mattcolville
Adventurer
I wrote novel, a fantasy novel, available now via Kindle. It's hard for me to describe, probably because I'm so close to it, but it's sort of a tough-guy, hard-boiled, short, fantasy novel with a lot of character, dialog, and action. It's not long, between 300 and 350 pages and most people get through it in two or three sittings.
But there's a layer in it that's hard to describe. It's not just about tough guys and solving a mystery. There's a deep emotional component to it and one, so far, I feel I've pulled off successfully. I felt like there wasn't much point in me writing a Fantasy novel if I didn't have something to say in the genre, and this is me trying to present the archetypes of fantasy in a personal way. A human way.
Before I get into the whys and wherefores, I figured I'd justify this thread by sharing my self-publishing experience thusfar. Here's what I've learned.
Initially, the book was available via Kindle and for free off my website. I tracked who was going where and the conclusion I reached was: Free vs Not Free doesn't make a difference. What made a difference was the medium. In other words, people who enjoy reading PDFs on computer screens went and downloaded the free PDF. People who preferred reading on their Kindle or iPhone, or iPad or Android (or whatever, you can get the Free Kindle app) paid for the Kindle version. It seems like $5 is the threshold for most people. Less than $5 is a trivial expense for most people, more than $5 and people start thinking about it.
Of all the people who've said they were interested, but didn't read it, the #1 reason...so far, really, the only reason, is the lack of a Print Version. No matter how much you believe in the e-book revolution (and I believe in it quite a lot, as an author and a reader) a lot of people still prefer the print version. So right now I'm looking into getting an ISBN. If I buy an ISBN, I can use Amazon's own Print on Demand service and then people can buy the physical book as well. Keen!
My original plan was to write the novel and then before I promoted it, commission some art for it. Not just cover art, illustrations. I strongly feel that good illustrations and lots of 'em are the best way to both convey the tone and content of your book quickly, and attract a potential reader's attention.
But after I'd written the thing, I found myself desperately saving my money as I'd just started my own video game company and the less money I spent, the longer we'd be able to last. So apart from linking to the book in my sig, I did no real promotion.
Here's where things get interesting. I'm a forum hobbyist and I've got a relatively popular blog and between the two of these things, people started reading the book. Mostly the free version.
One of those people was Tim Denee. He a brilliant graphic designer whom some of you may know from the Dwarf Fortress Saga of Bronzemurder.
Tim and I are on the same forum and he checked out the book. As he puts it he was A: skeptical of fantasy in general and B: SUPER skeptical of self-published authors. But for whatever reason he gave my novel a shot, and he loved it. Blew him away. I found this out when he posted about the book on his blog with a link to the cover he'd done for me, for free.
You can see that cover on the Amazon.com page. That's Tim's cover. When I saw it, I was ridiculously happy.
I had some notion, as I said, of paying someone to do a traditional fantasy cover, but Tim's design is so brilliant I was compelled to use it. The color is carefully chosen. Green is a color of some importance in the book for several reasons. The font for the title was inspired to and the kind of thing that made me look at my own work anew.
I describe the book as a Hard Boiled fantasy, but Tim got a very Western vibe off it and as soon as I saw that cover, I realized that vibe runs throughout the whole book. It has a lot in common with a Western. I count Robert B. Parker as a major influence. He wrote about 50 million hard boiled detective novels in the Raymond Chandler vein. Some extremely geeky person once described Parker as a "Chandler ghola."
After I saw Tim's cover, I realized that while I was writing Priest, I'd been reading a lot of Parker's Western series. Appaloosa, Resolution, Brimstone. They made a movie out of Appaloosa. That obviously had a big impact on me and I wasn't even aware of it. This is the power of art.
The skull on the cover is also a powerful image that *brilliantly* captures the tone of the book and also provides a colossal level of foreshadowing. Something no illustration could have done. It's the kind of thing that doesn't make any literal sense when you see it but, as you read, I think it would seep into your consciousness and sort of...tell you how the book ends. I suspect many people would read it and come out the other end still not 100% sure what that skull is doing on the cover.
So that's the power of self-publishing. Obviously the work has to inspire people, but if it does, they want to help. Tim wanted to help because he knew I was doing it alone, and he was inspired. I got a free cover out of the deal. That's important. It's incredibly small, compared to a publisher, but people want to see you succeed. They help.
I recently got a message from another forumite who works at a publishing house (I believe as a copy-editor) and was reading the book and enjoying it a lot and volunteered to copy-edit it for me. Hey, free editor!
