sam

As of the time of this writing, it is now May 10th, 6:00 in the evening.

In another six hours, it will be May 11th, 12:00 in the morning.

As my birthday is May 11th, by 6:00 in the evening of that day, I plan to be on my way to getting extremely drunk and already formulating what kind of deranged rant I’m going to be babbling about (I’m leaning toward a vast conspiracy in which the FDA is trying to keep my miracle drug, Sykesium, off the market because they can’t handle its amazing truth-quality, but time will tell).

With that in mind, I thought it’d behoove me to get a head start on telling you what I’ll be doing in May besides getting biblically astonished.

The big thing of course is Phoenix Comicon.

 

Tadow.

That’s right, for the fourth year in a row, I’ll be attending PHXCC as an author!  You can see my schedule here, but just for kicks, let’s see what I’m doing.

• Social Media for Authors: Thursday 7:30pm – 8:30pm

• Writing Believable Fantasy: Friday 12:00pm – 1:00pm

• Author Chair Dancing: Friday 3:00pm – 4:00pm

• Magic Methods: Saturday 12:00pm – 1:00pm

• Different Approaches to Non-Traditional Fantasy: Saturday 1:30pm – 2:30pm

• The Epic Fantasy Panel: Sunday 12:00pm – 1:00pm

Well, that’s incredible!  I know nearly all of those things.

Copies of my books will also be available for purchase at PHXCC!  That’ll be incredible, right?  RIGHT?!

But wait, there’s more!

On the evening of the 25th, at 5:00 PM, I will be interviewing my good friend and science fiction Renaissance man, John Scalzi, for the Poisoned Pen!  We’ll be discussing John’s newest work, The Human Division, and all about what he’s got planned for the future as far as work, love and liberty.

Liberty.

If you can’t make it, though, you can check out the webcast here.

PHXCC is my favorite convention of the year and I’m amazingly pleased to be a part of it again.  I hope, if you’re a fan of mine or of any of the other authors who are not as attractive as I am, you’ll swing by and say hello and maybe bring a book for me to sign.

If you don’t, I’ll cry.

So, I’m reading Douglas Hulick’s Among Thieves right now and it’s quite good.

It has almost everything I want: witty dialogue, in-combat banter, pirouettes and pivots, thieves’ cant, underworld politics, magic systems, histories, rich cultures and nary a feasting scene, training montage or poetry recital to be seen.

The reason I say it has almost everything I want is because, at about 40% through (I read mostly on my Kindle these days), I realized I really wanted to see someone get eaten by something.

Which made me pause.  And made me think.  When was the last time I saw someone get eaten in fantasy in a way that wasn’t oral sex?  When was the last time I saw a golem or a cockatrice?  When was the last time I saw someone trying to fight a giant, flesh-eating beast instead of another dude with a sword?

Where did all the monsters go?

I think that, as George R.R. Martin continues to set precedent in fantasy, we are continuing along a shift away from things you might find in older, more “traditional” fantasies into more complex plots that deal with character development and interaction.  Treasure hunting has been replaced with understanding the economic impact on society.  Deus ex machina has been replaced with studies on how religion influences a culture.  And flesh-eating monsters have largely gone by the wayside in favor of seeing what motivates two people when they do battle.

This is all actually a good thing, mostly.  Character motivations, cultural implications and studies of cultures are, largely, more rich topics than, say, stabbing a manticore.  But it does bring up an alarming question.

Is there a place for monsters, demons and other vicious inhuman creatures in modern fantasy?

Sure, they’re present.  A Song of Ice and Fire has the White Walkers.  The First Law trilogy has the shanka.  But you rarely see them doing much, do you?  Much is made over their presence, but it never actually comes to much.  By the end of A Feast for Crows, I had all but forgotten the White Walkers and what they could do to people.

And they aren’t totally gone.  While The First Law doesn’t have a tremendous amount to do with the shanka, the Northmen are portrayed as a fairly alien culture that don’t understand civilized people in the south who frequently come into clash with each other.  In a lot of ways, we have successfully turned humanity into monsters and that’s actually a really cool avenue of exploration.

But it doesn’t quite fit what I’ve been looking for.

So, why are we so reluctant to put monsters into our stories?

A big part of it, I think, is that fantasy is very concerned about presenting the clashes between motivations.  Seeing two people meet on the battlefield, each one convinced in the righteousness or necessity of their cause, and allowing the reader to become emotionally invested in those motivations is a deeply rewarding experience.  And it’s exceedingly hard to find sympathy in a creature whose primary motivations are to eat and poop, respectively.

But another part of it, I think, comes from a phenomenon I’m eager to call “The Shame of Salvatore.”

