You are in the enviable position of having formed a habit that most aspiring writers would kill to obtain. Or pay untold amounts of money on tuition for Creative Writing degrees, or workshops, or storytelling camps.
For the past two years, you have written, on average, 1374 words every week. Rain, shine, babies, heartbreak, plays, shows, gigs, arguments, new games, new books, new lives….every week. That means each of you wrote 142,896 words. Three novels or one massive tome.
Just by not stopping. By continuing to go.
For most humans, it takes 10 weeks of uninterrupted routine to form a habit. The habit is there. Don’t break it.
Right now, like me, you’re starting to feel the itch. A vague restlessness, an unease. A vacancy.
I have Spell/Sword to work on. What are you working on?
Open a Word Doc. Open a Google Doc. Open a notepad. Open napkin. Open your phone and email it to yourself.
Today, not tomorrow. Now, not later.
And start. Don’t stop.
It helped me to have a schedule. It helped me to have this blog. It helped me [eventually] to own the task, to admit to myself what I was making. Do all of those things, or none.
Just don’t stop.
Because, as unbelievable as it may sound. No one but us will truly ever read Lodestar. No one will ever hear your voices.
Unless you keep singing.
I can hear them. I have heard them for two years. It would be a great loss for them to fall silent.
For the rest of their days the dream will come, the Lodestar waits for them to board, just outside the window. So easy to slip out of their lives into the quiet night, into the golden dawn –throw their gear aboard, and sail away.
[And at last it is over. I’ll have more to say, and share in the days to come. A grand tale draws to its close. This is my dream, the most precious — thank you to my fellow artists helping me share it.]
Haskeer stepped through the steel door, and onto cracked linoleum. Red blaze of neon filtered through glass windows onto a crowded diner. The booths were crammed with humans laughing and talking. A long glass display case bisected the room, filled to the brim with faded toys and garish errata – twin rows of wide black booths down either side, with a long counter in the very back of the diner. A tall stool with a red-leather seat at the counter seemed to beckon, and the paladin moved towards it.
The humans seated at the booths were dressed strangely, somehow too simple and too elaborate — as if they were dressed both for work in the fields, and a journey across the tundra of the Northlands.. They paid little attention to his passing, or his gleaming silver armor.
A blonde man with a square jaw, sat with a baby in his lap – their eyes both wide and blue. A blonde woman at his side wiped the child’s face with a damp napkin and a certain elan. On the opposite side another couple, a man with a preposterous mustache fork-deep into a plate of fried potatoes and a dark-haired woman with a beautiful smile. The dark-haired woman was pregnant, and the man and his mustache nearly vibrated with concern and pride, each motion of his hands a prayer.
Two young men sat hip to hip in a booth, poring over a stack of brightly colored pages. They argued bitterly jabbing the page with pointed fingers, and gesticulating wildly as their argument crested into a familiar plateau. Across from them a woman rolled her eyes with exasperation, spreading cream cheese on a grilled bagel.
In the corner of the diner was a jukebox, glowing green and yellow. A man with glasses and a ponytail leaned against it, making a selection – his head bobbing unconsciously to the song already spooling through the air.
Are you sorry we drifted apart? Does your memory stray to a brighter summer day When I kissed you and called you sweetheart? Do the chairs in your parlor seem empty and bare? Do you gaze at your doorstep and picture me there? Is your heart filled with pain, shall I come back again?
A tall, gangly man stumbled through the door behind Haskeer, and moved to the jukebox — hands already spread in mute apology.
In a back booth, three men sat hunched close together. A pile of tiny figures were arrayed on the table before them – small soldiers, goblins, knights, even a fierce looking black dragon. The tallest and shortest examined each figure with animated fixation, while the third stared at something glowing in his hand with boredom. A large man with a fierce tattoo of a squid-demon stumped over and flopped down a large sketchbook. Haskeer caught a glimpse of men and women holding swords of fire.
There were others in the diner, every seat was full. A curly-haired man stuffing lemon after lemon into his water, a thin man with his hands steepled, a balding man laughing and pointing across the restaurant. The faces began to run together as the paladin moved forward, his steel boots clanking on the floor.
Haskeer sat down at the counter, his back to the rest of the diner patrons. A warm fog of steam billowed out of the kitchen, accompanied by the wonderful smells of fried potato and seared meat. A man approached, pulling a well-worn jotter out of his pocket and the nub of a pencil. He wore thick spectacles, and a thick mop of hair pushed up into a white paper cap.
The man greeted the paladin, barely looking up from his notepad.
