The Feathered Edge: A Woman Warrior's Tale

Last year I began this series on "the stories behind the stories" in this anthology of marvelous fantasy stories I was privileged to edit. I got about halfway through when life in the form of writing deadlines intervened. So I'm going to repost them and hopefully finish the series, then put them together in a companion volume. to The Feathered Edge.

"The Woman Who Fell In Love With The Horned King" is the second story with a woman warrior-as-champion/paladin. One of the most interesting things about putting together these anthologies of romantic, swashbuckling fantasy (2 volumes of Lace and Blade, and now The Feathered Edge: Tales of Magic, Love, and Daring) is the synchronicity -- or parallelism -- or "great minds work alike" thematic resonances. The first had 2 stories about Spanish highwaymen, and the second had 2 stories with Chinese generals. I'm not in the least surprised, but I am delighted and a bit awestruck by the way life works. The cover for The Feathered Edge could illustrate either this story or Sean McMullen's "Culverelle." You get to pick.

Now to the story. No, wait, background! I've loved Judith Tarr's work since I picked up A Wind In Cairo when it first came out. The horse got me into the book, as I'm a sucker for well-written horse characters, but the sheer mastery of storycraft, the depth and nuance, the use of language, all kept me wanting more. ( Read more... )

Thoughts On Long Form Fantasy... as in trilogy-plus

I've been deep in the throes of reviewing copy-edits for the longest work I've ever attempted. Actually, the first volume of it. The story began with a short piece for Sword and Sorceress, back when Marion edited it. I'd been reading about the Scythians, nomadic warlike horse people who kept the Romans at bay for many years, so I used that cultural tension for "The Spirit Arrow." The world and its peoples kept drawing me back, so I wrote 3 other "Azkhantian tales." And, eventually, a trilogy. Oh, around 400,000 words total. The first book, The Seven-Petaled Shield, comes out from DAW in June, with the other 2 at about 6-month intervals.

Now, "Shield" isn't a series. It's one long story that took 3 books to tell, like The Lord of the Rings. No one would ever describe that work as a series. But I found swan_tower's observations just as valid for this long form as for a "set" (same world, maybe same characters, stand-alone stories) or a series. Come to think of it, her insights work for single novels as well...

Originally posted by swan_tower at How to write a long fantasy series

On the basis of my re-read, and comparing to other series that attempt similar tasks, I have come to believe there is a single, fundamental principle, underlying all the other points I’ll make throughout this post, which governs the author’s ability to keep the narrative from spinning wildly out of control, to the detriment of their story.

It’s simple:

PICK A STRUCTURE, AND STICK TO IT.

Most of us, when we set out to write a novel, have at least a vague sense of how long it’s going to be. We can be off in that estimate -- In Ashes Lie ran about thirty thousand words longer than I originally intended -- but generally speaking, you know that you’re aiming for 60K or 100K or 200K, and you use that to guide a thousand decisions you make along the way. Should you introduce new subplots, or is it time to start tying things up? Does your protagonist’s next action need some complications along the way, or would it be better to just handle it offscreen and move on to more important things? Can you bring in a new character for this strand, or should you find a way to take care of things with the characters you already have? These are questions of pacing, and we’ll come back to that a bunch of times along the way. But you can’t gauge your pace when you don’t know how long the race will be: at best, you’ll end up going through the whole thing with a steady, slogging, workhorse pace that (to switch metaphors) loses all sense of dynamics.