I haven't gotten his feedback yet, my current plan is to reward every reader who finds a typo with a special thanks in the back of the book. "Find a typo, let me know! Come back and find your name below!" That's the power of e-publishing, I can create a new version of the book in a moment. Crowdsource copy-editing!
I do things you were taught not to do in grade school. I do these things on purpose as they are the style I've developed over many years. But a copy-editor would frown on it, so we'll see what I get back. What I crave, and what I cannot get via self-publishing, is the benefit of a professional editor who's worked for years in my genre, and wants to work with me to make the book the best it can be. Not fix typos, but question my judgement, challenge my ideas. That's the kind of thing you can only get with a publishing deal. I have lots of *friends* who would love to do that for me, but editing an RPG book is not the same as working at Del Rey for 15 years, and that's what I need.
Armed with Tim's cover, I revamped the Kindle edition, fixed some errors, rewrote the opening chapter, and removed the free PDF version. I wanted to focus on the version of the book that might generate revenue and with Tim's cover I felt secure in doing so.
The cover has made a huge difference. Do not underestimate the power of a good cover. Since then, I've gotten three reviews (one, you can tell, obviously from a friend trying to help me out, but the other two genuine reviews from random readers) and sold about a copy a day.
That's not a lot! But this is with no real promotion. I'm currently looking into some blogs that review books like mine, that's a good next-step. Eventually, once I have money, I intend to promote it more seriously. Doesn't do you any good to write the thing if you never tell anyone about it.
I have no real plan, currently, to look for an Agent. I have a friend who just got her first book deal with Harper Collins and it was a colossal amount of work and basically a full time job. I treat writing as seriously as I do my career as a game designer. In fact, about half my time in Game Design has been spent in writing and plotting. But I don't have the time to do what she did. She volunteered to organize book signings, went to lots of conventions and joined various organizations dedicated to her genre and eventually everyone in the business locally knew her name and wanted to see her work and it paid off. Book deal. But there's no way I can do that and do my day job.
The question became, how to monetize my writing. That I needed the work to generate some revenue became obvious when I started working on Book Two and found myself unable to concentrate. There were just too many other things in my life that had a chance of paying me, and this wasn't it.
So I needed to believe I could generate more revenue from Book Two than I did Book One. I ran across Kickstarter and currently, that's my plan. When Book Two is done, I ransom it on Kickstarter for something like...I dunno, $5,000. Maybe less.
Now, $5,000 is not a lot of money. Not enough to pay for my time. But the goal with Kickstarter wouldn't be just to raise money, it would be *mostly* to expand the network of readers. In other words, I have a small but dedicated following right now. People bugging me for Book Two. Kickstarter would give those people a motivation to get *more* people to read the book!
If this works...and it might...then Book Three, I do the same thing, but for more money. Everyone donates the same amount, there are just more people donating. Eventually, as readership grows, I could actually charge enough to pay for my time. I figure $30k would be enough. That's a business model! Holy carp!
Been a long post so far, but I hope interesting and informative. It sort of dances around the issue of why I'd write such a thing in the first place.
The last game I worked on, I was in charge of the story and all the writing and it was terrible. I hated it. It was 4 years of literally every single line of dialog being second-guessed by 8 other people, none of them writers, few of them creative people of any stripe. Everything good was killed by committee and the only thing that could survive was this jumbled mess.
Coming off that experience, I needed to prove to myself that left to my own devices I could produce a work of substance and quality. A novel would let me do that.
My genres were either going to be Fantasy, SF, or Detective/Police Procedural as these are what I am most read in. I spent a lot of time thinking about *why* to write in any of these genres. What would be the point? What did I have to say?
I have a couple of ideas for genuinely science-fictional novels. Reflecting what I feel the purpose of SF is, which is to frame human behavior from an alien point of view, thus getting the reader to ask questions he wouldn't normally ask. What If stuff. But books like that rely on strong Plotting, which is my weakness. Tone, Dialog, Character, these are my strengths. As a result, I spend most of my time working on Plot. For a serious SF novel, I didn't feel like I was a good enough writer for that, at least not right now.
I had no real ideas for detective stuff. I felt like, Robert B. Parker basically did what I'd want to do, and better.
But Fantasy...I had an idea there...
