On Fantasy (Patreon)

Now that the first chapter of ASoSaS (not the greatest of acronyms) is published, I hope you'll indulge me a little rambling about the writing of it.

I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy growing up.  I mean, a lot - it was pretty much all I read.  I'm sure it's all churning away back there in the unconscious depths somewhere - all those Dragonlance novels, the Chronicles of Thomas Covernant the Unbeliever, The Lord of the Rings (obviously), A Wrinkle in Time, Earthsea, and more--so much more.  Then mix in a fairly heavy diet of RPGing, and it's fair to say I was (am) a pretty major dork.

Strangely, though, I don't think I've actually tried writing anything in the Fantasy genre since I was a young teenager.  I don't know why--and I wish I had, because after settling on the vague outlines of the story, these first 15k words have come so easily.  I've played fast and loose with things like worldbuilding and so on, but even then, as I'd drop little nuggets in the prose for future development - the references to the Sisters, for example, or the sacrifice that founded the kingdom, etc...--it really brought back memories of DMing D&D.

(I was pretty much always the DM/GM, not the player.  No surprise there, I guess.)

There's a powerful appeal to crafting a world.  I think with enough time (and motivation) it's something I'd like to do with ASoSaS - really get to grips with the world building, flesh out its history and pantheons and so on, dig into the languages and people rather than (largely) making it up ad hoc as I'm racing throug a scene.  

It's one of the aspects of writing Constant that took me by surprise once I came back to it.  When I first started it, dashing out the original prologue and (I think) most of part one in a single sitting, I wasn't really looking very far ahead.  (Certainly not 17 years ahead!)  It wasn't meant to be a long story.  (200k words later....)  And so, in those original chapters, there isn't much to the world around David Saunders.  It's vaguely set in the future (ie, now considering when I started it) but it was all pretty secondary to the plot and characters.  

Coming back to it now, though, I'm finding the sci-fi-light world building a lot of fun, fleshing out some of the wider world (missons to Mars, geopolitical tensions, etc...) vs the local (what a person's job, neighbourhood or apartment might be like, twenty or thirty years in the future) vs the immediate (what tech and future realities directly impact on the characters, and what might realistically enable the wacky transformations the protagonist and others undergo).

This is the aspect that really makes fleshing out ASoSaS into a full-length story, a sort of 'real' novel, so appealing.  But man, it's also a lot of work, and there's only so many hours in the day.  I don't know if I'll ever get around to expanding it as I'd like, but it's fun to imagine.  The first couple of reviews that have trickled in are encouraging - maybe there's a market for (amateur) full-length fantasy fiction with a strong TG focus.

And so ends the ramble.  Thanks for your patience!