Category Archives: The Fictorians

A guest post by Megan Grey.

In retrospect, the signs of my becoming a fantasy/sci-fi writer and proud geek were all there from an early age. The joy I felt Christmas morning when Santa brought my older brother and me Castle Grayskull-the perfect backdrop to any number of adventures with He-Man and She-ra. The summers spent in my friend’s backyard, acting out the rousing adventures of Link from The Legend of Zelda. Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence is the note I found from my late grandmother, which references a story I wrote at the tender age of five and titled “Battle for the Unknown Universe.”

Despite these auspicious beginnings, however, I remained mostly uninterested in fantasy or sci-fi through middle school. I was always an avid reader, but my books of choice were standard fare for the time-stories about girls and their horses, or girls and their babysitting clubs

All this changed in seventh grade, when my dad introduced me to a series entitled The Lord of the Rings.

I can hear you already. “Oh, wow. A fantasy writer who was inspired by Lord of the Rings. I’ve never heard that before.” And I get it. Fantasy is a field rife with Middle-Earth wannabes. In some cases, they are great novels all their own, adding their own unique perspective to the genre, and in others, well… not so much.

There’s a reason for all the Tolkien love, and quite simply, it’s because Lord of the Rings is awesome, in the truest sense of the word. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I soon discovered that my dad didn’t bring home these books for me, the avid reader of the family. No, he bought them for my older brother, a high-schooler who played guitar in a heavy metal band and whose reading, I was fairly certain, consisted primarily of lyrics to Poison songs.

Surely my father was suffering from early-onset senility, thinking that my brother was the better candidate for this intimidating-looking series whose covers promised adventure and magic.

This couldn’t stand. So I, in an effort to show my misguided father who was clearly the smarter sibling, decided I would be the one to read those thick books filled with faintly archaic language and weird little poems first.

I swiped Fellowship of the Ring from my brother’s nightstand and started reading that very day. I admit I didn’t get into it right away. A birthday party for a one-hundred-and-eleven-year-old hobbit didn’t exactly pique my interest at twelve years old. But by the time the Ringwraiths showed up to attack our intrepid band of heroes at Weathertop, I was hooked.

For the first time in my life, I not only enjoyed and was entertained by a series of books, but I lived them. I stood beside Frodo, eyes wide with horror as Gandalf disappeared into the chasm in the mines of Moria. I trod silently through the beautiful and mysterious forest of Lothlorien. I rode on the massive branches of Ents, and triumphed in Saruman’s downfall. I swung my sword beside Eowyn and defeated the Witch-king of Angmar. I begged Frodo to cast the ring into the fires of Mount Doom. I stared solemnly out to sea, watching the ship that bore Frodo, Bilbo, and Gandalf from Middle-Earth disappear into the horizon.

And when I turned the very last page, I wept. I was certain I could never experience something that pure and soul-thrilling again.

Fortunately, though, I discovered that the bookstores had a whole section of fantasy books, full of worlds in which I could surround myself with wonder and magic. Worlds where I could discover who I really was, by living the lives of characters I wasn’t. I devoured every fantasy book I could get my hands on-books by great authors such as Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, David Eddings, Guy Gavriel Kay, Raymond E. Feist, Robert Jordan, and many more. Slowly but surely, I made my way across the speculative fiction aisle to discover the joys of sci-fi as well, beginning with Orson Scott Card’s excellent Ender’s Game.

What began as a healthy dose of sibling rivalry become an important part of who I am-not only a reader of speculative fiction, but a writer whose books will hopefully provide worlds that readers want to live in and characters they yearn to sorrow and triumph alongside.

Thanks, Dad, for bringing The Lord of the Rings into my life. And thanks to my big brother, for providing me the competitive push I needed to read it.

For the record, my brother is now a well-respected university professor with two master’s degrees and a PhD, so it turns out he was the smarter sibling, after all.

But I totally finished Lord of the Rings first.

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Megan Grey currently lives in Calgary, Alberta with her husband, two kids, and two yappy dogs. Her story “To Be Remembered” won the Editor’s Pick Grand Prize in a fiction contest for the Animism: The God’s Lake animated TV series and will be featured in an upcoming anthology. She has received two honorable mentions and a semi-finalist award for short stories in the Writers of the Future contest.

Stockholm Syndrome Barbie

May 14, 2013

fictorians

Guest Posts Kim May The Writing Life No Comments

A guest post by Kim May.

For some people, the call to write came late in life. For me, storytelling has been a favorite pastime for as long as I can remember. Really, it has. Now, I’m not just referring to the stories that my folks read to me-though they do play a part. I’m talking about the stories I told as a kid.

That time I told my mom’s friend that I was chased around the house with a butcher knife? Much to my mom’s friend’s relief, that was storytelling.

All those times I lied to my mom so I could place the blame on one of my siblings? Yup. That was storytelling too.

All the hours I played Barbie dolls with my little sister? You better believe it.