A had a conversation once after Game Night with fellow designer John Wick. He was describing the process of assigning the L5R RPG's Lion Clan sourcebook to a writer. A good writer John had worked with before. But for this sourcebook, the guy inexplicably was turning in crap. John questioned the dude and it came out that the freelancer was a devoted pacifist and he couldn't wrap his head around the idea of the Heroic Soldier. The guy who goes out and murders people and everyone celebrates him for it. He has broken the cardinal Commandment! Why are people celebrating sin!?
"Ah no!" John said, I thought brilliantly. "The soldier is *not* a sinner. He's a *sin eater*. He's someone who assumes this terrible burden on behalf of society, so normal people don't have to do it. That's what they celebrate. Not killing, taking this terrible burden off of them."
That was a powerful statement and one that resonated with me. You know, think about your grandparents or great grandparents or...you. You who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan. Do we believe that all of these people were bloodthirsty murderers? That they signed up out of a deep-seated desire to KILL KILL KILL? No we do not. We understand that these are normal people. And through John's insight I felt like I understood my own grandfather better.
I knew that was my hero. Someone who did something like that. That was a statement I wanted to make. It was true. It was human. That's what I thought fantasy should be about, showing morality and humanity. If SF is primarily a sociological literature, and I believe it is, I feel fantasy *should be* psychological, though it rarely is.
But I couldn't call the dude a Sin Eater, because that's a Catholic tradition. I spent a lot of work on the language and culture of the book. Not, like...the made-up language, but how people talk in a culture that doesn't have Sin, doesn't have modern time measurements, stuff like that.
So that was a problem. A problem solved when I was working while one of my favorite movies was playing, Dragonslayer. The bad guy delivers this little speech;
And without giving anything away, I said "AH-HAH!!" And that was it.
Around this same time I was listening to a great show any writer should listen to, a podcast called This American Life. It's great for getting at the human condition, unadorned by narrative. Key to being a writermans. There was a great bit about this guy, probably 22, come back from Iraq, completely incapable of functioning on his own. He was going to college in San Francisco and they have a big Muslim population there.
In Iraq, he was one of the dudes trained to bust down people's doors and see if they had machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. He's fighting terrorists. Terrorists look like normal citizens. ANYONE he sees could be one. Someone who smiles and shakes his hand and gives him food today could, and sometimes did, try to kill him tomorrow. No uniform, no way to tell. It destroyed his nerves. It would destroy anyone's. He only ever felt safe in the Tank, with his friends.
At school, every time he saw an Arab, he went straight back to Iraq. He'd literally seize up. Become unable to function. No one ever deprogrammed him. The perfectly normal, logical reaction he had in Iraq, the reaction that kept him alive on deployment, was destroying him in civilian life.
Again, I thought "My god, that's a human thing. A real, human reaction. Why haven't we seen this in fantasy literature?"
Now I knew I was ready to write the book. Not a point to make, per se, more a reality I believed in. A character with a moral dimension, a history, a perspective I believed in. That was real. That was human. In other words, the goal wasn't to sort of...expose what the reality of a fantasy world might be like, that's academic. It was to create a real character I believed in. And now I had that.
I started writing. About a third of the way into the book, I knew I was on to something, but I had a problem. All of my characters sounded the same. I knew who they were, but I didn't have anyone's voice.
I sat there staring at the page, looking at the dialog for a while. I went through several permutations of a snippet of dialog. How the main character could respond. What he should say.
Eventually I thought "What if he doesn't say anything?" And I wrote;
"Heden shrugged."
That was it! Now I had his voice. He was taciturn. Didn't like to talk a lot, was cynical, skeptical. Preferred action. Once I had his voice, everyone else's came off that. Defined in relation to him.
I decided that he, and people like him, would talk like modern Americans. This is something I get a lot of pushback on, but I'm sticking to my guns. There's a lot of profanity in the book, though nowhere near as much as in, say, Appaloosa, a best-seller I was reading at the time. But a lot of people don't like that in their fantasy. Even those who use that language all the time, who see it in everything else, even other genres they read! They do not like it in fantasy.
Well, I was committed to writing in a vernacular I could relate to. What bugged me was people who meant "I just don't like profanity in fantasy" but SAID "People didn't talk like that back then!"
First...back then? This is not set at any point in any real culture's history, there is no "back then." It's a revealing comment though, don't you think? Shows you how people think about fantasy. Shows you a LOT about how they think about fantasy.
But also....yes. Yes they did. I wanted to shout "Doesn't anyone read Chaucer anymore!? There's fart jokes!!" But I understand. We all come to the genre for different reasons.