It wasn’t too long ago, I think, that fantasy fiction was considered the domain of (man)children, largely dominated by things like Dungeons and Dragons and things that tied into them: Drizzt novels, Dragonlance novels, what have you.  And these were things where crazed beasts and dangerous monsters were most often found.  And they tended to be found rather poorly, serving mostly as inconsequential speed bumps in the journey that were mostly there to either pad out the story or showcase the characters’ power.  We felt nothing for the manticore that showed up and was dispatched by the brave heroes, but we did feel that it was pretty badass the way Drizzt did a double ninja backflip and decapitated the mofo.

As we matured, this stopped being enough for us.  Not only did we yearn to flex our muscle and see what we could really do with this genre, but we also wanted to put behind us the idea that this was a novelty genre for kids.  So we turned away from it entirely.  You still see reviewers sometimes complain that a story is “too D&D” to be taken seriously.

Which is unfortunate.

If it wasn’t obvious by the my writing (or the Lost Pages), I actually really, really, really like monsters.  I love tremendous battles with gigantic horrors from the deep.  I love vicious fights with bloodthirsty beasts driven chiefly by hunger.  I love the image of trying to hold back a pair of jaws, slick with one’s own blood, as they gnash ever closer to a tender, quivering throat.  I love demons.  I love beasts.  I love fiends.  I love monsters.

Which is why I flatly reject the notion that they have no place in modern fantasy.

But then…where do they fit?

My favorite subject to study in school was mythology simply because I loved the idea of gryphons and hydras and krakens.  I loved wondering about how creatures like these came to be, how they functioned, how they were put together.  How did a gryphon come to be half-eagle, half-lion?  Why an eagle and a lion?  For awhile, I was content to let these answers lie dormant.  It was an eagle and a lion because that’s how gryphons were made and I was able to put these in my stories with no real thought behind them.  A gryphon’s a gryphon, otherwise it wouldn’t be.

Like any good literary nerd, I loved books long before I loved textbooks.  So it wasn’t until I learned more about evolution and the natural process that I actually began to think about how these creatures functioned and why they evolved the way they did.  As I began to write more, my research came to include BBC and Discovery channel wildlife documentaries.  I could see how creatures were made and that affected how I made mine.

The creatures I make, as a result, are mostly biologically sound.  Sikkhuns have six ears that fold out like a radar dish because they are without eyes, growing up in the primarily lightless Nether.  Akaneeds are deep blue to serve as camouflage.  Environmental concerns dictated the growth of the Lizardmen.

Which is all worldbuilding, the type of shit you usually see nerds go nuts for.  Yet it’s somehow much easier to get someone excited in a tea ritual than in how bioluminescence plays a part in a fish-woman-demon’s evisceration technique.

 

Prrreeow (art by Sarah Elkins).

If worldbuilding is not enough, though, what other purpose does the monster serve?

Well, it’s not merely enough to have a monster exist for no reason.  Like any good student of Chekov, I believe that if you put a monster in the book, your characters should encounter it at some point.  And how they do that tells us a lot about that character and where they come from.

Consider Peter V. Brett’s world, for example.  Every night, demons rise from the center of the earth to torment mankind in a variety of shapes, sizes and flavors.  This has created a society that lives in perpetual terror and has shaped what they do and how they act.  They are terrified of the night, suspicious of anything that isn’t them, live in a largely isolated society and Brett harnesses this effect fairly well.

I do wonder, though, if we’re serving ourselves by denying the main reason we put monsters in our books.

And that is that monsters are freaking cool.

I wrote awhile back as to whether the expression of joy was enough of a reason to do something for an artist.  Frankly, I feel that it is.  God forbid something not be Spartan in its aestheticism.  God forbid something be in a fantasy because it’s awesome.  God forbid we try to have fun with what we write.

That’s not to say you can just throw it in and forget about it.  We cannot end our logic with “because it’s awesome,” but we can certainly begin there.  We can throw a monster into a story because monsters are awesome, but it must say something about the world it came from and the world it hopes to devour.  We can throw a romance into a story because kissing is awesome, but it must serve as a source of conflict and emotional tension.  We can throw a magic system in because it’s awesome (and we do), but for some reason we’re content to just leave it at that in most cases.

Let’s be more adventurous.  Let’s accept “awesome” as a good place to start.  Let’s devour flesh together.

I received my very first piece of hate mail today.

It had to happen eventually.  As an outrageous online persona possessed of views that sometimes skew the readership and skewer the meek, I often find myself at odds with certain subsections of the internet.  The clock marking the countdown to the moment I stepped on one toe too many (which I have dubbed DangerClock) was turned on the moment I became an author and has been going down steadily ever since.

