Guest Post: Looking Around the Corner From Epic to Urban and Beyond
What's
it like making a jump from epic to urban fantasy (and beyond that, to
steampunk)? Exciting, scary and
fun--sort of like your favorite amusement park ride. And best of all for a
writer, challenging.
I've
written eight epic fantasies, big, thick 600 page adventures sprawling across
kingdoms and continents, filled with necromancers and mages, monsters and
magic, armies, battles, intrigue and scandal. The most recent is Reign of Ash, sequel to Ice Forged, in my Ascendant Kingdoms
series from Orbit, and before that, my Chronicles of the Necromancer series
from Solaris.
It's so
much fun to paint with words on the huge canvas that epic fantasy requires.
Story arcs are big, enemies are ruthless on a large scale, problems have to be,
well, epic in size. It's an absolute
blast to be the man behind the curtain, the wizard of your own Oz, pulling the
levers and running the show. I have no
desire to stop writing epic fantasy--and there are still several more books
under contract.
But
there were other stories that I really wanted to tell, and they demanded
different settings. My Deadly Curiosities urban fantasy
novel/series from Solaris is set in modern-day Charleston, SC. It grew out of a
short story I wrote for their Magic:
Esoteric and Arcane anthology, and a world I developed for stories I had
done in many other anthologies. Deadly Curiosities is about a 350 year-old
antique and curio shop that exists to get dangerous magical items off the
market and out of the wrong hands. And it absolutely required a setting other
than epic fantasy in order to do the stories justice.
Then
there's the steampunk novel, Iron and Blood, coming up in 2015 with Solaris and I'm
co-authoring with my husband, Larry N. Martin.
It's grown out of a fascination with a particular city and it takes a
supernatural twist on steampunk. It had to be a certain "when" and a
certain "where." The story
wouldn't settle for anything else.
One of
the things that is so much fun about all this is that as an author, it's a bit
like having to shift between ballet, tango and hip-hop styles, or between three
different style of martial arts, or speaking three different languages
sequentially. It's a hell of a mental exercise, creative jujitsu, and it's an
exciting challenge.
The epic
fantasies and the steampunk are third-person narrative. The urban fantasy is
first-person. The epics and steampunk have male protagonists and strong female
secondary characters. The urban fantasy has a female protagonist/point-of-view
character with some seriously kick-ass male secondary characters. In the epic
series, the worlds were entirely of my own creation, so I didn't have to
reconcile anything with real historical facts.
The urban fantasy is set in a real city, and while I take some liberties
and fudge some details for the sake of artistic license, I still have to
respect the bulk of Charleston's history and its past and current geography in
order to be true to the city as a setting. In the steampunk book, I'm doing an
alternate history of the city, but I that means tweaking and twisting its
history, not ignoring it all together. When it's all said and done, it still
has to feel authentic to the people who live there now.
Even
magic changes its flavor as I dance between the genres. Epic fantasy magic is
on as grand a scale as the rest of the story, with sorcerer-caliber power that
can destroy armies or whole kingdoms. In my urban fantasy, the magic is more
subtle, sneakier, a combination of curses, restless ghosts, emotional
resonance, and stone tape as well as demons, demonic minion monsters, Voodoo
priests, psychometry and more. In the steampunk books, magic takes a Victorian sensibility,
dangerous but with decorum, a Marquis of Queensbury death dealing that tips its
hat before trying to blow you into the hereafter.
At the
end of the day, my goal is to make sure that readers have even more fun reading
the books than I have writing them. I want to take you on a wild ride, show you
some wonders, and skid full-speed into the conclusion so that you've got one
thought: "Damn that was fun--let's do it again!"
-----------------------
Gail Z. Martin, Deadly Curiosities, June 2014
About
the Author: Gail Z. Martin writes epic and urban fantasy, steampunk and short
stories. She is the author of the Chronicles of the Necromancer series, the
Fallen Kings Cycle series and the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga series of epic
fantasy books, as well as the Deadly Curiosities urban fantasy world and coming
in 2015, Iron and Blood, a Steampunk
novel, co-written with Larry N. Martin. Gail is a frequently contributor to US
and UK anthologies. She also writes two series of ebook short stories: The Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures and the Deadly Curiosities Adventures.
Find her
at www.ChroniclesOfTheNecromancer.com, on Twitter @GailZMartin, on Facebook.com/WinterKingdoms,
at DisquietingVisions.com blog and GhostInTheMachinePodcast.com. She leads
monthly conversations on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/GailZMartin and posts free excerpts of her
work on Wattpad http://wattpad.com/GailZMartin. Read the new free novella, The Final Death, in
the Deadly Curiosities universe on Wattpad—the link is here: http://www.wattpad.com/story/15334006-the-final-death
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