And those are mine! I wanted a short book, tough guy dialog. Action. I think I got it. Man this is like a way way longer post than I thought I'd write. Don't blame anyone for not reading the whole thing. Hope there's some substance here beyond self-promotion.
But there's a layer in it that's hard to describe. It's not just about tough guys and solving a mystery. There's a deep emotional component to it and one, so far, I feel I've pulled off successfully. I felt like there wasn't much point in me writing a Fantasy novel if I didn't have something to say in the genre, and this is me trying to present the archetypes of fantasy in a personal way. A human way.
Before I get into the whys and wherefores, I figured I'd justify this thread by sharing my self-publishing experience thusfar. Here's what I've learned.
Initially, the book was available via Kindle and for free off my website. I tracked who was going where and the conclusion I reached was: Free vs Not Free doesn't make a difference. What made a difference was the medium. In other words, people who enjoy reading PDFs on computer screens went and downloaded the free PDF. People who preferred reading on their Kindle or iPhone, or iPad or Android (or whatever, you can get the Free Kindle app) paid for the Kindle version. It seems like $5 is the threshold for most people. Less than $5 is a trivial expense for most people, more than $5 and people start thinking about it.
Of all the people who've said they were interested, but didn't read it, the #1 reason...so far, really, the only reason, is the lack of a Print Version. No matter how much you believe in the e-book revolution (and I believe in it quite a lot, as an author and a reader) a lot of people still prefer the print version. So right now I'm looking into getting an ISBN. If I buy an ISBN, I can use Amazon's own Print on Demand service and then people can buy the physical book as well. Keen!
My original plan was to write the novel and then before I promoted it, commission some art for it. Not just cover art, illustrations. I strongly feel that good illustrations and lots of 'em are the best way to both convey the tone and content of your book quickly, and attract a potential reader's attention.
But after I'd written the thing, I found myself desperately saving my money as I'd just started my own video game company and the less money I spent, the longer we'd be able to last. So apart from linking to the book in my sig, I did no real promotion.
Here's where things get interesting. I'm a forum hobbyist and I've got a relatively popular blog and between the two of these things, people started reading the book. Mostly the free version.
One of those people was Tim Denee. He a brilliant graphic designer whom some of you may know from the Dwarf Fortress Saga of Bronzemurder.
Tim and I are on the same forum and he checked out the book. As he puts it he was A: skeptical of fantasy in general and B: SUPER skeptical of self-published authors. But for whatever reason he gave my novel a shot, and he loved it. Blew him away. I found this out when he posted about the book on his blog with a link to the cover he'd done for me, for free.
You can see that cover on the Amazon.com page. That's Tim's cover. When I saw it, I was ridiculously happy.
I had some notion, as I said, of paying someone to do a traditional fantasy cover, but Tim's design is so brilliant I was compelled to use it. The color is carefully chosen. Green is a color of some importance in the book for several reasons. The font for the title was inspired to and the kind of thing that made me look at my own work anew.
I describe the book as a Hard Boiled fantasy, but Tim got a very Western vibe off it and as soon as I saw that cover, I realized that vibe runs throughout the whole book. It has a lot in common with a Western. I count Robert B. Parker as a major influence. He wrote about 50 million hard boiled detective novels in the Raymond Chandler vein. Some extremely geeky person once described Parker as a "Chandler ghola."
After I saw Tim's cover, I realized that while I was writing Priest, I'd been reading a lot of Parker's Western series. Appaloosa, Resolution, Brimstone. They made a movie out of Appaloosa. That obviously had a big impact on me and I wasn't even aware of it. This is the power of art.
The skull on the cover is also a powerful image that *brilliantly* captures the tone of the book and also provides a colossal level of foreshadowing. Something no illustration could have done. It's the kind of thing that doesn't make any literal sense when you see it but, as you read, I think it would seep into your consciousness and sort of...tell you how the book ends.
I suspect many people would read it and come out the other end still not 100% sure what that skull is doing on the cover.So that's the power of self-publishing. Obviously the work has to inspire people, but if it does, they want to help. Tim wanted to help because he knew I was doing it alone, and he was inspired. I got a free cover out of the deal.
That's important. It's incredibly small, compared to a publisher, but people want to see you succeed. They help.I recently got a message from another forumite who works at a publishing house (I believe as a copy-editor) and was reading the book and enjoying it a lot and volunteered to copy-edit it for me. Hey, free editor!