Unsurprisingly, it was Fantasy Reddit that was the culprit this time.  You see, at the request of Steve Drew, their most gracious overlord, I agreed to participate in the Reddit Gift Exchange: where various degenerates exchange pleasantries in cardboard boxes and pretend to partake of civilized society, if only for a day.  I offered to give up a full trilogy of The Aeons’ Gate, signed and bookplated and everything.

And what did I receive in return?

Actually, some pretty nice stuff from a lovely redditor, NyanKatniss, including a neat figurine of a pug with a gun and a cool drinking glass of House Baratheon (not dishwasher safe, I note, so that’ll be my official glass-I-never-wash that I offer to house guests I hate).

AND ALSO THIS.

 

I have received threats in my life.

I have received harsh criticisms.

I have received speculation on my personal life that I have found rude, intrusive, offensive and uncalled for.

In terms of sheer offense, though, this gift tops them all.

Perhaps I have not made myself clear in my stance toward mystery-solving cats.  Perhaps you simply assumed that I was like many of the other addle-brained socialites who swooned and cooed at the notion of felines who are capable of treading the noir field where human feet dare not.  Perhaps this was an honest mistake.

Perhaps.

For the benefit of those who may be driven by such “charity,” let me be perfectly succinct in my views on this.

CATS CANNOT SOLVE MYSTERIES.

CATS ARE PORTLY, SLOW-WITTED ANIMALS WHO POOP IN BOXES.

CATS DO NOT BELONG IN STORIES.

Call me harsh, if you will.  Call me a bigot.  Call me an enemy of felinity, for that is what I am and I make no qualms about it.  I thoroughly reject any reality in which a self-absorbed quadruped is given a responsibility of solving a crime.

And it is that, the sheer audacity of a world in which cats are given the authority to solve and prosecute crimes, that offends me most.  Not the fact that cats are smelly and stupid.  Not the fact that they are so much lamer than dogs.  Not the fact that I once dated Stephanie Dyson back in high school and every time we went out she would go on and on about her fucking cat and fucking suck precious hours from my life with stories about how Mittens did the cutest thing today until I just grabbed her by the shoulders and screamed into her face: “LOOK AT ME.  LOOK AT ME.  I AM A HUMAN BEING.  I HAVE NEEDS.  I AM NOT A CAT.  I CAN SPEAK TO YOU.  I NEED TO LIVE A LIFE WITH YOU.  NOT YOUR CAT.  LOOK AT ME, STEPHANIE.  LOOK AT ME AND REJOICE IN WHAT YOU HAVE DONE TO ME.”

Simply put: cats cannot handle the amount of authority needed to be a detective.  The mind rejects it.

I have put together a sample chapter culled from my own dark thoughts to demonstrate the absurdity of it all.

“Detective Smuckles, you are one fucking sorry-ass excuse for a lawman,” Corporal Grimes muttered through a mouthful of cigar smoke and whiskey breath.  “But fuck if you aren’t just the kind of mean-ass son of a bitch I need for this kind of job.”

He threw the case file onto the desk with much the same ceremony one would throw a witch onto a burning pyre.  It hurt his meaty fingers to touch them, it hurt his bloodshot eyes to look at them as the grainy color photos spilled out from the dossier and onto the hard wood.  She was a beautiful girl once, if her corpse was anything to go by.  Maybe she had a room with a canopy bed with pink sheets.  Maybe she had a desk with a vanity mirror she begged and begged her parents to buy her.  Maybe she spent a lot of time sitting in front of that mirror, wondering what her first kiss would be like, wondering if she and Steve Rhames would ever get married, wondering if it was all right to think that Mr. Jefferson in fifth-hour Geometry was kind of cute.

Maybe.

“The killer sent us these at exactly three-thirty-three in the P.M., Smuckles,” Grimes said.  He bit down so hard on his cigar it threatened to sever.  “Every fucking third month for three years.  It’s not always a girl.  Sometimes young boys, sometimes dogs, sometimes old people.  Aged 13, 33, whatever else involving the number three.  That’s the root of all this, Smuckles.  These aren’t some random killings.  We are dealing with one sick motherfucker.  I need a sick motherfucker to catch him.”  Grimes leaned over the desk, regarded Detective Smuckles evenly.  “Are you that sick motherfucker, Smuckles?”

“Meow,” replied Detective Smuckles, kneading his paws on the chair before curling up and falling into a drowsy purr.

SEE?  SEE HOW STUPID THAT WAS?!

Now I have this stuff in my house.  WHERE MY CHILDREN SLEEP.

Thank you, Reddit.  Thank you, NyanKatniss.

Thank you for this terrible gift.

I didn’t want to like Tomb Raider.

I mean, I really didn’t want to like it.  The earliest footage of its gameplay looked like something out of a snuff film with a heroine who was constantly moaning and whimpering at being constantly beat up between violent deaths.  I mean, the stuff that made it in was horrifying enough (warning: that link includes a lot of footage of Lara Croft dying violently, I wouldn’t look at it unless you really want to).

