Category Archives: Fantasy Fiction

Celtic culture, Fantasy Fiction, Writing

Like a waterfall

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Greenville2

I’m in the Zone, folks. It’s finally come together. I’ve achieved cruising speed on my latest wip, as ideas, dialogue, and action are flowing onto the laptop like a waterfall. My characters and I are finally on speaking terms, even to the point where they nudge me to point out what I need to have them say and do next. Man, what a feeling. This is what writers live for.

Gone are the gruesome hours of agonizing over the major plot points. You know what it’s like: The protag can’t do that. He wouldn’t react that way. And why the hell would our villain do that? She’s not stupid.

And so on. I’m almost in that other-worldly state you see in movies about painters, song-writers, and authors where they’re possessed by their muse, and their wip just flows out of them in a burst of feverish activity. That’s not the way it really works, but you get the idea. Rent Moulin Rouge ( the one with José Ferrer, not Tom Cruise’s first ex) to see what I mean. Great movie. Lousy role model for writers.

Anyway, my latest wip is about Appalachian folk magic in an urban setting. So far, it’s been a blast. Here’s the list of books I’ve read or re-read as background:

Cracker Culture Grady McWhiney
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America David Hackett Fischer
At Home in Dogwood Mudhole Franklin Sanders
Grammatical Man Jeremy Campbell
The Story of North Carolina Dr. Alex Arnett
The Other Irish Karen F. McCarthy
Our Father’s Fields James Kibler
The Making of a Cop Harvey Rachlin
A History of the South Francis Simkins & Charles Roland

And last but certainly not least:

The Golden Bough Sir James George Frazer

Underlying all this research is a bit of family history you probably wouldn’t believe, but which I’ll discuss fully once the book is out. Then there are my excursions into Charlotte’s extensive creek walks at weird hours. One thing that’s always fascinated me is how familiar things transform come nightfall. More on that later.

Further updates to follow. Right now, it’s time for bed. Yes, it’s been that intense.

Aztec Midnight, Book review, Fantasy Fiction

Cristian Mihai Reviews Aztec Midnight

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From Cristian Mihai: “This novella is one hell of a roller coaster ride. It’s got just the right amount of suspense, well delivered, to make me want to get to the end as soon as possible. The dialogue is excellent, the plot flows in a natural manner. The story works. It just does.”

Read the rest of Aztec Midnight: a novella by M.C. Tuggle at Cristian Mihai’s blog.

Fantasy Fiction, Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard

Lovecraft and Howard and the Forces of Chaos

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CthuluRising
I have an article up at the traditionalRIGHT blog:

Both Howard and Lovecraft saw civilization and order as not only fragile but necessarily short-lived. In the fictional worlds these imaginative writers created, the values and beliefs that made life possible had to be defended against forces of chaos that inevitably had the upper hand. What counted was the protagonist’s resolve and dedication.

Read the rest at traditionalRIGHT.

Fantasy Fiction, Writing

Best Fiction and Writing Blogs

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Brundage1
The week’s best “how-to” articles compiled by margaret

Jacqueline Seewald: Setting the Scene
Holly Lisle: Freeing Up the Subconscious in Writing
Grady Brown: SUPERPOWER: ENERGY MANIPULATION (I could use that!)
A Vase of Wildflowers: Links for Readers and Writers
Cindy Knoke: It’s Home to The Holler We Go! (Nothing like dazzling pictures of exotic wildlife to inspire you)
Nicola Alter: Accepting the Existence of Magic (How to do magic right in your stories)

Fantasy Fiction, Flannery O'Connor, Robert E. Howard, Southern Fiction

Robert E. Howard, Southern Writer

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The Abbeville Institute, a site dedicated to Southern arts, has published my article on Robert E. Howard. Here’s a sample:

“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” Flannery O’Connor

The Southern Gothic tradition, as pioneered by such writers as William Faulkner and Carson McCullers, as well as O’Connor, is noted for its stinging indictment of modern life. Southern Gothic tales feature shocking violence and criminality committed by bizarre, larger-than-life characters clawing for survival in a society that has broken down. Magical and supernatural forces often intervene in unexpected ways.

Read the rest at Abbeville Review, and like it here.

Aztec Midnight, Fantasy Fiction

We Are Not The World

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MexicanChurch

Sarah Hoyt reminds us how presumptuous and simply wrong-headed it is to imagine the rest of the world is just like us, only dressed differently. As she puts it, “I don’t think anyone realizes just how different the texture of life is elsewhere.”