I haven't gotten his feedback yet, my current plan is to reward every reader who finds a typo with a special thanks in the back of the book. "Find a typo, let me know! Come back and find your name below!" That's the power of e-publishing, I can create a new version of the book in a moment. Crowdsource copy-editing!
I do things you were taught not to do in grade school. I do these things on purpose as they are the style I've developed over many years. But a copy-editor would frown on it, so we'll see what I get back.
What I crave, and what I cannot get via self-publishing, is the benefit of a professional editor who's worked for years in my genre, and wants to work with me to make the book the best it can be. Not fix typos, but question my judgement, challenge my ideas. That's the kind of thing you can only get with a publishing deal. I have lots of *friends* who would love to do that for me, but editing an RPG book is not the same as working at Del Rey for 15 years, and that's what I need.Armed with Tim's cover, I revamped the Kindle edition, fixed some errors, rewrote the opening chapter, and removed the free PDF version. I wanted to focus on the version of the book that might generate revenue and with Tim's cover I felt secure in doing so.
The cover has made a huge difference. Do not underestimate the power of a good cover. Since then, I've gotten three reviews (one, you can tell, obviously from a friend trying to help me out, but the other two genuine reviews from random readers) and sold about a copy a day.
That's not a lot! But this is with no real promotion. I'm currently looking into some blogs that review books like mine, that's a good next-step. Eventually, once I have money, I intend to promote it more seriously. Doesn't do you any good to write the thing if you never tell anyone about it.
I have no real plan, currently, to look for an Agent. I have a friend who just got her first book deal with Harper Collins and it was a colossal amount of work and basically a full time job. I treat writing as seriously as I do my career as a game designer. In fact, about half my time in Game Design has been spent in writing and plotting. But I don't have the time to do what she did. She volunteered to organize book signings, went to lots of conventions and joined various organizations dedicated to her genre and eventually everyone in the business locally knew her name and wanted to see her work and it paid off. Book deal. But there's no way I can do that and do my day job.
The question became, how to monetize my writing. That I needed the work to generate some revenue became obvious when I started working on Book Two and found myself unable to concentrate. There were just too many other things in my life that had a chance of paying me, and this wasn't it.
So I needed to believe I could generate more revenue from Book Two than I did Book One. I ran across Kickstarter and currently, that's my plan. When Book Two is done, I ransom it on Kickstarter for something like...I dunno, $5,000. Maybe less.
Now, $5,000 is not a lot of money. Not enough to pay for my time. But the goal with Kickstarter wouldn't be just to raise money, it would be *mostly* to expand the network of readers. In other words, I have a small but dedicated following right now. People bugging me for Book Two. Kickstarter would give those people a motivation to get *more* people to read the book!
If this works...and it might...then Book Three, I do the same thing, but for more money. Everyone donates the same amount, there are just more people donating. Eventually, as readership grows, I could actually charge enough to pay for my time. I figure $30k would be enough. That's a business model! Holy carp!
Been a long post so far, but I hope interesting and informative. It sort of dances around the issue of why I'd write such a thing in the first place.
The last game I worked on, I was in charge of the story and all the writing and it was terrible. I hated it. It was 4 years of literally every single line of dialog being second-guessed by 8 other people, none of them writers, few of them creative people of any stripe. Everything good was killed by committee and the only thing that could survive was this jumbled mess.
Coming off that experience, I needed to prove to myself that left to my own devices I could produce a work of substance and quality. A novel would let me do that.
My genres were either going to be Fantasy, SF, or Detective/Police Procedural as these are what I am most read in. I spent a lot of time thinking about *why* to write in any of these genres. What would be the point? What did I have to say?
I have a couple of ideas for genuinely science-fictional novels. Reflecting what I feel the purpose of SF is, which is to frame human behavior from an alien point of view, thus getting the reader to ask questions he wouldn't normally ask. What If stuff. But books like that rely on strong Plotting, which is my weakness. Tone, Dialog, Character, these are my strengths. As a result, I spend most of my time working on Plot. For a serious SF novel, I didn't feel like I was a good enough writer for that, at least not right now.
I had no real ideas for detective stuff. I felt like, Robert B. Parker basically did what I'd want to do, and better.
But Fantasy...I had an idea there...
A had a conversation once after Game Night with fellow designer John Wick. He was describing the process of assigning the L5R RPG's Lion Clan sourcebook to a writer. A good writer John had worked with before. But for this sourcebook, the guy inexplicably was turning in crap. John questioned the dude and it came out that the freelancer was a devoted pacifist and he couldn't wrap his head around the idea of the Heroic Soldier. The guy who goes out and murders people and everyone celebrates him for it. He has broken the cardinal Commandment! Why are people celebrating sin!?