I mean, I got what they were going for.  They wanted to establish the overwhelming odds that Lara had to overcome to become the heroine she ended up as.  I expect some of it was made to address a rather tarnished reputation she had as a sex object.  While I never played the original Tomb Raider games, she always seemed to embody some strong ideals: confident, bold, sex positive, okay with who she was, that sort of thing.  This Lara seemed like someone who was intentionally being made weak to demonstrate how horrible the world was (is that a trope, by the way?  A character made weaker just to demonstrate horrors of the world?  Not quite Women in Refrigerators, but I’m getting ahead of myself).

Then you had comments like this.

I wasn’t on board and I was more than ready to write it off.

My friend Carl, whose taste I generally trust when it comes to most forms of entertainment, told me it was a good thing.  But it was really this post here by Ashelia at Hellmode that made me want to give it a go.

So I did.

I was pretty surprised.

The violence was horrifying.  Like, I say this as an unapologetic fanboy of God of War.  It was more shocking than personally gouging out the eyes of someone (whose eyes you happen to be looking through) because the tone was different.  This violence was presented as unexpected, horrible, out of the norm.  God of War’s violence is…trivial isn’t the right word I’m looking for, but it’s close.  It’s more like it’s procedural, it’s how you get from point A to point B, which is fine for the kind of story that God of War is telling.  But Tomb Raider’s violence is telling a different story, something about the price of blood, the cost of violence, the measure of a human life and human suffering.  Tomb Raider’s violence was different.

It had weight.

I don’t want to talk about grimdark anymore (though for those of you that do, Jenny’s Library here has put up a pretty comprehensive list of stuff discussing it).  What I’d like to talk about is a concept that just hit me a few days ago going hand-in-hand with weight: heft.

When I talk about the weight of violence, I mean the impact it has on the story, the way it affects the characters, the way it shapes the world and the way it makes the outcomes of each conflict mean something.

Something wigglypoo (which I am now coining to be the inverse of grimdark) fantasy fiction doesn’t do well is show the weight of violence.  An orc is an orc, so let’s kill that orc and move on and not think about his family or what choices drove him to end up on the bad end of this blade.

Something grimdark fantasy fiction does pretty well is show the weight of violence.  Almost too well.  I’m not going to list a lot of the dangers of doing so, since I’ve already done that and Elizabeth Bear also said everything I wanted to a lot better, suffice to say that the weight of violence becomes crushing.  Something we’re unable to get out from under.

Heft, then, is the way we interact with the weight, how it feels in our hands, how far we can throw it, how well we can swing it, what breaks when we hit something with it.  It’s the harmonious nature of joy and despair, the moment where tragedy becomes triumph and triumph becomes tragedy.  It’s the moment when Robb Stark rallies the North to avenge his father.  It’s the moment when Katniss makes the decision to take her own life.  It’s the moment when someone reacts to the violence in a way that shapes their character.

And that’s what we’re missing.

The more I played of Tomb Raider, the more I really, really liked it.  Because I saw so many moments of emotional heft that it was impossible not to start liking Lara Croft.  The violence she suffered served to make the moments when she overcame her circumstances so much stronger (and those moments, in turn, made her tragedies so much more profound).  I found I quickly recognized the moments of violent goreporn (of which there is a bit) weren’t nearly as important as the moments where she looks up at some impossible obstacle and says: “I can do this.”

Those moments are what defined this game and Lara for me.

That and the moment when she busts out of a flaming building with a machine gun screaming (in a British accent): “RUN YOU BASTARDS, I’M COMING FOR YOU ALL.”

But I digress.

The highest praise I can offer a video game is that it somehow affected my work.  And yeah, Tomb Raider definitely did.  It made me think more about what makes a strong character, how vulnerability and violence affect that, what makes a tragedy powerful and what makes blood meaningful.

But most importantly, it made me appreciate the cost of a human life.  It made me appreciate how it affects people, how they kill, what it makes them.  It made me appreciate violence far more than my previous work ever could.

I can’t help but feel that this project is going to be my strongest yet.

I mean, either that or it sucks ass and this will all have been an exercise in futility.

Either way, good to know.

Featured image is by Mad-Jill on Deviantart.  Amazing artist, go check her stuff.

It occurs to me, in all my haste to slap a label on “grimdark,” that I forgot to tell you how the Tucson Festival of Books went.

In a word: good.

The crowds were very sizable, very receptive, very enthusiastic and very involved.  It doesn’t hurt that a lot of them decided to pick up my books, which certainly made the whole event a little more fun for me.  But I think chief among the events was the fact that I got to hang out with Patrick Rothfuss for the first time.

