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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2408466" data-attributes="member: 5171">Hey RW,Depends on what you consider a problem. If you're writing what you want to be reading and reading what you want to be writing, you're in good shape. The problems begin when you read Star Trek and Dragonlance novels and then wonder why your writing isn't more like Tolkien or Martin. What you read always affects what you write. That's part of the reason that I don't read much when I'm working on a novel, or I stick to one sort of thing -- I don't want to change my style halfway through the novel when I decide that I'd really rather be writing a murder mystery than a swashbuckling action story.The problem you do have is that the subgenre to which you naturally gravitate is one that is not terribly easy to get into and doesn't encourage originality. I'm not knocking the genre -- it's not my favorite thing these days, but I'll still read any Peter David I run across. It's just that most media tie-in things are done by established folks or big name folks, so if you wanted to write Star Trek or Dragonlance books, it's going to be tough to get in. Not impossible, but at least as tough as selling an original novel, and with more strings attached. And if you want to write original (not tie-in) fiction that reads like tie-in fiction, you've got an uphill battle, since most original fiction markets don't like to publish stuff that reads like tie-in fiction. That's not a "never" by any stretch -- good enough stuff always sells eventually, somewhere -- but as I said, it's an uphill battle.Your best bet, as I see it, would be one of the following:1) See how much a rewrite will hide the tie-in-ness of your novel, so that you can sell it to a normal fantasy publisher (Tor, Daw, Baen, Roc). Might work, might not, might make you end up with something you hate.2) Try WotC's original fiction open submissions period -- I think you did before, but it seems that they'll be doing that on a regular basis, and they're likely to be less averse to fiction like the kind you're writing than other places would be.3) Get into WotC writing tie-in fiction and back-burner this novel for when you've got enough pull to say "Hey, actually, if we've got a lull, I've got this novel I'd like to do." This might mean compromises (setting it in Eberron, for example), but it is more likely to work than a "Hey, I know you already have all the worlds you want, but here's another" when trying to sell to WotC's tie-in department.Caveat: All that said, there's a big difference between writing gaming fantasy and writing lazy fantasy. I haven't seen your fiction, so I have no way to know what kind you're writing. Gaming fantasy is fine. Lots of fight scenes, monsters that are familiar to the reader, no worries about people harping on your mythology because you're using something established... very fun. Lazy fantasy is bad no matter what you want to call it, and lazy fantasy doesn't care about genre. Stepsisters who mock the attractive young girl who talks to unicorns and does rainbow magic for no sensible reason are stupid, not "a convention of the Cinderella fantasy genre". Adventurers who adventure for no particular reason while calling attention to that fact in a humorous way could very well be gaming fantasy, but... it sounds a bit more like lazy fantasy, just from your description. Calling attention to a problem in dialogue doesn't solve that problem -- and my D&D games give the adventurers solid reasons for having to go into the Cave of 9th-to-12th-Level Peril, so it wouldn't be "a convention of the genre" that I'd swallow. The kind of fiction you're describing, if not lazy fiction, sounds like "in-joke" fiction... and again, that can do well in the tie-in market (see Peter David, who zings the very shows and comics he loves mercilessly) but requires you to really know what you're talking about -- and be in the right market. And it usually only works in an official tie-in. If you're trying to write something that isn't in the Dragonlance part of the bookstore that makes fun of Dragonlance... that's gonna be a tough sell in the normal fantasy market, and an impossibility in the media tie-in market until you've established that you can write normal Dragonlance books well enough to sell those.So... uphill battle, either way.None of which means "stop writing" or even "Change what you're doing." It simply means that you should be aware of the choices you're making and examine whether you really and truly can't write anything different from that, or whether you could get your geek-jones by writing a fictitious story hour and write something more likely to sell on the side.</blockquote>

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