A gray city, made from simple stone. The towers and streets show signs of great age, and great wear. This is a place where it rains much, where the people must go to the walls to stand against an endless tide of dark. Yet in every eye, a fierce pride – a bright flame that burns against the dark. The people move about their day, and among them walk the men of the Legion. The Crusaders, the Swords of Iron – their cloaks white and blue. Their armor is brightly polished, but the paladin quickly sees the signs of steady use. Leather straps worn to fraying, dents in shields carefully beaten back to true, and burnished with care.
Pennants fly from the towers, each showing three swords bound in a circle, blue on a white field. In the streets Haskeer sees simple signs of nobility, peace and kindness. A young boy keeping his older brothers from harming a kitten, an old man doffing his cap for a passing milk maid, a portly baker giving barely stale bread to beggars in the church square. The quiet prayers at the temple of the Nameless God, the priests laying hands on their flock with the gentle touch of wise shepherds.
A king with a golden crown, white hair spilling down his collar – his family drawn close around a fine table. A plan is laid out before them, a bridge that needs building — the family laughs and argues good naturedly over the plan.
“This is Gilead.” the lady said. “The anvil where the hammer falls again and again, but the steel does not break.”
[Can you be sad about a place that never existed – a fictional place that you as the storyteller destroyed? I don’t know if you should be able to — but I am. I just wrote this, but I feel like an empty jug.]
Two more of my Alpha Readers gave me their criticism on the book, and I’m still picking the shrapnel out of my ego. I picked my first readers well — they’re good enough friends to call me on my shit. And called it was indeed. INDEED.
Beyond the psyche-bruising, all this feedback is making me really excited to get back to work on editing. So far, all of my readers have overall enjoyed the book — and the problems they’ve called my attention to are concrete. Maybe not easy to fix — but definitely doable. I can see multiple ways to change things to evade their criticism, but I’m going to let all of it settle a while longer. I’m still waiting on feedback from a third of my readers, and I don’t want to over-react to the first criticism I’ve received.
Admittedly, a fair amount of the criticism are ‘no-argument’ types. Grammar flubs, word repetition, confusing passages, jokes that didn’t work, etc. Those will be fixed — -it’s the things that deal more with overall structure and style that I’ll need to carefully ruminate on.
Sorry I can’t be more specific yet! Still drafts out in the wild.
Those are the two driving forces, theinspirado of a grand bulk of the genre. Either the writer has a really neat system of magic, combat or dragon-sex and they hammer a plot and some characters into a framework to hold it — OR the writer has a really neat world, or character, or setting for dragon-sex and they hammer a plot and some less interesting characters into a framework to hold it.
I’m not really complaining that these forces exist. [Especially about the dragon-sex.] I’ve invested a massive amount of geek-hours into consuming as much of this content as I can, and I never plan to stop. My complaint derives from the endless mimicry, and the bone-certain belief that these two masters are the only ones that the genre can serve.
That is not the case, more on that shortly. But first, a primer.
In general, there are two types of fantasy authors. Nerds and Dungeon Masters.
Nerds love their shining rules, and Dungeon Masters love their precious backstory.
So when you are reading a fantasy novel and realize you’ve just spent two pages reading about how Flame-aligned Slaughter Wizards cannot use their Flambe attack when Ice-aligned Tempest Mages have spent a fortnight attuning their Ava-crystals to the Fourteenth Ley Line —- then the author is a Nerd.
“Well, they can’t.”
Uh, thanks Mr. Sanderson.
And when you finish a blistering passage on the Archduke Sargasso and the five-year conflict he endured developing the Draconian Congress, including the Riddle-Game played in the jaws of Tyrinel the Inferno, Red Dragon Lord – with exacting minutes provided, including three water breaks and a complete rundown of the Inaugural Dylithic Council’s attire, facial hair and a five stanza limerick sung by Jargon the Time-Sworder — ALL of this read by the protagonist on a discarded scroll in the waiting room of his dentist’s office. Then, my friend, your author is a Dungeon Master.
“Roll versus Total Despair, bitches.”
Both of these ideas sound pretty awesome, and both of the authors above are titanium-plated awesome. There’s nothing wrong with either approach, and in a skilled scribe’s meaty grip each style can keep you patently enthralled. I’ve spent more than a few minutes thinking about everyday applications of Allomancy from Sanderson’s Mistborn series — and you better believe I’m far more concerned about the fate of the Iron Throne of Westeros than the outcome of the 2012 Presidential Race.
Democracy in action.
This isn’t about what those authors have already written. It’s about the fantasy that hasn’t been written yet.
The fantasy that you and I are writing. The new fantasy, which is also old fantasy — as opposed to the middle fantasy that we’re currently sitting in. The new/old fantasy where we basically don’t give a shit.
