sam

The most important criticism you will ever receive as a writer is the one that you can’t ever answer cleanly.  It’s these criticisms that will ultimately make you choose what’s important to you as a writer and if that’s more important to you than the reader (or some readers, anyway).

The thing is, because these criticisms don’t have clean answers, you’re never going to be able to totally dismiss them.  They’re going to keep coming back, with each new criticism, and you’re going to find yourself asking yourself if you did the right thing all the time.

Mine?

I have a few, but one of the biggest ones I have a problem defending myself against is the fact that I have a lot of banter in my combat scenes.  My characters often pause in the middle of battle for a little repartee, toss a few taunts at their enemy or offer up the occasional plea for mercy.

The criticism against this is fairly hard to defend myself against.  It’s unrealistic (debatable; as my friend M.D. Lachlan pointed out to me, Muhammad Ali was famous for taunting his opponents during fights), it’s decidedly reminiscent of an action movie (and it’s true, I do occasionally employ one-liners), and it diminishes or otherwise breaks the tension of a life-or-death fight (and that part is definitely true; we could, of course, debate that gallows humor and joking during tense situations gives the reader a moment to breathe and makes the tragedy have more of an impact, but the point remains that it’s hard to take a death threat seriously when you meet it with a joke).

Sometimes, I ask myself why I do it.

And then, sometimes, I read a book that tells me exactly why.

Because I fucking love it.

I won’t name the book in question, because it’s largely irrelevant and I’m still enjoying it, overall, but I will say that it is the kind of book where the dialogue is about as exciting as two cardboard cutouts of Hugh Grant reading the obituaries of a small town in West Denmark to each other at library level.

Now, granted, that doesn’t suggest incompetence.  Far from it, the dialogue is functional.  Like everything else in the book is functional.  The cloaks are big, the fights are brief and the dialogue is used sparsely and to do nothing more than exchange information.  I know precisely what is going on in the story and precisely what happened in the backstory (which is appropriately epic for epic fantasy, after all), because that’s all these people talk about.

It’s clean.  It’s neat.  It’s 100% functional.

And it is terribly, terribly boring because it terribly, terribly misses the point of dialogue.

Dialogue is messy.  Dialogue stutters, stumbles, backtracks and doesn’t always make sense.  People are not 100% clear and functional when they talk.  They don’t always talk about the situation at hand; oftentimes, they talk to avoid talking about the situation at hand.  People are sloppy when they talk, they have trouble expressing themselves when it’s appropriate and no trouble doing so when it’s inappropriate.  They talk to get people to admit something, they talk to avoid talking about things they hate, they talk to test their own courage and sometimes they back down.

We use dialogue to dance around a topic, to let the reader inform him or herself as to what’s important to the character, rather than to take him by the back of his head, shove his head between the double-quotes and scream “HERE.  HERE IS WHAT IS IMPORTANT.  THIS IS AN IMPORTANT PLOT POINT.  IT IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE REASONS.  MOVING ON.”

We learn a character through their dialogue not by what they say, but by how they say it.  The importance is in the expression, not the information.  The information is important, assuredly, but not as important as how the character reacts to it.  Knowing that the demon wars of aught-six claimed a billion lives is not as important as knowing that Johnny Boyhero has trouble talking about it because he still has nightmares of seeing his mother eaten by Lord Doomjaw III.

Dialogue can’t be segregate from the story.  Would you tell the story about a boy who got a sword and slew a dragon as “there was a boy who got a sword and slew a dragon, the end?”  Probably not.  You’d want tension.  You’d want atmosphere.  You’d want to know why this boy got this sword to slay this dragon and how that all came to be and you’d want it reflected in the prose.  In this, dialogue is much like a story within a story.  A good conversation will suggest to us all of that (why this person is talking to this person and how they feel about each other) without telling us all of that, outright.

And the word “suggestion” is key.  Suggestion keeps the reader involved, it lets the reader become invested because the reader is engaged.  If you just tell them, then they already know, so why would they keep reading?

