a former prison warden turned mercenary, has always been compelling to me because she’s more of an anti-hero than Eric, and she comes across as heartless even though she struggles with a dark and tragic past. Mike Kane, a prisoner turned soldier, is a relentless smart-ass who blends heroism with comic relief. Ronan, a swordsman and former assassin, is my “hitman with a heart of gold” character, whose incredibly warped sense of the world is put to the test in The Witch’s Eye when he inadvertently finds himself in the unlikely position of holding what’s left the team together once they’ve all scattered to the wind.

Do you base your characters on real people in your life? If so, are you one of them?

I don’t make my characters exact duplicates of anyone I know in real life, but of course I take aspects of different people’s personalities and blend them into these fictional people. It’s safer that way…if I tell someone I based a character on them, I have to listen to how I got them all wrong. ;D

There’s no question Eric is the most like me (poor guy), but even he and I have our differences. Many of Cross’s insecurities bear a striking resemblance to my own, and he’s the easiest for me to write in terms of knowing how he’ll behave in any given situation, because I feel like he and I are pretty much on the same wavelength. Cross makes his fair share of stupid moves every now and again; one of the reasons I like writing him is because I know I probably would have done the same thing, whereas with some other characters, I’d be tempted to change things up to make it more realistic.

 

How do you handle the challenge of writing from multiple points of view? What makes it hard, and what makes it possible, at all?

Aside from the prologue of Blood Skies, I actually didn’t start writing from a second POV until Book Three, when Cross’s disappearance mandated a new character take over as the eyes and ears for the readers. For me the trick is to keep it simple: if you’re writing from multiple POVs, be sure to make them different enough individuals that the reader never gets confused, and try to use them in such a fashion that it makes sense to switch perspective — i.e. you’re still advancing the story by switching characters, not just re-telling every event from multiple viewpoints.

Blood Skies is the name of both the series and the first novel in it. Did you have such a good experience with the first novel that you decided to expand it into a series, or did you envision a long story arc and plan all the installments in it, first?

The former. The original draft of Blood Skies was actually quite different from how things wound up. As I mentioned before, the first version had strong elements of steampunk, and it was only about half as long as the finished novel. The original draft also had no survivors, so it definitely wasn’t intended to be an ongoing series. ;D

But as I revised and prepared Blood Skies for publication in early 2011, I got hit with a number of ideas for potential sequels, and decided I wanted to leave things more open-ended. Then, just a month before I released the book, I had an avalanche of ideas for Black Scars, so in the end I was very happy I’d decided to give myself the option for writing Book Two and beyond.

Can you describe the story arc? Where are you so far, and where will the next four books go?

Blood Skies (the series) at a glance is about the war between the humans of the Southern Claw and the vampires of the dreaded Ebon Cities, but before long the story turns to humankind’s struggle to protect their world from the dark powers behind The Black, a cataclysmic event that transformed the world into the wastelands it has become.

Blood Skies introduces Eric Cross, the protagonist of the series, and establishes many of the rules of the setting. Black Scars introduces Danica Black and Mike Kane and shows the formation of Cross’s team of mercenaries. Books four to seven (Soulrazor, Crown of Ash, The Witch’s Eye and Chain of Shadows Parts One and Two) chronicle the team’s struggles against the forces behind the creation of The Black. The final three books in the series (Vampire Down, The Ending Dream and Darker Sunset) will deal with the aftermath of the struggle, and show how the team’s victory was anything but complete.

All of your books seem to feature many of the same elements: witchcraft, horror, vampires and a damaged, changing world. Are they all based in the same alternate time-line, or are they different tales, entirely?

I’ve always tried to push the idea that the World After the Black is a conglomerate of multiple realities: the shattered remnants of different worlds, realities, times, or planes of existence having all crashed together with Earth as the focal point. The truth is, no one really knows where most of the elements came from originally — Earth and all of its disparate parts have been forcefully fused into a new paradigm. Part of the reason I did this, honestly, was to enhance the horror of the situation, for it means the world that humans are trapped in is all but impossible to break down and understand.

Do you ever find elements from your novels or from your life as a novelist have an impact on your other identity, as an accountant?

I do wish I had an arcane spirit with me at work, if that’s what you mean. ;D But seriously, the only real effect I find is that I wish I was doing more writing than accounting. With luck, I can continue to move toward that goal.

Do you have plans for any other types of stories outside of the Blood Skies world, or the genre?

This year I plan to publish City of Scars, which I wrote a few years back, the first novel in my epic fantasy Skullborn series. I’ll also eventually publish another stand-alone horror novel called Blood Angel Rising, about a pair of hit-men tracking down a fallen angel. On top of that I’ve written dozens of horror and dark fantasy short stories which I should probably allow to see the light of day at some point.

What is your favourite type of book to read?

I like dark epic fantasy, military sci-fi, and some horror. I enjoy some paranormal romance and urban fantasy, though it has to be taken in short doses. I’m also a sucker for a good murder mystery.

Who would you say are your major influences as a writer?

To this day my biggest influences remain J.V. Jones, China Mieville, Clive Barker, Tanith Lee, John Marco, John Meaney and C.S. Friedman. I’ll eat up pretty much anything those authors write. In the Indie field I’m a huge fan of Michael Hicks, Jon F. Merz, Jen Kirchner, Alan Edwards, Mike Berry, Candice Bundy and that Bruce Blake guy.