I mean, we’d known each other for a while, but we never really got to enjoy each other’s company.  It was quite pleasant.  Pleasant enough that it gave me the sincerely flattering honor of having said something that affected him.  It’s always gratifying when that happens, since it shows that you actually aren’t just spewing rot that makes no sense to anyone but you.  Also, it makes it much easier to come out and say so when another author says something that happened to affect you in a meaningful way.

It was on the panel “Epic Storytelling,” upon which I was speaking with Diana Gabaldon and Patrick, when he happened to say something that’s been weighing on my mind for the past few weeks…

Heaven forbid something not be totally necessary to the plot.

And that statement there about summarized the conclusion of my many literary angsts that I’ve been sharing with you these recent months.

The Aeons’ Gate, as a trilogy, is completed.  In the space between its publication and my next project, I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about the nature of storytelling.  More specifically, the nature of my storytelling.

Is there too much violence?  Does life mean so little in this world?  Is there too much dialogue?  Is there too little plot development?  Is the worldbuilding too scant?  Is the existential angst of the companions too much?  Is Kataria not as badass because one of the main thrusts of her story about romance?  Is Lenk’s dual personality a bit too reminiscent?  Is the dialogue overwrought?  Is Gariath trying too hard?

Whether I spend a lot of thought or a little on these questions, I find myself boiling them down to just two.

Is this what I want to write?

Does it make me happy?

While perusing Something Awful a while back, I came across a criticism of a book whose title and author escapes me.  Rather, it was the nature of the complaint that stuck with me: an eye-roll induced by the idea of a character having his thoughts expressed in italics.

Naturally, being quite fond of this myself, I was a little perturbed to realize that someone’s thoughts being conveyed in italic text was something cringe-worthy. I guess the argument revolves around the idea that, if you’re a skilled writer, you can convey someone’s thought process without telegraphing it like this, oh god that makes me so worried.

But to me, that’s a lost opportunity to get as into the character’s head as you possibly can.  That’s a moment when you no longer ask the audience to witness this thought process and see what happens, but when you force them to be involved with the character’s personal narrative, to be a part of every angry thought, nonsensical desire and contradictory self-criticism.  Peep Show (the UK television series) used this to great effect, forcing you to be a part of the character’s inner monologue and investing you in their mental struggles.

Suffice to say, I’m a big fan of thoughts in italic texts.

I’m also a big fan of verbal sparring in high-stakes fight scenes.  I also like impractical costumes.  I like magic words.  I like cool special effects.  I like mushy love stories.  I like hearts skipping half a beat at the sight of someone.  I like exploding similes.  I like tortured heroes.  I like tortured villains.  I like messy relationships and freaky-as-shit monsters and screaming in all caps.

I like a number of things that a lot of fantasy fans say make them “embarrassed” to be a fan of the genre.

It’s cringe-inducing to read a complex romantic relationship.  It’s eye-rolling to read thoughts in italics.  It’s groan-worthy to see ostentatious costumery.  It’s embarrassing to see magic that does crazy shit and similes that are occasionally overwrought and sex scenes that are a little weird.  Why?  Because they’re gratuitous, because they’re excessive, because they aren’t totally necessary to the story.

Heaven forbid.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m aware that these things can quickly go overboard.  Indulgence quickly turns to gratuitousness.

And yet, I can’t help but feel that we, as readers, so often err on the side of conservative thinking when it comes to these situations.  We’ve seen them done poorly, so we can never see them done again.  We want Spartan storytelling: nothing there that isn’t 100% important to the plot, nothing there that doesn’t serve to hurry the story along, nothing there that might be fun.

And if an author wants to write that kind of story?  Fine.  It’s done to amazingly good effect by many.

But it does beg the question.

Is an expression of the author’s joy a valid form of art?

Is there value in something that isn’t 100% necessary to the plot?

Is a little excess to be excused?  Is it to be embraced?  How about a lot?

Robert Jackson Bennett did an awesome essay on this, and frankly, I find myself agreeing with the idea that an author going overboard is not only excusable, but necessary for a story to be a story.

Jackson talks about voice in his essay, how it’s frustratingly difficult to describe.  Truth be told, it isn’t.  Everything we’re talking about up here?  All this excess?  All this gratuitousness?  All this unnecessary stuff?

That’s voice.

That’s energy.

That’s how a story is told.

The story lies in the passion, in where the author’s attentions are and where they want them to be directed.  The story lies in the excess, in what the author chooses to gush about and what the author chooses to be sparing with.  The story lies in the big, hot mess of an author’s joy, an author geeking out, an author indulging themselves.

Robin Hobb’s The Assassin Trilogy is essentially the story of an excessively angsty young man.  What makes it great?

Brent Weeks’ The Night Angel Trilogy is essentially about badass assassins and super cool magic.  What makes it well-read?