You’ll note, in movies, that actors will tell you everything you need to know with just a facial expression or body language.  A man sitting slightly more upright in a chair when another man walks into the room will tell us everything we need to know about their relationship.  A woman who reaches out to another woman, holds her hand over her shoulder for just a moment, then withdraws it will tell us infinitely more than, say, the phrase: “I want to tell her, but I just can’t.”

This may sound like I’m contradicting myself slightly, but in writing we don’t always have the luxury of describing facial cues or body language so easily (these can be pretty easy to miss).  When you can do them and do them well, then they should always take precedence.  But when you must use dialogue, you must use it to tell as much about the character without telling us about the character.  If a woman is confident and proud in her speech, yet stutters in front of someone else, we know what there is between them.  If a man is short and terse with his wife, their entire relationship is suggested to us.

If we say “she always found herself falling all over herself when this other person was around” or “he was always short with her since he found out about the other man, even though they had left that behind,” then a level of engagement has been stripped away from the reader.

So, to bring it all back.  Is it a tad impractical to have my characters banter with each other during battles?  Sure.  Does it make slightly less like a fight to the death and more like a movie?  Maybe.  But is it bad?

To me, no.  It tells us something about the characters, these characters who are routinely in battle, these characters who have been forced to look at life and death a certain way, these characters who struggle to cope with the things they’ve done and will have to do when they stop talking and start stabbing.

A lot of readers got what I was going for there.  That’s awesome.

Some readers didn’t.  That’s okay, too.  I’m not an author who blames a reader for not getting what I throw down.  Their own interpretation is just that.

And, in time, I will have to question myself on that again, question if I’ve gone too far with this banter of if it will rob too much tension if Lenk makes a joke when he’s being held out over a flaming pit by the throat, blood in his eyes and mouth full of broken teeth.

But, for now, I like it.

Because I hate Hugh Grant.

Joy and annoyance come to every party together.

Whatever is worth talking about is inherently joyous, but because we have to talk about it, it will always be annoying.  Because you and I read fantasy, we are in a very joyous position that the question of how seriously fantasy should take itself will always be something worth talking about.  And because you and I have opinions on the subject, we’re bound to annoy each other eventually.

And under the auspices of this revelation did I realize that very few things annoy me more than the word “escapism.”

Specifically, the phrase “it’s escapist.”

Always offered briefly, intended as explanation but offered as excuse.

At some point when we’re talking about fantasy, we will reach a chasm.  It will be a very short gap to jump, bridged by the words “you know, I don’t think we like the same things,” but it will always seem huge to us because to confess that certain things don’t work for us, we confess that there is no one great almighty answer to the question “what is good fantasy.”

So instead, we use the phrase “it’s escapist” and we stay firmly on our side of the chasm.  The conversation grinds to a halt, anything else we might have said about the subject will never be said and we have to wait until the next time we talk about this to be annoyed all over again.

That’s a big reason I hate the word.  But it’s not the only one.

We don’t use the word “escapist” correctly.

In general, when someone offers up the phrase “it’s escapist,” it’s code for “I know it’s perceived as shit, but I like it.”  Thus, our minds make the connection that “escapist” = “shit” and escapist fantasy is shit fantasy in which half-naked dudes save half-naked babes from wholly-naked dragons.  Or something.

The thing is, no one escapes into a bad book.  They devour a bad book, maybe.  But to escape, to inhabit another life in another world with another conflict, you need to be invested in it.  You can’t escape into a character you don’t feel anything for.  And if there’s investment in the character, the world, the conflict, then the author, on some level, has done their job.  They have made you care.  More than that, they made you care enough to feel like you’re there, in this skin on those feet in this pair of boots on that ground.

We escape into good books.  We merely visit bad ones.

We think that escapism makes us turn our brains off.

There is, for some reason, a private shame that comes from enjoying oneself.  If you love a sweet, it must be because it’s bad for you.  And if you love a book that’s mostly sweet, it must be bad for you, as well.  So we say that we read the shallow stuff to turn our brains off, to take a vacation from our own thoughts.

