Adrian FaulknerFantasy Author

Things have been pretty quiet on the blog mainly because I’ve been knuckling down and working. There’s nothing sexy or exciting about the vomit draft other than seeing the story come together, and that’s not something I can really share without ruining the book.

There was a depressing moment mid-week when I realised that I’d probably have furthered my career if I sat a little neater inside genre categories. But then I realised that I write fantasy as much for what I dislike about the genre as for what I love. And in creating my own cross-genre fantasy novels, I’m not trying to emulate anyone else. That’s got to be a good thing in the long run? It’s so easy to look at other authors and think “If I had done that, maybe…” but the world don’t work like that.

On a positive note, there seems to be genuine love for my 140 character novel pitches I give when asked on Twitter what I’m writing. It is the excitement about those that spur me on through those fleeting moments of despair. There’s definitely a large audience for my type of fantasy, I honestly believe that it’s actually quite commercial. But whether it is or isn’t, my latest novel won’t write itself and so I continue my process of discovery writing, hoping that this now 20,000 word flashback section won’t end up being cut when it comes to revision.

I have no problems with negative reviews. I’m interested in people’s opinions and if someone didn’t like something, it’s interesting to hear why. There are a few people whose positive reviews are enough to make me buy books, and there are some people whose negative reviews have convinced me likewise.

Coming from the low art side of the spectrum (contemporary sculpture if I want it to sound grand, designer toys if I don’t), I expected the genre community to really push the boundaries of criticism, and whilst there are a number of really great reviewers out there I find those at what genre considers the top end of the scale, to be frankly appalling.

China Mieville is 11 days older than me. 11 days more in which he’s managed to write numerous successful novels, win loads of awards and become the poster boy of genre fiction. Even if I didn’t sleep in the next two weeks I’d never be able to beat that. If there was a scorecard labelled “Genre writer career”, he’d be miles ahead of me on points.

It’s very easy, as a writer, to look at the careers of others and compare. And it’s very easy for that green-eyed monster to raise its head.

I think if you never compare your career to another you’d be lieing. It’s part of human nature. No matter who you are, there are always other writers who have done more, achieved more, written greater stories. The trick is to realise that envy is one thing, jealousy is another.

I’ve been pretty wound up the last couple of days. And yes, I know I’m getting older and have publically said I intend to become a “grumpy old man”, but this is about books. Books!

I’ve sat on this for a couple of days because I disagree with people I like. I think they’re massively wrong but that doesn’t mean I think they’re idiots or never want to speak to them again. So I don’t want to say anything that singles them out or distorts what they actually said. Over the last couple of days I’ve slipped into generalisations, and as we know people are defined by their exceptions, quirky little beasts that they are.

So I’m going to talk in general terms and not mention names. So if you read this and think “that sort of sounds like what we were talking about the other day” it probably was, but that was my jumping off point and my argument is not about the specifics. I want to talk about books and nepotism and awards and promotion, and I want to talk in general terms.

Amongst many of the late night conversations at Fantasycon was a discussion on sex scenes. There were stories of horrendous sex scenes both published and unpublished and we then spent the rest of the night giggling like naughty schoolchildren at words such as ‘spill’.

But this brought up one of my personal bugbears about sex scenes. All too often the sex is too perfect, the participants automatic black belts in the art of lovemaking. Sex is clumsy and raw, rarely a well choreographed dance.

I think it’s fine to have perfect lovemaking if you’re writing erotica or for titillation but if your sex scene is part of the plot or character it always strikes me as some wish fulfilment on the part of the author. It should reflect character. It seems a protagonist is rarely crap in bed or a selfish-lover, almost as if the author is worried that they are making some embarrassing personal confession.

Above all else, I find it dishonest, and dishonest writing is bad writing.

I think fantasy has some way to go with sex scenes, all too often they are a bad cliché of sweat and bodies moving as one. Our genre has grown up over the years, I think our sex scenes need a grow up a little too.

I’ve never played a pen and paper RPG. When I announced this on twitter last week, it shocked a few people. How could someone who is such a fantasy geek as me miss out on AD&D?

