What is a mash-up, you ask?
Well, you see, genres, perfectly respectable and decent as they might be, have urges, urges repressed and constrained by the demands of their authors and their audiences. For years, sometimes decades, a genre will sit and stew quietly, content to bring out all the expected tropes and well-mannered prose. But then, they go to a bar of seedy repute, and find other, more dangerous genres. At first it begins all nice and polite, what with the trading of elements and influences. But by the third drink, things begin to get rowdy.
Before long, they’ve stripped off their cover art and are rolling about in a drunken, passionate embrace, only to part in the morning and try to forget they ever associated with each other…
…until one fateful day, when Romance calls Fantasy in quiet, sobbing tones and tells him they have nine months to make a decision. Poor Fantasy is flustered and escapes into one of his many, many worlds. Romance, unwilling to admit the association, quietly gives up the child on the doorstep of a local reading club. And they take it up into their arms and, with a single tear shed for the miracle, say: “We shall call her…Paranormal Romance.”
Now, I respect the sanctity of genres too much to venture far beyond my comfortable Epic Fantasy (despite some things I did in college that I’m not proud of), but it’s high time that I started getting in on this amazingly innovative field of blending genres.
Thus, please enjoy this excerpt from my newest manuscript, a tale of one woman’s quest to truly live her life through the pain and suffering of others, a mash-up of Privileged Literature and Epic Fantasy: Eat, Pray, Destroy.
Chapter Two: Alejandrus
By the time I had fully roused myself from the waking coma that had been my marriage, the world began to seem a different place to me. The scents of the Necromancer’s laboratories seemed more acrid, the blood of executed prisoners spattered the walls in such bright patterns I thought myself like to weep for the beauty they presented. And yet, it was in the mornings that I found the comfortable, dreary routines that had beckoned me into that coma: the empty beds, the quiet dinners, the times when our lives were interrupted by another Army of Light battering down the doors.
The Dark Lord Stephen was away…again. The excuses had all begun to run together these days: elvish guerrillas attacking our outposts, clerics banishing the undead hordes, another rag-tag band of comically mismatched heroes attempting to fulfill another prophecy of light. And my excuses were not so dissimilar: “Of course, dear, we’ll do it next time,” “Well, I’m sure you have a good reason for missing dinner,” “Yes, honey, I realize that the blood of the innocent does not spill itself.”
But it was only on that day, when I woke up, that I realized something.
I was a woman with a life.
And it was time to start living it…by the point of a sword.
*** *** ***
He was a gentle man, I knew. His hands told me that as they so delicately ran over the swirling layers of clay. His eyes confirmed him as he looked up at me, full of the fear and terror that could only come from a man unused to seeing a woman of high society and her twelve-foot-tall Ogre Bodyguard.
“And what is it you’re making there?” I asked him. We had vases and pots aplenty in the Black Tower, of course, but this was the first time I had seen one made. This was the first time it had occurred to me that they came from artisans…or, I guess, maybe from homes that had been sacked and looted by the orcs. Stephen told me once, but I couldn’t take time to remember now. I was living.
“It’s…uh…a pot…” he said, trying hard to focus on the craft and not on Pietrov’s one-eyed scowl locked upon him.
“Such people,” I whispered, astonished, forgetting that I usually made my monologues internal. “The way you weave, the way you sculpt. You find such meaning in these things that I never could amidst my piles of gold and plush blankets.”
“Well, actually, I make these so I can sell them at a pittance, assuming they aren’t stolen or confiscated by the Dreadguard, so that I can feed my family and–”
He spoke with such gentility I almost lamented the crack of the whip as Pietrov snapped the braided leather against his back and sent him crashing to the floor, his misshapen project to follow.
“The mistress was having an epiphany, vermin,” my ogre snarled. “You dare interrupt her musings on the common folk?”
“Oh, oh god no,” he whimpered, his voice punctuated by an agony that I had never heard inside the tower. “God, lady, I didn’t mean anything by it. I just…oh… Just don’t…don’t kill me.”
Incredible. Here, they talked about killing like it was a bad thing. Was life truly like this on the outside? I knelt beside him, moving my skirts out of the pool of blood weeping out from his flayed back.
“Tell me your name.”
“Ale…Alejandrus. God, lady, I have a family.”
Alejandrus. That sounded just poor enough for me to start my adventure.
His name was Alejandrus.
And he was bleeding out at my feet.
I had made my first true friend.