Brains don’t work like that.

Just by reading something, you are, in fact, engaged.  And if you happen to enjoy it, even if you know (or think you know) it’s bad for you, then your brain is actually probably very engaged.  But because the story has an element that might be considered simplistic, straightforward or juvenile, we don’t bother explaining why we’re engaged.

We never say that we happen to enjoy the straightforward, unquestioning morality of the hero and, thus, we never have a discussion about whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.  We look at what other people say about that morality and somewhere along the line, someone says it’s juvenile, or shitty fantasy and we, having liked that, say: “Well, I just wanted to turn my brain off for a bit.”

You didn’t.  You just didn’t want to explain why your brain wasn’t turned off the same as anyone else.

We use the word to explain away the success of what we perceive as bad writers.

We love to bash Twilight.  It’s a hobby.  We love to point to its simplistic characters and laugh, we love to point to its juvenile plot and giggle, we love to point to its bland-as-dishwater writing and slap our own genitalia in raucous joy.

Until it comes time to point to its success.

And then we say “well, it’s escapism.  People enjoy escaping their own lives.”  Because, for some reason, this is a more palatable explanation than suggesting that there might actually be something to this book in which love is a dominant theme, in which holding hands is sexy, in which we admit that maybe there is a part of us that wants that for ourselves.  And it’s certainly less work to call it “escapist” than to perhaps wonder why it is these readers don’t get love from books we like, why it is that readers seek out comfort in human contact rather than political intrigue, why it is that we can or can’t do it better.

And suddenly, we have a very good conversation wasted.

We use the word to excuse the difficulties of books we perceive to be good.

We love to praise Name of the Wind.  We love to point to its complex plot and swoon, we love to point to its lyrical prose and sigh wistfully, we love to point to its thoughtful, vivid characters and say “yes, that’s exactly how it should be.”

Until it comes time to point to the fact that there are debatably very few female character in that book that didn’t exist to placate/satisfy Kvothe.

Then we say “it’s escapist.  No harm in a little wish-fulfillment.”  Because, for some reason, this is a more palatable explanation than suggesting that, for as far as we’ve come, we’ve still got a ways to go, that maybe we actually do crave that but haven’t figured out how to do it better, that maybe once in awhile the relentlessly bleak, politics-heavy, evil-son-of-a-bitch-of-a-protagonist grimdarkness that has become the norm in fantasy might not be authentically true to life as we thought it was.  And it’s certainly less work to say “escapist” than it is to discuss why it is that our authors can sometimes fall into the same mistakes as their forebears, than it is to discuss why we exchanged one set of tropes for another, than it is to say that sometimes, yes, we fucked the pooch a little here.

And again, another good conversation is wasted.

Summation.

Look, I write a series in which a brooding young man, along with a girl  with a bow and tight pants, a fearsome dragonman and a boy wizard that urinates fire duke it out in tremendously over-the-top battles full of bloodshed, banter and emotions running so hot it sometimes even makes me stop and wonder if I’m going too damn far.

I’m not a stranger to the concept of escapism.

But I call it “fun.”  I like stories like that.  That’s why I write them.  And that’s why I discuss them.  And that’s why sometimes I persuade readers to give the story about the boy-with-a-voice-in-his-head falling in love with the hissing-girl-with-identity-issues while they both stomp on a pile of demon corpses a try.  That’s also why sometimes I’m forced to eat a little shit when someone says that a 125-page fight scene is really exhausting and why sometimes it feels like every groan-worthy fantasy trope is being paraded around with gleeful abandon.

Somewhere along the line, though, we stopped giving “fun” a serious meaning.  We stopped enjoying stuff that makes us smile because, surely, it must be juvenile.  We stopped admitting that sometimes holding someone’s hand is amazingly intense because, surely, that’s not as important as who’s going to assassinate who.  And we stopped admitting that sometimes we don’t have all the answers because, surely, we don’t read “escapist” books.