The answer came when I popped round to my parents and discussed this with my mother.

“Oh, we stopped you having those things,” she told me. “We saw a news report that said it was some sort of cult and people were going mad. So we decided to keep you away from it.”

First off, if you’ve come here expecting a ranty moan about ebook pricing, this probably isn’t the blog post for you. If on the other hand, you’re interested to hear what I learned from speaking to a work colleague who has started pirating books at 64, read on.

Let’s kick it off by saying that I do like ebooks, and whilst I’d like them cheaper I still think they are pretty good value for the hours of entertainment they provide.

I’ve noticed in the last month – since Xmas really – that a LOT of people are getting kindles. We’ve gone from none in my place of work to at least 4 (which is about 10% of the workforce). In chatting to those people, I feel I’ve been given a better insight into the issues ebooks face moving forwards.

Take person X, we’ll call him John. John is close to retirement and likes Bradbury and Harry Harrison. He’s a big reader and bought a kindle for he and his wife to share (which she hogs all the time). He likes it so much, he may buy a second one. John knows nothing about publishing and he knows nothing about my writing (I go all Clark Kent at work, it’s a long story).

But John has an issue with ebooks and told me the other day how he’d committed his first illegal download. I can’t remember which book it was, I only know it wasn’t genre as it was one of his wife’s favourite authors. He’d managed to find a torrent or a download of the book.

“It’s not been out that long and it’s already out there,” he enthused.

But why download? I mean, for all Amazon’s evils, they do make it so it’s incredibly easy to add books to your kindle. It was all down to pricing apparently. The hardback had been heavily discounted by Amazon so that the “This price was set by the publisher” kindle edition was more expensive.

“It’s a rip-off,” John told me.

Now this got me thinking. You see, I don’t have an issue with an ebook being more than a paperback (or even a hardback) so long as it’s good value. But to John, the fact it was more was a major issue. I told him that ebooks have VAT but he didn’t care.

“You’re getting less, why should you pay more.”

Now the arguement to that is that books aren’t free to produce. We at all levels of the publishing industry know this. So what’s the problem then? Why can’t John see this?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and came to the conclusion that it’s one of perception.

I think if I make the statement “something is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it” I’m not being controversial. Worth is not primarily derived from cost, although it does play a major factor.

Let me give you an example. You know those amazing resin busts of Marvel and DC charcters you can get for about £60? Well I remember one company telling me the reason they preferred to produce those than action figures was because they were comparatively less to make. With an action figure, you make lots of little parts and then have to put them all together. With a bust, because it’s usually a single piece, it needs a bigger mold (and those molds are very expensive) but the profit margin is far, far greater. Why do people pay £60 for them, then? Well because those things are bigger than an action figure and must therefore be much more expensive. Size plays a factor in worth.

Now look at the hardback novel. Never mind that it’s always discounted, a hardback novel costs more than twice that of a paperback, and the reason the public accepts this, is because it’s bigger. Now, I’m not trying to attack the hardback pricing model and I’ll hold my hand up and say I don’t know all the details, but I’d wager that just like the Marvel resin models, hardbacks probably have a greater profit margin.

Whatever the business model, whether I’m correct or not, the point I’m trying to make is that the general public has come to accept that how the book is bound affects its worth. In short, it’s helped build the myth that manufacturing costs form a large part of the cost of a book. If a hardback costs £20 and a paperback £8 then they assume manufacturing must cost a lot, otherwise where is that other £12 going? Again, I’m not attacking the business model, I’m just saying where people’s perception comes from.

So remove the binding, the public perceive the book should be cheaper. It’s all the fault of hardbacks.

It gets worse When I try and tell John that by downloading the book he’s denying the author money. I do slip in the old “most authors earn less than…” routine. But John’s opinion is the pricing IS the fault of the author.