You see, our Barbie dolls weren’t content to sit at home and mother all the My Little Ponies, She-Ra, and Rose Petal Place dolls. They had to have fantastic adventures in far-off lands. One of our favorites was a spinoff of Cinderella. First of all, since neither of us wanted to take a back seat to the other, everything was done in duplicate. That meant we had two Cinderellas and two princes (for some reason, we never doubled up on the villains). Rather than sit around and wait for the princes to find them after the ball, our Cinderellas snuck into the palace, knocked the princes unconscious with a thunder egg, kidnapped them, and had a Stockholm-syndrome happily ever after.

Now, you have to keep in mind that I was about eight years old and had no idea that what we were playing out was morally wrong. For us, it was just a fun and empowering twist on a favorite tale. The fact that it gave us an excuse to hog-tie Ken was a bonus.

When we weren’t infringing on the Geneva Convention, we play-acted/discovery-wrote stories that borrowed elements from our favorite books and movies. Those world building skills came in handy in the sixth grade when I had to write a short story for an English assignment. Most of my classmates wrote about their dog or about a stupid, annoying younger sibling that bore a strong resemblance to their own. I, however, had no interest in writing the same story as everyone else. After drawing on Barbie skills, my story ended up being about two talking flowers that were going to save the world after they finished having tea.

In high school, even though I hadn’t touched my dolls for years, I drew on those skills again for another short story assignment. This time I wrote a paranormal YA story-twenty years before it became cool, I might add.

You would think that I would have figured out by then that it was my fate to be a writer. Nope. That realization didn’t come until college. After bopping between eight different science majors, the only thing that didn’t change was my desire to minor in writing. Unfortunately, that was also around the time my life took a sharp turn for the worse. I won’t depress you with the details. Suffice to say, when life turned back around the first thing I did was sit down and write.

I love being a writer. I get to sit down with my characters-my imaginary dolls-every day and take them on fantastic adventures in wondrous places. If those adventures take a turn for the weird, and they most likely will, all the better.

* * *

Kim May writes sci-fi and fantasy but has been known to pen a gothic poem or two. She works at an independent bookstore and dog/house sits on the side. A native Oregonian, she lives with her geriatric cat, Spud, and spends as much of her free time as she can with family and friends. She recently won The Named Lands Poetry Contest. If you would like to find out what she’s working on, please visit her blog.

Make It So: A Twelve-Year-Old’s Head Start

May 13, 2013

Evan Braun

Evan Braun The Writing Life 1 Comment

On a schoolyard in 1993, I made a new friend. His name was Joey, and he introduced me to Star Trek. Without seeing a single episode, I began to learn about the Starship Enterprise. It was like hearing the Gospel for the first time. I started by watching some of the Star Trek movies. I remember going with Joey to the local video store. While browsing the shelves, he explained to me those basic tenets of the Star Trek feature series that now seem as constant and self-evident as the lunar cycle, the length of day, and the colour of the sky-the odd movies are good, the even ones are bad. So we started with Star Trek II, which proved successful, if not completely a deal-sealer.

I was reluctant to share this interest with my family, because I had a sense that they would not endorse it. Little did I know that my mother had grown up watching Kirk and Spock on her family’s television-a piece of technology still mostly shunned in the 1960s by most people in the religious community where she grew up. Yes, my mother’s family was quite worldly, a fact which I am somewhat proud of.

My parents were tolerant of my interest in Star Trek, and so it was that I began catching episodes here and there on television. This was the early 1990s, of course, so the episodes I saw were reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation-and I quickly grew to love it. There is one episode that sticks in my mind. I’m not a hundred percent certain it’s the first episode I saw, but it’s definitely the one that sealed the deal. It was called “Remember Me,” a fourth season episode featuring Dr. Crusher’s escape from a warp bubble. (I’m sure that sounds like Chinese to some, but it makes perfect sense to me.)

The result is that in 1995, at the age of twelve, I wrote a full-length novel. It was set in the Star Trek universe and it was called “Warring Factions.” Oh my goodness, it is a travesty of epic proportions. I say it’s set in the Star Trek universe, but I had the unmitigated gall to invent my own new ship, and a whole new crew. Eighteen years later, I have only the vaguest recollections of the plot, but I’ve been too embarrassed to actually read it (it even has an alien character named “Hamlit,” ugh). I may never read it. A year later, I wrote a follow-up called “Nightstalker.” This one mingled my invented crew with the cast of Star Trek: Voyager, a bizarre mashup which makes precisely zero sense.

As terrible as those books are, within them are over 100,000 words, interspersed with correctly placed commas, period, and apostrophes (also a fair share of incorrectly placed semicolons). These books gave me a powerful head start, and I doubt any of it would have happened without Star Trek.

Ever since, my progression into the world of genre publishing has been characterized by an attempt to eradicate Star Trek tropes from my writing-not that they’re bad, but because they’re so very distinctive. Remember what I said about the warp bubble? Well, in my early fiction I had a tendency to write about the positronic reconfiguration of the neutrino assembly, or the baryon- particle causation effect in the warp field capacitor. Trekkers affectionately refer to this as technobabble.