Call it “fun,” call it “escapism,” but don’t make the mistake that it’s bereft of meaning just because of that.  And don’t make the mistake that just because it is fun that it doesn’t have to have something else going on.

Everything that is joyful must also be a little bit annoying.

Today’s featured image comes from Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Sidell, which you really should be reading.

Ho there, beasts.

I have nothing particularly profound to say about the state of writing, nor do I have any tremendous update to speak of on my new project, but I do have a few things to let you in on that I would absolutely love for you to stuff into your fat little faces and absorb as knowledge.

First of all, if you felt like it, you could come check out an interview I did for Bookworm Blues.  Really, as interviews go, this one might be the favorite one I’ve ever done.  The questions were tough and offbeat and not a single iteration of “where do you get your ideas from” to be seen.  Thanks so much to Sarah for offering it to me!

BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY.

On November 14th, next Wednesday, I will be present at The Poisoned Pen with my very good friend Cherie Priest as well as Rhodi Hawk for a signstravaganza!

I don’t usually get a big turn-out for these sorts of things.  So I’m hoping that posting this well in advance will convince a few of you to come out and see me and my esteemed colleagues (I’ve even heard tell that spurious knave Kevin Hearne will be around).

The even begins at 7 PM!

Anyway, do please make an effort.  It’d be so lovely to see you all.

So very lovely.

And tender.

This year, I suggested to my good friend, Robert J. Bennett, that we exchange ghost stories for the viewing pleasure of our fans.  You can read my own woefully inadequate measure here.

What began as an exchange of artistic ideas quickly became a competition to see who valued his dignity less.  Please find enclosed Robert J. Bennett’s ghost story…

“Well, that does it,” said Professor Exposition. “All five of us are most definitely trapped inside of this incredibly haunted abandoned toilet factory.”

“Of all the luck in the world!” said Victoria Ghernten to her fiancée, Rick Stump. “I’m really starting to regret choosing to get married in the most haunted toilet factory in the Northern Hemisphere!”

“It could be worse,” said Rick. “Thank goodness we didn’t choose to get married in that haunted toilet factory in São Paulo.”

“You’re right,” said Victoria, “That place is fucked up. Though I guess we could have easily avoided getting married here in the middle of the night, with no power, no priest, no attendees, or really anything related to weddings at all.”

“Even chairs,” said Professor Exposition. “Shit, guys. Chairs.”

“Chalk it up to inexperience, I guess,” laughed Rick. “But we do have our love. And this duffel bag of sputtering, half-working flashlights, and video cameras that only work in nightvision when they’re pointed directly up at your face.”

“And you also got me,” said Fertt Chapley, PI from the corner. “Fertt Chapley, PI.”

“You’re right,” said Victoria. “What were you doing hanging out inside of this abandoned haunted toilet factory in the middle of nowhere, anyway?”

Fertt Chapley, PI gave her the squint eye, and stuck a cigar in the corner of his mouth. “Lookin’ for clues, of course, little darlin’,” he said. And that’s also why I cruise around in men’s bathrooms at rest stops, he thought to himself. No one had asked him about that, but if they did, he was ready – especially if his mom asked.

“What about that guy,” said Rick, pointing. Standing behind Fertt Chapley, PI, was a short, filthy man in a stray hat and overalls.

“I don’t know who he is, maricon,” said Fertt Chapley, PI, “but I know he’s a turnip farmer.”

“How do you know that?” asked Rick.

“Cause he gave me this card.” He showed it to Rick. It read:

HELLO

I AM A TURNIP FARMER

PLEASE DO NOT HAUNT ME

“Shucks, mister farmer,” said Victoria. “Seems you’re plum out of luck, just like the rest of us, who are plum out of luck.”

“Maybe you should shut the fuck up about luck for a second so we can figure out what to do,” said Professor Exposition reasonably. “Clearly the ghost of this toilet factory has trapped us here for some reason, probably ghost- or toilet-related. We have to find out what that reason is, and do some stuff, and then I bet other stuff will happen, maybe.”

“I sure am happy that we ran into a professor of ghostology here in this ghosty place!” said Victoria.