Patrick Rothfuss’ The Wise Man’s Fear is about witty dialogue and faerie sex.  What makes it loved?

This is not intended to summarize inadequately or diminish my fellow authors’ achievements, but rather to prove a point.  What are these stories but tales of excess?  Of interest?  Stuff we’d write off as juvenile, indulgent or “embarrassing?”

Now, this isn’t to say that excess is beyond criticism.  Far from it.  There are valid concerns with the gratuitous and the excessive and even the embarrassing.  And we should definitely talk about them where they strike us.  Nor does it mean that every piece of excess means the work is quality.  By all means, a love of assassins or faerie sex or angsty heroes is not something we shouldn’t bother criticizing.

But it is something we don’t need to justify.

Voice is worthwhile.

Excess is sometimes appreciated.

Joy is a valid form of art.

It’s weird being a child of the internet.

I get annoyed when people bring up memes that I’ve already known about and gotten tired of six weeks before.  I’m waiting for the Harlem Shake to catch on in earnest and become even more unbearable.  It enrages me to no end that I’m in a position where I can actually say something like: “you still laugh at Grumpy Cat?  No, dude, it’s all about Shiba Confessions now.”

That said, though, I’m actually kind of glad that the phrase “grimdark” has caught on enough for us to talk about it.

First, a definition: “grimdark” is when a story’s setting, mood or theme is one of relentless violence, despair and grit, usually to a degree that some would find excessive to the point of absurdity.  Grimdark tends to be defined as self-serving; that is, grimdark is grimdark for the sake of conveying an exceptionally dark and brutal setting rather than as a product of the story.

It was originally coined to describe the setting of Warhammer 40k, derived from its tagline “in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.”  And, like all things coined on the internet, it’s undergone quite a few changes in definition and application until it’s pretty much used for whatever someone happens to disagree with or dislike at the time.

Including fantasy novels.

If you run in the same circles I do (and if you’re reading this blog, chances are you do), you’ve probably heard the label applied to authors like Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence, Richard K. Morgan, sometimes George R.R. Martin.  All very good authors whose work I have appreciated, despite (and in some cases, because of) their bleakness.  And internet labels being what they are, they can’t be considered to have a lot of academic integrity, so nebulous that they can be twisted to apply to just about anything.

Unsurprisingly, and perhaps somewhat justifiably, I think there’s a dismissive attitude toward the word.  “Oh, it’s just these people who want to return fantasy to white hats and evil orcs upset that there aren’t enough puppies and rainbows,” they say.  “We deal in raw, gritty stuff.  The real world.”  Grimdark is a word that we’re kind of kicking around with no real discussion going on about it.

And I think that’s a mistake.

As people who make our bread and butter off of words, you’d think we’d know that even the most whimsically-tossed ones have some value.  And the fact that we have this particular word to deal with as it pertains to trends in our craft is something that I don’t think we should discount so swiftly.

It’s very easy to sign off accusations of grimdarkness as overreaction, because sometimes it is.  There are people who want sunshine, bunnies and rainbows in their books (these people are out of luck).  There are people who think it’s morally irresponsible to portray such crass darkness and to not “think of the children” (the people are stupid).  But there is a real danger in dismissing the word because there are some questions that should be asked.

How much weight does violence carry?

What’s the worth of a good deed?

Is striving to be a better person an unrealistic goal?

If everything is dark, how can we tell?

How many different ways can we say “people suck, war is hell, the world is a bottomless shithole” and still have it mean something?

And this is where we need to be wary of the meaning behind grimdark.  The danger is not in corrupting children or in changing the face of fantasy, but in robbing us, the  reader, of the scope of consequence.

Frankly, I think it’s kind of shitty that wanting some hope and love in one’s books is considered unrealistic, on par with rainbows made out of kittens that slide into a pot of gold.  It seems like in our quest to be taken seriously as a genre and thus distancing ourselves from a legacy of goodly wizard, naive hobbits and evil orcs, we’ve hit a point where we want to deny everything that made us enjoy these stories in the first place.

Qualities like hope and love, stories about people trying to do the right thing (even if we disagree about what the right thing is sometimes), have a value beyond just making people feel good.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to explore the darker side of a story.  But when we think of the word “explore,” our minds are filled with the ideas of discovery, trekking out into the unknown and seeing what’s on the other side of the hill.  We tend to ignore what makes the word so powerful in the first place: where we came from.

Exploration is just as much about where you came from as where you’re going.

Exploration is only impressive because you’re leaving the safe comfort of home behind you.  Explorers are only heroes because we know what they’re leaving behind.  They have to move from the familiar to the unfamiliar and it’s the familiar that gives the unfamiliar weight and meaning.  And it’s the familiar, I think, that’s missing in grimdark.