You see he views the author as the one with power. If an author “gives” their work to a publisher who “screws” the public on pricing, they are an accomplice to the “rip-off”. ‘Ethical’ authors (apparently) should withhold the manuscript if they feel their readers are going to get screwed. Again, it’s a case of perception. To John, 1-starring an amazon review because of ebook pricing seems entirely justified because the author “isn’t doing anything”.

Now we all know that authors have no real power, and to be fair I don’t think £8 for a new novel is bad, whatever the format. But if piracy is going to be minimised then authors and publishers have to realise they are playing a game of perception. Say that books cost nothing to produce and, at best, Joe Public thinks publishers are lying, at worst they feel people have been ripped off for years over hardbacks. Say that authors have no say over pricing, Joe Public will just perceive authors as mealy-mouthed.

Now I’m not saying the answer is to drop ebook prices, nor to lay a book’s P&L on the line. In fact I’m not sure that I know what the answer is, just that a 64 year old has started filesharing simply because they don’t feel the current pricing models are justified. I’m sure John’s not the only one, but at the same time I accept this isn’t an epedemic. Not everyone thinks like John. But it’s going to continue until perceptions are changed. And currently, the arguments don’t seem to be working.

Yesterday I sent you on over to Sam Sykes blog. Today I’m going to send you over to Pornokitsch and their review of Brandon Sanderson’s Way Of The Kings. Not for the review – although that is very good in itself – but for the insight into the issues with High Fantasy.

I have a real love for traditional fantasy but it’s often criticised these days for being out-of-touch and outdated. Instead New Weird and Post-George R R Martin gritty fantasy is the order of the day.

I often feel in the minority, because I honestly do believe Epic Fantasy could be… well, epic again. The problem is that I do agree with a lot of its detractors. High Fantasy needs a makeover.

It’s all too easy to write High Fantasy off as jingoistic. Elves and dwarves are written off as incredibly passé when all they’re just a shorthand. Yes, I do think that books where all the ’bad races’ are dark skinned is racism, intended or not. But an elf can be a metaphor for the upper classes, the intellectual… whatever the author wants. And if Fantasy is used as a format by which to compare and contrast our own world, those sorts of metaphors are very useful.

I see some writers who write races that act like elves, talk like elves, even look like elves, but are called some other name. This bugs the hell out of me. Thousands of years of folklore yet someone decides the name “just isn’t good enough”. Each to their own, I suppose.

One of the big problems Pornokitsch raised was with Destiny. Now I like destiny. It’s like super-foreshadowing. I said I see it as a contract between the author and the reader as if to let the reader know “it’ll all be OK in the end.” Now, as people wiser than me pointed out, there have been stories where that contract gets broken, but I argue that it can only be done by a skilled author. If you’re gonna break that contract with the reader, you better have something awesome to appease them with.

Pornokitsch said their issue wasn’t so much destiny but the fact that some villain slaves away to get where he is on merit alone (bad merit, but merit nonetheless) yet some farm boy wakes up some day, gets told they are the chosen one and gets a free pass to greatness.

That’s really got me thinking about prophecy and one of the reasons I love the way spontaneous debates just pop up on twitter.

Check out Pornokitsch’s review. There’s a lot of really interesting things there to consider for anyone who reads or especially writes fantasy. I’m going to be mulling over it for weeks.

I’ve met a lot of writers who aren’t great fans of JK Rowling. I think there is something about her amazing, impossible-to-repeat success that worries them. It’s as if it’ll somehow suck them in and they’ll believe their book will sell a million copies and they’ll be super-rich, when the reality is that there is no money in writing. I guess her story does make a lot of people think they’ll write a book and become rich and famous overnight, but for me, what I love about her personal story isn’t the rags-to-riches ‘plotline’, but her story of belief.

If you look into it, you’ll realise that her book was her emotional crutch through her lowest point in her life, a constant in an uncertain world. I’m sure for every JK, there’s a thousand writers whose emotional crutch of a novel never made it to publication.

But if you can take anything away from her story it’s that you have to believe in yourself – not so that you are blinded to realities, but that with hard work and determination you can get there. That sometimes feels like such a crime, doesn’t it? How arrogant to believe in yourself! It feels as indecent as if you had just flashed the Queen.