“I’m actually a professor of Jewish Studies,” said Professor Exposition. “My family’s original name was Expositionberg.”

“Then what were you doing in here, padre?” said Fertt Chapley, PI. He stuck another cigar in the other corner of his mouth.

“I can’t quite say,” said Professor Exposition. “One thing I can’t quite say is that I was in here crying because my wife of thirty years ran away with a moderately popular, muscular, toned African American actor, who will passionately make love to her like they do in music videos from the 80’s. I can’t quite say that, because I am a reasonable, established man with a respectable career who has not cried a couple of hundred thousand times in the past two months. Now let me abruptly change from this stream of thought and look at this map of the toilet factory.” He pulled out a big piece of paper.

“Where did you get that?” said Fertt Chapley, PI. He stuck another cigar in the third corner of his mouth.

“It’s a Jewish tradition to have maps of factories,” said Professor Exposition. “I’m pretty sure it was in a Philip Roth novel. Now,” he said, looking at the map, “at the center of this dense maze of toilets is what appears to be the Mother Toilet, which produces all the other toilets, because that’s how toilet factories work, probably. We have to get to the Mother Toilet, because I’m certain that’s where the ghost is.”

“And then what?” said Rick.

“Shut up,” said Professor Exposition.

They trooped off through the shelves and shelves of toilets, which gleamed whitely in the gloom, except for the black ones, which didn’t, because they were black.

“Why do they have black toilets?” said Victoria. “I’ve never seen one of those.”

“The owner of this factory, Cherp Horsebeans, tried to shake up the established toilet formula, and produce black toilets,” said Professor Exposition. “But what he didn’t realize was that black toilets are totems of sad. Have you ever sat on a black toilet before?”

“I ain’t sat on one, no,” said Fertt Chapley, PI, through a mouthful of cigars.

“Well, it would induce in you a feeling which is known as the sads. When he tried it, people felt so sad they never got off the toilets. They just died right there, in the stall. On the toilets. With their junk hanging out and everything. It was real messed up. It ruined the Horsebeans family for good, driving many members to suicide, right here in this toilet factory.”

“How do you know so much about toilet powers, pardner?” asked Fertt Chapley, PI.

“Damn it, I told you, I’m Jewish,” said Professor Exposition angrily. “Do you listen? Y’all some fucking racists!”

They trooped along in silence.

“Do you all feel sad for plums sometime, because they got no luck?” said Victoria.

“Oh, my God,” said Professor Exposition.

Finally they came upon the Mother Toilet. They knew it was the Mother Toilet, because it was four stories tall, and it had an apron on it. They watched, horrified, as the Mother Toilet shook and shuddered, before burping up a tiny black toilet which plummeted to the ground to shatter into a million pieces. There was a huge pile of black toilet shards on the floor, nearly a dozen feet high.

“Look!” said Fertt Chapley, PI. “The Mother Toilet!”

“That’s been established already!” said Professor Exposition. “But my question is – why’s it still doing this? And where’s the ghost?”

“Right here,” said a ghostly voice.

They gasped, except for Fertt, who coughed, because he had inhaled a cigar.

A faint luminescence on the top of the toilet shards coalesced into the form of an old man in a pinstriped suit.

“It’s Mr. Cherp Duncan McGillicutty Horsebeans Jr. himself!” said Professor Exposition.

“Indeed!” said the ghost. “I’ve been trapped here for four hundred years, waiting for someone to come and free me!”

“Wait,” said Rick. “You can’t have been trapped her for four hund-”

“Four hundred years!” said Horsebeans. “Yes, four hundred years. A hundred years, in four sets. Twenty times twenty years. Four hundred multiplied times one, then divided by one. Four. Hundred. Years.”

“Okay, fine,” said Rick.

“And though you may think I stand upon a mound of broken toilets, I tell you I stand upon a mound of broken dreams!” cried the spirit. “Of broken souls! Of lives lost, of morals betrayed! I have brought shame upon my family! And here I sit, broken hearted, awaiting… a champion!”