Grimdark happens when we’re born in shadows.  The skies are always dark, people are always terrible, war is ever-present and the heroes are always justified in doing terrible things because that’s just how things are done.  We know nothing of the world beyond the fact that it’s shitty.  And because it’s shitty, the shit stops stinking.  We commit that most heinous of crimes in writing: we become banal.

Violence isn’t shocking, it’s just something to do.  Rape isn’t horrifying, it’s a common form of social interaction.  War isn’t hell, it’s Monday.  Loss isn’t loss because you were going to lose it anyway, so who cares.

It may sound like I’m advocating for an abolition of all violence, horror and grit in fantasy.  Anyone who has read literally anything by me can probably tell you that’s a hoark.  Truth is, as a reader, I’m kind of advocating for more masochism.  I’m asking for you to show me the sunlight so the darkness has more meaning.  I’m asking for you to make me love a character so you can hurt him later.  I’m asking for you to show me some kindness and hope so that the emptiness where they used to be is all the more profound than if they had never existed at all.

I like it that way, baby.

And the man who does this sort of thing quite excellently is Scott Lynch (who, incidentally, is gearing up to release his third book, hallelujah).  His work has a lot of deft wordplay, fast jokes and charming interactions, but no one would dare call it whimsical.  And anyone who read The Lies of Locke Lamora can pinpoint exactly the moment where he crushed your soul.

Look, as a dude who has written scenes where the walls are literally painted with blood, I’m aware of the irony of criticism I’m offering here.  And honestly, I wonder if I can only really start looking at this carefully given where I’ve come from and what I’ve written.  Or maybe it’s just a desire to be different that’s driving me.

My latest work has me asking a lot of these questions.  I’m wondering what gives violence its impact: how it happens or who it happens to?  I’m wondering what makes a dark world dark: the people who act like shit or the people who don’t?  I’m wondering what a dead body means: scenery or conflict?

Maybe you’ll have to tell me if I got it right when it comes out.

Just a quick reminder: this Saturday and Sunday, I’ll be at the Tucson Festival of Books.  Check my schedule here!  Hope to see you there!

I’m going to warn you in advance: I’m going to be talking about sex in fantasy again.

And the reason I’m going to warn you is because this is apparently a divisive issue in a lot of readers.

And the reason I’m going to be talking about it is because this topic has been weighing on my mind a lot lately.

Earlier today, while carousing the twitter feed of Shanna Germain, I happened across an article at the Telegraph discussing the need for authors feeling commercial pressure to include sex in their literature.  The headline happened to resonate rather clearly with me today, since sex and relationships in fantasy have become something of a hot topic lately.  Whether it’s a (admittedly good-natured) diss on Rothfuss for the sex in his work, whether it’s a (admittedly necessary) discussion on rape versus consent by Kate Elliott, whether it’s a (admittedly stupid-as-shit) implication that relationships are the dominion of icky things like “girls” and their dreaded “romance genre,” relationships, sex and romance have extremely weird intonations when uttered within the language of fantasy fiction.

My latest project (which I’ll discuss at length another time) features all three to some extent, thus you can see my current fixation on the topic.

And, as I inch closer to announcing this project and what’s going on in it and turning it over to my editor, I don’t feel pressured.

I feel fucking (har) scared.

I don’t read my own reviews, so I have no idea what people are taking from my books (though, if you’d like to share your thoughts, I’m always happy to have someone drop a line).  But I kind of hope it’s obvious that I’m a little bit in love with the idea of love.

I was the kid that paid rapt attention whenever Drizzt and Cattie-Brie were alone.  I was the kid that played FF7 primarily to see where the love triangle between Cloud, Tifa and Aeris was going.  I’m still the kid that reads a passage about his hand brushing hers, two fingers lingering just a moment too long, and blushes and then feels silly for doing so.

I like romance.  I like relationships.  I like sex.  I don’t like them simple and I don’t like them easy, but I like them.  I also like blood, swords, anger and poop jokes.  Frequently, I like all of them together.  And it’s a little discouraging when I want to venture out into something I haven’t done before and see people still reacting to the idea of sex and relationships in fantasy with the sort of thing you might see in a schoolyard.

I’ve heard the arguments, of course.  There are those that say a sex scene doesn’t add anything to a story.  There are those that say a relationship is always gratuitous.  There are those that say romance detracts from the story at large.  These are arguments that hinge on the idea that two people are at their best when they are walking in lock-step side-by-side.  Anything more is a distraction from the story at large.

And to be honest?  I don’t always blame them.

Let’s be brutal with ourselves a minute here: when it comes to the hierarchy of tasteful depictions of sex and relationships, fantasy authors probably rank only a few notches above pornographers in respectability and a few notches below in finance.  Truth be told, there has been a long tradition of sex in fantasy being overblown and gratuitous, of romances being saccharine and uncomplicated, of relationships hinging more on prophecies and swords than on chemistry and motive.