I’ve had a string of amusing incidents that have brought this home to me recently. First there was my brother telling me I should look at the vanity market. Then there was my mother who told me that because she hates fantasy, she’ll read the novel but “won’t like it”. Then today there were half-joking comments from friends. Jesus, I thought, is there anyone who believes I can write a decent novel?

But then I realised something, something I think is important for writers who lack confidence or don’t get a lot of support. With no belief comes no expectations. And at first, that might seem like a horrible thing, but when you think about it, it’s incredibly freeing.

No expectations means you can take your time, practise your craft, fail and try again. There’s no expectation to write a certain type of story, to get it done by a certain time, or write it in a certain way. The only thing holding you back is your belief in yourself.

That can be difficult – I still have problems describing any of my work as ‘good’; I usually describe myself as a competent writer and leave it at that. I can see so many flaws in my work that it just feels wrong to describe myself as a ‘good’ writer. This comes from someone who has had a load of non-fiction published. But then I think a good writer isn’t necessarily one who gets everything right, but one who constantly evaluates his work and continues to perfect his craft.

I really recommend watching the Oprah interview with JK Rowling. There was a lot of what she said that resonated with me, and whilst I severely doubt any of us will ever see a tenth of her success, you may get something out of it as well. Let’s face it, if we’d wanted to be millionaires, we would have become bankers!

If I could dish out any single piece of advice it would be to never be ashamed about what you like.

This week the Speculative Scotsman got a lot of shit because he argued that Fantasy was a bit crap and should be more literary. For the record I disagree with him, and it seemed a lot of people did too.

The problem, as I see it, isn’t that Niall hates fantasy, it’s that I think, deep down he’s ashamed that he likes it.

Let me tell you a story about my own family that I think demonstrates this. I was round my parent’s house with my brother, and I was enthusing on my brother what a great book Peter V Brett’s Painted Man is. Both my mother and brother are crime lovers, and whilst my brother has read a few fantasy novels (I think he likes Trudi Canavan), he admitted that he isn’t a great lover of Fantasy.

“Well,” I said to the pair of them. “You better start getting use to it. When my book gets published…”

Yes, I used ‘when’ instead of ‘if’, how pretentious!

To which my mother replied, “Well I suppose I’ll read it if you wrote it. But I won’t like it!”

I think me becoming a writer is my mother’s greatest pride, the fact I write fantasy, her biggest disappointment.

Years of therapy aside, I would love dearly for my mother to love my chosen genre, that the genre was good enough for her to respect.

But you know what? The problem doesn’t lie with the genre, it lies with my mother. She’s closed off to it. I lent her The Prestige to read and she liked it, but she hates speculative fiction (go figure!).

I love her dearly, and she’s entitled to her opinion, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s her loss if she’s decided to close herself off to SFF. I can sit here and wish that genre was of a quality that she’d respect it all I want, but it’s never gonna happen.

That doesn’t mean that genre is bad or crap or needs to change. It is what is it, and if people don’t like it, be they readers, critics or even my mother, then so be it. I don’t need the stuff I love to be externally validated.

There’s a wonderful blog post by Sam Sykes, but the thing I was most interested in was the person who in the comments talks about discrimination. Yes, there will always be people who say “What you like comics? At your age?” but look at how the medium of the graphic novel has grown to the extent that it is now respected even by the critics.

I think that’s what Niall wants to happen with fantasy, so that China Mieville or some fantasy novelist is on the Booker shortlist. But you know what? A fantasy novel could win and my mother is still not going to like fantasy.

So what do you do? The answer is nothing. You just keep loving and supporting your genre (and beyond). Be as enthusiastic about those tie-in novels you secretly love, as much as the important new fantasy release. Stand your ground and argue the case for Twilight, if that’s what you love, and never be so cheap as to dismiss another’s comments by calling someone a fanboi. We’re all fanbois here, the argument is mute.

Because I guarantee you one other truth. If people see others congregating and having fun, sure as hell they want to investigate what all the fuss is about