“A champion?” asked Professor Exposition.

“Yes! Though you may not know it, I have called you all here to see if you can free me! You, Professor Expositionstein-”

“Berg.”

“Right. You I called due to your intellect. Ricky and Victoria, you I called here for your love. Fertt Chapley, PI, you I called because you spend so much time in highway rest stops, and you know how to push the boundaries of what toilets can do.”

Fertt Chapley, PI, laughed nervously.

“And you,” said Horsebeans, looking at the turnip farmer, “I… I’m not entirely sure who you are.”

“He’s a turnip farmer,” said Professor Exposition.

“Great,” said Horsebeans. “But one of you, surely, must be able to complete the test – you must be able to use this Mother Toilet, so she will stop producing these hateful black toilets, which bind me to this mortal realm!”

All of them looked at one another as they considered it.

“Uh,” said Rick, “you can count us out.”

“But what about your love?” said Horsebeans.

“We love each other in a Protestant American fashion,” said Victoria. “Which means we’re wildly repressed, and can’t acknowledge our nether regions in any sort of public fashion, nor will we ever admit in our lives that we have functioning anuses.”

“I am determined to die believing Vicky has no asshole,” said Rick, fondly staring into his fiancée’s eyes.

“I love you too, sweetheart,” said Vicky.

“Goodness, Vicky,” said Rick, sweating. “There are people around us.”

“And pardner,” said Fertt Chapley, PI, “I can’t do it because I explicitly use toilets for depraved, sexual purposes. When I need to do a twosie, I do it out in the woods at night, shrieking in a leather wolf mask, like a normal person.”

“Shut up, Fertt!” said Horsebeans. “Nobody likes you! And you talk like a cowboy, not a detective!”

“Shucks,” said Fertt Chapley, PI.

“I can’t do it because I’m still deep in anxiety over my wife, who definitely didn’t leave me for actor Scott ‘Taye’ Diggs,” said Professor Exposition. “And even if she did, I can’t understand why the hell she would want to. I mean, yes, the guy is handsome, handsome like he’s been carved by the gods themselves out of the most supple wood on Earth, wood that’s been soaked in oil and honey by some wise shaman who’s been on many spirit journeys, but what’s up with his career lately? Equilibrium stunk up the place, and sure, he was on Better Off Ted, which is okay, but what the fuck else? Jesus. I am a professor. A professor of Jewish Studies. They even gave me a special badge.” He showed them the badge. It was pretty special.

“Okay, so let me get this straight,” said Horsebeans. “I get five people in here to help me out, and none of you are willing to pinch a loaf for my freedom? None?”

Suddenly, a low, rough voice said, “You done admitted you got five people in this here toilet factry. But I only heard four no’s.”

They all gasped. They slowly parted to reveal the speaker – it was the turnip farmer. The one from the beginning of the story, that we haven’t talked about in like a page or two. Yeah.

“You?!” said Horsebeans. “You are willing?!”

“Mister,” said the farmer. “This been a long time comin’. Cause what you don’t know is my name is Enoch J. Ditchley – but my ma’s name was Horsebeans.”

They all gasped. They parted some more, just because.

“We done escaped the curse of the Horsebeans family by burying ourselves deep in the turnip business.” He produced a turnip from his pocket, and took a huge bite out of it, just like an apple, straight-up. “The curse overlooked us, for the curse haints on account of ambition. Toilet ambition. But,” he said, and he started unbuttoning his overalls, “it’s time someone with sand in their blood gussies up and lays that ol’ curse to rest. Now you’ll see what turnips are made to do.”

And lo, the turnip farmer did put the curse to rest, precariously balanced on the lip of the Mother Toilet, as all around him cheered and clapped, except for Horsebeans, because his ghost-hands didn’t make clapping noises.

Then, with a whisper of “Thank you,” he glowed bright, and vanished. And all of them departed from that place of sullied dreams and toilet-horrors, and returned to happy endings, unless you read horror stories to see people get all fucked up and stuff, in which cause they all died in, I don’t know, a grease fire.