If there was one thing about your published work that you could change, what would it be?

I hate that it took me so long to produce those books. ;D I also know my first novel wasn’t as crisply edited as some of my later work, a fact that I plan to remedy as soon as I have some spare time. I’ve toyed with the notion of releasing an Omnibus of the first three novels of the Blood Skies series, and I’ll doubtlessly re-edit the lot before I do that.

Thanks for having me, Scott!

Thank you for coming, Steven.

Steven Montano’s books are all available on Amazon. For a full list, visit his Amazon author page.

And don’t neglect visiting his website, bloodskies.com, his blog, and grab the Ebon Cities Gazette.

Follow Steven on Twitter @Daezarkian

TTC Blog tour- week six: Flash Fiction by Nikki Nofsinger

This week on the Tasha Turner Consulting Virtual Blog Tour, I'm hosting guest blogger Nikki Noffsinger. This week's assignment is something a little more traditional for a blog tour: flash fiction based on a picture.

How did Nikki take a picture of two boys on a picnic table in a golden field to a dark futuristic tale? You'll have to ask her. But enjoy the story, first:

The Promise

"Just promise me something." Deacon asked as he stared into the distance.

"Alright bro." his friend Hayden said with trepidation.

Deacon had been Hayden's best friend since they were babies. Their mothers had been best friends and when they had been both been sent to Sherwood School, it was with each other that they had found solace. To themselves, they were brothers and DNA didn't change that. Hayden looked at Deacon and for the first time he was afraid that he was going to do something that was going to throw their whole lives out of balance.

Deacon was just a hair taller than Hayden. He had thick unruly dark hair and clever but unusual violet colored eyes thanks to his genetics. He was a half-breed like Hayden, but unlike Hayden he had more of his paternal parent's lineage. Hayden was blonde headed and his eyes were almost silver with splinters of gold in them. They both had run from the Sherwood school, which had been more of a prison than a school. They and many others had been placed there because of their "gifts" and genetic encoding.

Deacon's DNA came from an ancient race of aliens that had crash-landed on earth more than eighty years ago, and his mother had been willing to have one of her eggs fertilized with altered sperm that carried the alien DNA.

Hayden had been created with animal hybrid genetics. Already Hayden's senses were heightened. Hayden was a mixture of human and hybrid wolf DNA and the only one to survive it. Like Deacon, their mothers had escaped before giving birth, not willing to give up their children, and had been hidden away for the first eight years of their lives until the Government had found them. Their mothers had been killed and they were sent to Sherwood. A month ago they had escaped, and so far had eluded capture.

"Promise me, Hayden, that you won't let yourself be caught and if they capture me, you'll kill me first." Deacon's voice was quiet but serious.

Hayden's head whipped around, "What the hell, Deacon we're not going to be caught!"

Deacon turned, his eyes swirling "I won't go back to Sherwood. I can't, Hayden. There is something changing in me and I'm scared of it. I don't know if I'm even going to be safe to be around and I need to know that if the worst should happen that you as my brother and friend will do what needs to be done!" he explained almost pleading.

Hayden ran a hand through his hair. How could he promise what Deacon was asking him to do? They both were changing, but Deacon could never hurt anyone. They had both seen the records and the archives. Deacon's alien ancestors had never been violent. Deacon had inherited certain things such as telepathy, telekinesis and an ability to absorb energy. One of the reasons they had left Sherwood was because the scientists had wanted to use him as a weapon.

They both looked over the countryside not knowing where they would go or what lie ahead. For several minutes there was nothing but silence other than the breeze blowing the grass and a few birds over head.

Hayden turned towards his friend, "Okay, if they ever get you or," he swallowed hard, "or you become a danger to yourself or others...I'll do it. I'll put you down but it isn't going to get that far! Do you hear me, Deacon, it will never come to that!"

Deacon smiled sadly,"Let's hope not, Hayden. Let's pray it doesn't."

What Deacon hadn't told his friend was that more and more, he was changing. Dreams that weren't of his past but of someone else's haunted him. Already he was craving blood, because that was what the Krios, the alien stock he was bred from, needed to survive. He didn't want to become a blood-thirsty monster. His mother had always told him that no matter what, he was a good boy. He hoped he would never have to face the day when he would make a liar out of her.

Nikki Noffsinger is a 37 year old mother of 2 who has had a love of books and a passion for writing at an early age. At 35 she embarked on getting her stories out there by getting published and by the time she was 37 she had two E-books published by XoXo Publishing. Aside from books and writing she enjoys time with her family, meeting new and interesting people, cooking, and loves rock music. You can find more about author Nikki Noffsinger at:

• The Author Blog of Nikki Noffsinger
• Nikki Noffsinger on Facebook
• The Realm of Author Nikki Noffsinger
• Nikki’s Thoughts and Stuff
• Nikki Noffsinger on Amazon
• XoXo Publishing, a division of Ninni Group Inc. 572 A College Street, Suite 2 Toronto, ON M6G 1B3 CA
  

During this, the sixth week of the TTC Virtual Blog Tour, she's hosting the racy Laci Paige (hope you've got a working fire extinguisher, Nikki!) 
My guest post on the tour this week is a new installment in my story about the Worst Person in the World. It's on Brad Fleming's blog at http://bradfleming.co.uk/blog/. Visit the whole tour for some great fiction!