She’s right. My wife and I spent three weeks in a village in central Mexico where I researched Aztec Midnight. Though I’d been in the country before, I was not prepared for what I encountered.

The locals we met were extremely hospitable, generous, and eager to talk to us. I admired how social they are — we attended a birthday party for a 75-year-old man we’d just met, and our hosts kept offering us homemade rum and beer, pastries, and enchiladas. They love to fiesta.

But Mexicans are indeed different. There’s a certain Mexican attitude that encompasses both cheerfulness and fatalism, and it’s expressed with a grin and a shrug of the shoulders. Their national character is a striking contrast to American triumphalism.

The more we learn about others, the more we can appreciate who we are.

Fantasy Fiction

Why we need fairy tales now more than ever

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Mystical
Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, argues that fairy tales aren’t just for kids, though these stories do teach children  that the world is a rough and tumble place full of hurt and strife. These stories also remind us we are capable of courageous and intelligent action that enables us to cope with the challenges of life:

The point is that myths don’t need happy endings; they are not ways of resolving the unfairness of our experience or the frustration of our emotions. They provide a framework for imagining our human situation overall. But the fairy tale has its roots in a mixture of what Warner calls “honest harshness” and “wishful hoping”, depicting the hardest challenges we face as human beings and the possibility of “alternative plot lines”, ways out or through. But when we become culturally more suspicious of ways out, something changes: stories have to be coloured with a tragic palette, a recognition of what can’t be wished away.

I’d add that the same holds true for all fiction. Like religious faith, good literature not only opens us to beauty and contemplation, but to the central message of human existence: that there are things beyond our control, but we are never alone nor helpless in facing life’s challenges.

Fantasy Fiction, Writing

The Magic of the Everyday

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Rosemary

“There is a rule for fantasy writers: the more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.” – Diane Duane, via A Writer’s Path

Anne Leonard offers some great advice for fantasy writers in the current  io9 that echoes Diane Duane’s invaluable maxim:

I still really like epic fantasy, and especially the world-building part. What I’ve come to realize, though, is that for me world-building is necessary but not sufficient to suck me into the story; for the epic to be epic, it needs to be set against the mundane. By “mundane” I mean “worldly as opposed to spiritual,” rather than the more colloquial usage implying boredom and dullness. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote about “exoticizing the domestic,” and I think that concept is what makes for really good fantasy and speculative fiction. The writer takes the ordinary and twists it, or puts it into a different context.

The term “exoticizing the domestic” brings to mind Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin, one of the greatest fantasy stories ever. The movie will rattle you, and the book will make your head explode. What makes it so relentlessly creepy is the way it piles on odd but apparently explainable details that, by themselves, appear ordinary, but add up to a tsunami of horror. In the opening, a helpful elderly man shows Rosemary and her husband Guy around the exclusive Bramford apartment building. He taps the elevator button, and Rosemary notices he’s missing part of his finger. They find a beautiful apartment where they stop and puzzle over a massive dresser blocking the door to a closet. When they manage to move the dresser and open the closet door, they find … nothing out of the ordinary. They take the apartment, and feel lucky to get it. After all, this is Manhattan.

Weeks later, at night, Rosemary hears the neighbors through the walls. She thinks they sound like they’re chanting … but Guy doesn’t believe her. And then … well, you know what happens next: a cultural phenomenon.

I rejected the idea of introducing the magical elements of Aztec Midnight in a prologue for just that reason. Not only would that have made the story less accessible, it would have been overkill. The interior of Mexico is a haunted, brooding place alive with tragic stories and populated by a stoic, courageous people. I wanted to capture the region’s dark magic, and the best way to do that was to show its effects without heavy-handed explanation.

Anne Leonard’s point is that a smart writer positions the ordinary into stories to lure the reader into a recognizable world. Once they’re in, the magic you unveil will be more believable.

Fantasy Fiction, Lovecraft

The Call of Lovecraft

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Now this is fun! Take an armchair tour of Providence, Rhode Island, where H.P. Lovecraft lived most of his life. It’s eerie to see the actual sites from Lovecraft’s home town that made their way into so much of his fiction. The accompanying text shows real understanding of this tortured but gifted author’s work and vision.

Be careful, though — the Old Ones are always near. And Cthulhu doesn’t like to have his dreams interrupted.