Happy Halloween!

An extremely talented artist, a very solid professional and an excellent friend, John Picacio, is running a Kickstarter for his new project, the John Picacio 2013 Calendar.

Holy shit, Sam Sykes is plugging another artist.

In truth, I always do stuff like this.  I have a morbid fascination with artists.  I think extremely visually (I like seeing things on paper or in motion to see how they fit with what I’ve got in my head), hence why fan art and other pieces of art make me squeal with glee (to that end, if you are a fan artist, you should definitely show me your stuff).

More than that, though, artists make me writhe in envy for doing what I cannot.  Much like how I’m certain band conductors writhe in envy at novelists (and stir fry chefs envy band conductors; there’s a whole food chain on this, trust me) for doing what they cannot.

I don’t plug just anyone, though.  I don’t plug people whose art I don’t like and I don’t plug jackasses.

It’s my pleasure, then, to offer my support of someone at the extreme opposite of that spectrum.

John’s been a good friend of mine, essentially, since I was published.  I met him through Lou Anders and he’s been nothing but a real friend who acts with the utmost care and consideration for his profession and, especially, his work.  I’d lend my utmost support to him based on his talent and character alone.

But I wouldn’t plug him unless I thought this was something really, really cool.

So please, take a look at his work on his blog.  See if you agree with my assessment.  And when the time comes, please consider lending your support to John.  It’s really awesome to be able to chip in on an art project, as you all proved when you helped out with the funding for the Unsounded comic (for which Ashley says “thanks!”) and this is a project I wholeheartedly believe is worth supporting.

Kerpow!

As I often do, I was puttering around Something Awful earlier.  And as I often find, there was a subject that struck my interest.

Sex in fantasy.

A vast number of people seem to consider this a bad thing.

This subject caught my attention pretty rapidly, owing to what I’m working on at the moment.  Not that I’m in the midst of a throttling sex epic (or sexpic), mind you, but as I continue to grow as a writer, I discover that the more important developments in a story happen between people, in relationships, in stares that linger too long and the heat of breath upon bare skin.

And I wondered why I’ve come to this conclusion and more people haven’t?

I wondered why, exactly, it was that sex in fantasy was such a subject worthy of such scorn.  People like sex, don’t they?  Vast swaths of books are sold that heavily involve the subject.  Sex is realistic, isn’t it?  Aren’t we always looking for ways to enhance our realism in fantasy?  Sex is important to human development, isn’t it?  And at the core of every book beats something human.

And as I wondered why, I realized that there are probably a few reasons.  I’d like to address them here.

Sex is Gross

The complaint I most often hear about this subject is that it’s just “there.”  It has no purpose in the story, no real reason for it to happen, no relevance to the plot.  This always makes me think of a scene in which someone is screaming: “It’s no use, Barbara!  The bomb is sextivated!  The only way to disarm it is for us to engage in rousing coitus right now or the entire world is DOOMED!”

That’s silly, of course.  I tend to see most peoples’ points when they bring this up.  Sex oftentimes feels shoehorned in by the author, as though the author sat at his or her desk and went: “…and there we are.  ‘The end.’  Oh, snap, I forgot to add in a romantic subplot.  Hang on, let me go fix that.  Aaaaand…done.”

That’s not too far from the truth.  Frequently, it’s more like: “Oh, snap, I forgot to add in emotional development.  Hang on, let me throw in a sex scene” or “oh, snap, I forgot to titillate someone.  Hang on, let me throw in some kinky bondage.”

Here’s a protip for writers: if you ever feel you need a sex scene, you probably do not need a sex scene.  It tends to just happen between characters, like most good writing, and there’s not a lot you can do about it.

And here’s a point for readers: Sometimes, indeed, sex does just happen.  Sometimes it is meaningless.  But in books, it frequently isn’t.

Quite often, sex is the raising of the emotional stakes between two characters, the evolution of their relationship from one stage to the next.  It’s every bit as important to the plot, just less spelled out and more…naked.

Usually. 