What am I talking about?
Swordpunk.
I have chosen this term because:
a) It sounds cool.
b) Fuck you, that’s why.
Are there rules? Yes, of course. But they are to be like a kindly sour-smelling uncle. You send them a card on their birthday, a sincere hug at Christmas — but you’re not inviting them over when it’s time to party.
Is there backstory? As long as there is linear time there shall be Stuff That Happened Before. But we shouldn’t drag it with us like those creepy dudes wearing their high school letter jacket to English 101. Leave that shit behind.
Not wearing pants.
And world building? Of course, building your own little bolt-hole from reality is the bleedin’ point. But why do we need to reinvent the wheel every time? Tolkien did it and generations of fantasy writers have been doing their best to ape him ever since. Too many fantasy writers think like Carl Sagan:” If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”.
How about we just have apple pie? You know, the apple pie that is at the store and we’ve all had it and we all know what it is?
Swordpunk is all about just eating the fucking pie.
I think the fear that fantasy writers have is that if they don’t reinvent the wheel, they won’t be taken seriously. Like Tad Williams is going to roll up and revoke their Fantasy License. [I’m imagining him in a lime green golf cart and wearing a jaunty scarf. Are you imagining it that way? Just me? Okay.]
The worlds are there. The tropes are there. It’s all in how you use them. I think there can be more power in connecting to the old stories, then running down the street and trying to start up your own Disneyland. “Oh, no — this ain’t Mickey Mouse, this is my own character Mouselord McQueen. He’s totally different.”
I don’t want to waste energy convincing you that my world is more clever or more original or ‘waaaaaay fucking different” [WFD] from any other fantasy author’s world. That’s a fool’s errand, and honestly more than a little outside of my skillset.
When I have a hero step forth and raise his sword, I don’t want to try to sell you on how he’s different than the inumerable sword-slingers in the genre. I want you to think of them. I want you to think of Sturm Bright-blade, Simon Mooncalf, Logen the Bloody-Nine, Brienne of Tarth, Lancelot, Garet Jax, Neville Longbottom, Reepicheep, Paksenarrion Dorthansdotter and Conan the Barbarian,
Pictured – License to be snooty and pedantic.
himself. I want you to think of them all. I want to connect to that resonance, that legacy of character.
Is it getting a little Joseph Campbell-y in here?
Beyond that, fantasy needs to be more of a wackadoo fever dream. I want more Fritz Lieber and Michael Moorcock – more Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, more Elric of Melnibone. Beautiful little offshoots of the genre, grand and strange, bizarre and gleefully weird.
That’s what I’m trying to do at least, with Spell/Sword, my first novel. And if I can keep going, I’ll keep trying.
My book has rules. My book has backstory. [Shit, you better bring some Post-It Notes, dog.] I’m a Nerd and a Dungeon Master, just like all of you.
But thinking about these things, and giving them a silly name made me feel free. It made me feel empowered, it made me write the book I wanted to write — not the one that I thought would ever sell.
I hope it makes you feel the same.
Swordpunk
1. Eating the pie is more fun than making the pie.
2. No one cares about about your character’s grandfather.
3. Only trot out the Rules on special occasions.
4. Don’t let anyone tell you how to make your art. Make it. Make it scream and bleed, make it shine and shatter. Be true to the moment, to the beauty of it — and make no excuses for putting it on the page.
5. There should always be more minotaurs. Preferable riding on cherry-red mopeds.
And if Brandon Sanderson wants to start an internet feud, he can GET IN LINE.
Thanks for reading my ramblings. This is what happens when I’m not editing.
I’m on schedule for finishing my Alpha Edit of Spell/Sword before July 1st — my personal printer [aka my mom] is waiting to print copies for my crack team of Alpha Readers.
Editing is like painting with sand — everything you do changes the landscape, and draws into question things that you once considered granite-bedrock of your fiction.
I’ve spent a lot of time just sparring with anxiety. Am I editing too fast, too slow? Are the changes I’m making good — are they bad? Why aren’t there more minotaurs?
I’m terrified of getting overzealous and damaging the heart of the work — I’m terrified of not doing enough and leaving cancers to grow and fester in the lines and pages of the book.
I do think it’s time to crack the door open and let some other eyes prowl over the pages. I’m restricting my Alpha Readers to 10, half male, half female — and a pretty even spread of reader-types, and writers that I respect. After they get done, and give me some feedback, and I can stop crying — I’ll get back to work on a Beta Draft for the final round of 5 readers — my toughest critics: my girlfriend, a world-renowned Shakespearean scholar, a playwright, and the cruelest douchebag I can find.
spell-sword.com 