But there are a lot of things that Star Trek did right, lessons it taught me and which have served me well over the years. For one thing, Star Trek, at its best, did a good job of balancing sci-fi premises with compelling character drama. After all, just about every form of fiction, whatever genre it falls into, must have a strong character component. Star Trek also taught me about immersing the story and the characters in the setting, and finding ways to actively integrate and bring to life the environment in which a story takes place.

Star Trek was powerfully inspirational to me, in more ways than I can count. It’s something I return to constantly, and it always gives me a creative boost.

Ultimately, Star Trek imbued me with an appreciation of style and setting, but when it comes to story and structure… well, that’s a post for another day. May 27, to be exact. I’ll see you then!

The Beginnings of the Quest

May 11, 2013

fictorians

Guest Posts The Writing Life No Comments

A guest post by Martin Greening.

In seventh grade, a classmate of mine gave a presentation on his comic book collection. I had read a comic or two prior, but had never even considered collecting them in plastic bags with backing boards to keep them fresh and unbent. That Christmas, I asked for one thing from Santa, my parents, anyone: I asked for comics so I could start my own collection.

A few months later, while strolling through the aisles of the local comic book Mecca, I first discovered The Holt. What is The Holt, you ask? Only a gnarled tree in the midst of a great forest. Within the boughs of this tree lay magically shaped rooms that were home to a tribe of elves known as the Wolfriders. I had discovered Elfquest, by Wendy and Richard Pini, and it would be the start of a long and loving relationship.

The original story introduced such great heroes as Cutter, also known as The Blood of Ten Chiefs, his trusty companion Skywise, and twisted creatures like Winnowill and Madcoil. Cuuter and Skywise, along with their small tribe, are forced to embark on a trek from their idyllic woodland home. A trek that would eventually lead them on a quest to find their true origins. The story has all the makings of traditional Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell would be proud.

The Pinis shopped Elfquest around to the major comic publishers, but received no bites other than a tiny independent comic called Fantasy Quarterly. The first issue of Elfquest appeared in that comic in 1978, but the Pinis felt they could do better. They founded WaRP Graphics and published the rest of the story themselves. Since then, Elfquest has appeared under the banners of Marvel, DC, and now Dark Horse (for the upcoming Final Quest storyline). The Pinis’ tale is one of the great success stories in self-published comics.

Not long after devouring the four large graphic novels (which dominated the top of the fantasy and science fiction section at Waldenbooks) that comprised the original story, I came across a copy of the Elfquest Roleplaying Game by Chaosium. Yes, I was a roleplayer, Dungeons and Dragons and all that. It’s my brother’s fault. You try growing up in the same room as a sibling who is three years your elder and not absorb whatever he is in to. That game opened new doors for me. Along with my good friend Dennis, we created our own tribe of elves (called the Kindred). We created our own stories that featured the likes of Stormpoint and his daughter Springmist and the tribe chief Swiftscent (Dennis’s character). All kinds of things found their way into our stories, including a clawed glove that was exactly like the one Lion-O donned in Thundercats and even a dark elf (courtesy of R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt) we named Orebender (because he could magically shape rock and metal).

On a side note, the Elfquest Roleplaying Game had character silhouettes so you could draw your own characters. My art skills have long deteriorated, but I’ve kept the drawings of many of the Kindred, which I’m happy to share below. Looking at them is a doorway into the past and brings memories of good times with friends, both real and imaginary.

Sadly, my friend and I never wrote down any of the adventures of Stormpoint, but I still dream of their tales and parts of them find their way into my writing every now and then. Perhaps someday I will get around to chronicling their story.

To bring my story full circle (which is sort of ironic, as one Elfquest saga is titled “Kings of the Broken Wheel”), in 2012 I was fortunate enough to attend the Superstars Writing Seminar in Las Vegas. During one of the evening meet-and-greets, I sat next to one of the faculty whom I did not know, James A. Owen (who also contributed a guest post here at the Fictorian Era). We chatted for a bit about how he is a comic artist and novelist and eventually the conversation turned to Elfquest. It turned out James was a huge fan, so much so that he wrote the introduction to the second volume of the Elfquest Archives, put out by DC comics (it’s the one with the dark blue cover in the below pic).

That brief connection has rekindled my love of Elfquest and the stories I created as a child. The first thing I did after that seminar was go home and dig out Volume 2 to read his introduction. (By the way, James is an inspirational guy who has written about his journey in a fantastic book called Drawing Out The Dragons).

So there you have it. Elfquest: one of the works that has influenced me. You can read it online for free at www.elfquest.com. Maybe it will spark something in you as well.

* * *

Martin Greening hails from Southern California and has been drawn to fantasy and science fiction from a young age. He is currently working on a fantasy adventure novel and several short stories. Martin lives in Sin City working as a IT guru by day and a dreamer of the fantastic at night. He can be found at www.martingreening.com.