Truth be told, it’s always going to seem a little gratuitous.  Because sex is just plain fun to write.  We owe it to ourselves to make it fit the story, but that doesn’t mean we have to be joyless shitpails about it.

But that’s not the main problem.  The main problem is that, as we struggle with the definition of “epic,” we find that it doesn’t fit our definition of a relationship.

I think there’s an element of denial still at play in fantasy, in writers and readers alike, that we only recently came to overcome these past few years.  We’ve come to accept the fact that good people do bad things and bad people sometimes have good reasons.  Hell, we’ve come to embrace it, shunning our past of white-hatted heroes and hand-wringing villains with names like “The Destroyer.”  And yet, somehow, we’re still clinging to the idea that relationships are, at best, a pleasant distraction that shouldn’t bite too much into the main story.

When the truth is: relationships are the story.

We’ve come to embrace the fact that character trumps plot when it comes to fantasy.  We know now that characters drive the plot, not the other way around.  But what we have yet to realize is that relationships make the characters.  They shape the motives.  They force the expression.  They create the action.  They are the difference between doing the right thing for the wrong reasons and doing a bad thing because any of us would have done the same.

The concept of epic, until recently, was relegated mostly to maps, magic systems and histories.  Lately, we’ve come a little closer in putting it to rights by including the word “epic” in things like politics.  We’re perfectly fine to accept relationships if the end goal is to screw someone over.  But we have yet to really accept the idea that any relationship can be epic.

We think relationships are supposed to be intimate, honest, heartfelt (or, if you’re jaded: unnecessary, sappy and overwrought).  We think of them in the same way we view them in Dragon Age: bonus content, fun to play, but ultimately irrelevant.  It’s at odds with our idea of what epic fantasy ought to be: high stakes, complex, gritty and hard to handle.

Anyone who has ever been in love can tell you the disconnect here.

Relationships are all those things.  And in a good story, they are the driving force behind the characters.  They are what makes Jaime Lannister throw Cersei’s note into the fire.  They are what makes Kvothe feel like a bumbling, preening idiot.  They make the decisions more difficult, the plot more complex, the consequences more severe.  They condense the most important things in the world to two people.

There’s a reason Casablanca is a classic.

That’s if they’re done well, of course.

If they’re done poorly…well, then, yeah.  They do feel like someone hit the end of their manuscript and went: “Oh, fuck, I forgot to put a romantic subplot in.”  And yeah, there’s no shortage of shit like that in fantasy.  There’s also no shortage of male power fantasies, blatant racist analogues, heavy-handed morality plays and aggressively weird kinkiness.  But we’re getting better with those, as well.

So much better that it’s a crying shame that there seems to be this part of us that’s reluctant to accept that the best stories are human stories.  And the human stories that don’t always involve humans are even better.

We owe it to ourselves, as readers and writers, to begin exploring these avenues a little more and start accepting that they are there to enhance the story instead of detract from it.  We owe it to ourselves to start being interested in this and accepting the humanity of it, and that includes sex scenes.  Because just as relationships are an avenue of conflict, sex scenes are an avenue of expression, a way to tell the story without so many words.

Joe Abercrombie sometimes gets shit for the sex he put in The First Law trilogy (I’ve heard the word “embarrassing” tossed around).  Having devoured his books messily, that’s never what I got from his writing.  Take two people: Logen Ninefingers, berserker terrified of his own past, and Ferro, warrior woman with a grudge against a world that failed to live up to her expectations.  Put them together.  Maybe we were seeing different things.  Maybe you saw the clumsy prose, the awkward thrusting, the grunting.  What I saw was two people who, at their core, just weren’t quite sure how to be human anymore, reflected in their quivering buttocks.

Sometimes it seems like I’ve said this all before.  Sometimes it seems like I’ll be saying it forever.  Fuck, maybe I will.  Maybe this is less about you than it is about me.  Maybe it’s me getting over my own hang-ups about sex and love and just forcing you to take in my textual diarrhea.  Maybe this is something we’re just never go to see eye-to-eye on.

But, as I come to the end of this blog post and inch a little closer to hitting the “publish” button, as I prepare to go back to work on this project, yet plagued with doubt as to whether this will impress or alienate, I realize the worry is futile.  This blog post was futile.  Ultimately, it will change nothing about what I’m doing right now.

This is the story I want to write.  Thus, it is the story I have to write.

It is complicated.  It is messy.  It is violent.  It is romantic.

There is sex.  People cry.  Love is still the most dangerous thing in the world.

I think a dude fights someone while naked.

This is the story.

And I cannot stop it.