"Ah no!" John said, I thought brilliantly. "The soldier is *not* a sinner. He's a *sin eater*. He's someone who assumes this terrible burden on behalf of society, so normal people don't have to do it. That's what they celebrate. Not killing, taking this terrible burden off of them."
That was a powerful statement and one that resonated with me. You know, think about your grandparents or great grandparents or...you. You who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan. Do we believe that all of these people were bloodthirsty murderers? That they signed up out of a deep-seated desire to KILL KILL KILL? No we do not. We understand that these are normal people. And through John's insight I felt like I understood my own grandfather better.
I knew that was my hero. Someone who did something like that. That was a statement I wanted to make. It was true. It was human. That's what I thought fantasy should be about, showing morality and humanity. If SF is primarily a sociological literature, and I believe it is, I feel fantasy *should be* psychological, though it rarely is.
But I couldn't call the dude a Sin Eater, because that's a Catholic tradition. I spent a lot of work on the language and culture of the book. Not, like...the made-up language, but how people talk in a culture that doesn't have Sin, doesn't have modern time measurements, stuff like that.
So that was a problem. A problem solved when I was working while one of my favorite movies was playing, Dragonslayer. The bad guy delivers this little speech;
And without giving anything away, I said "AH-HAH!!" And that was it.
Around this same time I was listening to a great show any writer should listen to, a podcast called This American Life. It's great for getting at the human condition, unadorned by narrative. Key to being a writermans. There was a great bit about this guy, probably 22, come back from Iraq, completely incapable of functioning on his own. He was going to college in San Francisco and they have a big Muslim population there.
In Iraq, he was one of the dudes trained to bust down people's doors and see if they had machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. He's fighting terrorists. Terrorists look like normal citizens. ANYONE he sees could be one. Someone who smiles and shakes his hand and gives him food today could, and sometimes did, try to kill him tomorrow. No uniform, no way to tell. It destroyed his nerves. It would destroy anyone's. He only ever felt safe in the Tank, with his friends.
At school, every time he saw an Arab, he went straight back to Iraq. He'd literally seize up. Become unable to function. No one ever deprogrammed him. The perfectly normal, logical reaction he had in Iraq, the reaction that kept him alive on deployment, was destroying him in civilian life.
Again, I thought "My god, that's a human thing. A real, human reaction. Why haven't we seen this in fantasy literature?"
Now I knew I was ready to write the book. Not a point to make, per se, more a reality I believed in. A character with a moral dimension, a history, a perspective I believed in. That was real. That was human. In other words, the goal wasn't to sort of...expose what the reality of a fantasy world might be like, that's academic. It was to create a real character I believed in. And now I had that.
I started writing. About a third of the way into the book, I knew I was on to something, but I had a problem. All of my characters sounded the same. I knew who they were, but I didn't have anyone's voice.
I sat there staring at the page, looking at the dialog for a while. I went through several permutations of a snippet of dialog. How the main character could respond. What he should say.
Eventually I thought "What if he doesn't say anything?" And I wrote;
"Heden shrugged."
That was it! Now I had his voice. He was taciturn. Didn't like to talk a lot, was cynical, skeptical. Preferred action. Once I had his voice, everyone else's came off that. Defined in relation to him.
I decided that he, and people like him, would talk like modern Americans. This is something I get a lot of pushback on, but I'm sticking to my guns. There's a lot of profanity in the book, though nowhere near as much as in, say, Appaloosa, a best-seller I was reading at the time. But a lot of people don't like that in their fantasy. Even those who use that language all the time, who see it in everything else, even other genres they read! They do not like it in fantasy.
Well, I was committed to writing in a vernacular I could relate to. What bugged me was people who meant "I just don't like profanity in fantasy" but SAID "People didn't talk like that back then!"
First...back then? This is not set at any point in any real culture's history, there is no "back then." It's a revealing comment though, don't you think? Shows you how people think about fantasy. Shows you a LOT about how they think about fantasy.
But also....yes. Yes they did. I wanted to shout "Doesn't anyone read Chaucer anymore!? There's fart jokes!!" But I understand. We all come to the genre for different reasons.
And those are mine! I wanted a short book, tough guy dialog. Action. I think I got it. Man this is like a way way longer post than I thought I'd write. Don't blame anyone for not reading the whole thing.
Hope there's some substance here beyond self-promotion.