Feelings are Gross

Sometimes, people just don’t want to see the physical act.  That’s fine.  A lot of people don’t like violence, either.  It’s good when those people can skip that aspect of it, but it doesn’t always work out that way.

A lot of people, I think, associate sex with that most horrible threat to genre fiction: emotion.  Relationships instead of swords?!  Kissing instead of stabbing?!  In my fantasy?  I don’t think so!

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to paint the entirety of fantasy readership as a bunch of underdeveloped children terrified of mushy stuff.  But it’s been a genre standard for awhile that things like combat, worldbuilding and discussing economics have been expected to make up the lion’s share of the book.

But that’s the problem of desensitization.  I’m certainly not going to say that action isn’t effective (I did write a scene in which a dragonman stomps a man’s crotch into pulp, after all), but if, indeed, so much of the book is action then the relationships and emotional content, by virtue of being less in quality, must have the greater importance and the stronger impact.  This is simply how good plotting works.

And likewise, humans work fairly simply, too: we love action, we love fight scenes, but we have a hard time investing in it.  Relationships, though, are something we invest in.  They are something we feel ourselves drawn into because we can relate to heartbreak much more than we can relate to broken bones.  This is why we can look at an explosion and barely register it in an action movie and find ourselves obsessed with the meaning of two people holding hands.

Authors are Gross

If you read closely enough, you can tell the exact point in the prose where the author started touching themselves.

–Source Unknown

This is harder to defend against because, for the life of me, I can’t easily disagree with.

The truth is, across all genres, every work of fiction, a lot of us authors are accused with the wholly-accurate charge of writing some really, really, reeeeeally creepy sex scenes.

Sometimes, it comes across as weird self-gratification in which our superman self-inserts fuck a dozen supermodel elf queens in quick succession.  Sometimes, it’s wildly descriptive phrases done with a butcher shop’s thesaurus in which m’lord’s meat was taken idly between arachnid-cool fingertips and slid tantalizingly between m’lady’s pair of hams.  And sometimes, it’s morally vile, such as when someone tries to make a rape scene titillating.

No doubt, we authors have a long way to go when it comes to this.

The thing is, though, we’re never going to know what’s going right or wrong if we don’t experiment, if we don’t try and sometimes fail, if we don’t give it our best shot and see what really didn’t work and what some people somewhere just didn’t like.

Also, sex is really fun to write.  So bear with us a little.  We’ll get it right one of these days.

Conclusions are Gross

I could bring up economics.  I could say that the success of weirdness like Fifty Shades of Grey justifies writing sex as a sound business decision and that more people enjoy reading it than don’t.

I could bring up social change.  I could say that we have an obligation to push the genre forward and, if it is indeed mired in conservative thought, to push it and the fanbase out of that.

I could bring up realism.  I could say that characters do get messy, do make relationships that aren’t clean, do sometimes have sex just for the heck of it, do make mistakes with each other.

These are all less than ideal reasons, in my opinion, to write sex.

I write sex because it’s important.  It’s important to the characters and, thus, important to the story.  If it were not important, I probably wouldn’t do it.

And that, my friends, is your anticlimax

Hello, friends!

If you’re at all a fan of this site, you’ve probably noticed the Lost Pages, a handy little piece of bonus content that explains a little more about the world of The Aeons’ Gate trilogy and its many characters, as illustrated by Michael Lee Lunsford.

And if you’ve been watching my twitter feed at all, you’ve likely noticed that it was just updated for The Skybound Sea!

Why not go take a look?

And, as a quick reminder, I’ll be at the Surrey International Writer’s Conference this weekend, doing workshops and panels and blue pencils and such.  I might even wear a hat.  Wouldn’t that be something?

I posted my schedule already, amongst other things, but just as a reminder: I’m not sure what kind of books will be available at the fair.  If you have a copy of something of mine you’d like signed, you might want to bring it!

I CANNOT GUARANTEE YOUR SAFETY, YOU SEE.

Here is a manatee.

Ain’t nothin’ to fuck with.