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Before I go any further, let me take the time to remind you that we’re about at the halfway mark on The Skybound Sea ARC Giveaway!  Please feel free to enter, if you haven’t already!  Also, if you’re a reviewer or blogger in the US and haven’t yet received an ARC, please let me know so we can get one into your hands!

Now, then…

I often feel as though there are a multitude of ways to possess a professional relationship with someone.  And while I never count myself as in a professional relationship with anyone without counting them first and foremost as a friend, I admit that when it comes to someone as awesome as N.K. Jemisin, I often feel that my chief role is as a buzzard on the savannah, swirling about a mighty impala she has brought low and swooping down to nab pieces of stringy red meat in my beak and fleeing before she can finish rending its flesh between her jaws.

That metaphor is just weird enough to warrant further explanation, and I hope to do so by piggybacking off her post on Magic Systems and why we sometimes misuse them.

See, “magic system” is one of those of pairings of words that makes my eyes involuntarily glaze over, along with “feast scenes,” “poetry interludes” and “training montage.”  To me, “it has a great magic system” is one of those left-handed compliments you give someone when you’re trying to keep their interest without directly answering their question.  It’s like when you’re asking how much gas mileage a car gets and the salesman points you to the roomy trunk instead.

“So, is the story any good?”

“Well, let me tell you, it has one of the most in-depth magic systems I have ever seen.”

Now, I know that’s not entirely fair.  A well-thought-out magic system does not necessarily suggest that the rest of the story is subpar.  It’s perfectly possible to have a compelling story, interesting characters and an interesting magic system in the same book and there are several examples of this.  Magic systems, on their own, don’t harm a story.

On their own.

But I can’t help but accredit magic systems with being a symptom of a problem that faces us as fantasy writers, and that is the obsession with rules.  And as any writer will tell you, following the rules in writing is a very easy way to turn a good story into a bad one.

Now, this obsession with rules came from good intentions, as did the obsession with homage and influence and the recent obsession with grimdark: people wanted to be taken seriously.  In a way, fantasy’s entire quest (often misguided) has been to be taken seriously by mainstream fiction.  To that end, we created a bunch of rules and systems to govern our lands so that we couldn’t just bust out a flight spell to get ourselves out of pits we fell into, literally and metaphorically.

Ultimately, this is a good thing.  It’s always been a mainstay of fantasy that magic used recklessly has a price that must be paid.  And in the case of using recklessly in fantasy fiction, the goat that must be slain is tension.  It’s hard to feel a sense of danger for characters if we know they can cast a Flight spell to get themselves out of pits.  It’s difficult to believe that there’s anything that can challenge a character if they all have Swords of Doomenheisers (of the New Jersey Doomenheisers).  It’s hard to take things seriously if, at any moment, someone can just bust out a laser beam and fry their enemy into ash.

As conflict is the soul of character, so is tension the blood of conflict.  We need that tension to keep invested in the conflict.  We need to not be sure if the hero can pull this one off, if he can survive this blow, if he can come back from this defeat.  Even if we’re pretty sure he ultimately can, tension is what keeps us reading to find out just how he’s going to do it.

And when he can just make up the rules as he goes along, then there’s no point in reading, since every conflict has new rules and thus there’s no way for us to get invested.  Magic systems, rules in general, go a long way toward addressing this.

But only to a point.  A very fine point.  Put at the end of a sentence that reads “THAT WAS A GOOD RULE YOU MADE AND IT IS FINE TO STOP HERE.”

Because when you don’t stop there, rules become…well, something more.

At its absolute best, a rule isn’t even totally immutable.  It’s a suggestion of consistency, a generally-accepted pattern of behavior that we can usually assume will be followed.  This serves to illustrate and lend weight to the moments when that rule is broken or otherwise defied.

As a caveat, though, I urge you to consider this rule from Pixar’s 22 Rules for Story (which is quickly becoming my favorite thing on the internet): coincidences to get characters into trouble are great, coincidences to get them out of trouble is cheating.  As rules are made to be broken, so are broken rules meant to be punished.  Consequence needs to happen.

And magic systems work great when they’re in the background as generally accepted schools of thought that prevent us from just leaping straight to flying out of pits (even if it is a possibility later).  I treated my magic system much the same: something hard, but not immutable, that was used mostly to further the characters of Dreadaeleon and Bralston.

At its commonplace worst, rules become immutable.  Rules are stringent, unbreakable and never defied.  Rules never change, nothing ever happens to contradict the rules.  There is no consequence for breaking rules because it never even occurs to anyone to break them.

The problem with this is the same problem that comes from having no rules at all: the tension is absolutely shattered.  We can assume that, so long as the rules are followed, everything will work out in the way it’s supposed to.  Things become inexorably tiresome as every opportunity to defy the rules is smacked down, repressed or outright ignored.  We already know how things are going to happen because we have a set of rules that cannot be defied.

Typical offenders are epic fantasy stories where characters are robbed of humanity and will to fulfill an obligation to the story.  Where magic systems and worldbuilding are more important than individual drive or desire and character motivations fit the plot exactly to best tell how the Dark Lord was defeated.

When rules become absolutely intolerable, however, is when they begin to govern humanity.

This is where we see the most egregious examples.  We begin to see things like Fantastic Racism (all orcs are evil all the time, no exceptions).  We begin to see human psychology presented as a simple, immutable thing.  We see our characters stagnate, fall back, regress and rarely change.

Typical offenders are grimdark settings who occasionally fall in love with their own grit.  These are settings where characters are suppressed to usually serve a mood or theme.  When they experience desires, they will usually be of the negative sort.  When they change, it will rarely be for the better.  This often becomes just as tiresome because it always moves in the same direction.

I often feel like a buzzard when it comes to these sorts of discussions we have because, far too often, I feel like I’m constantly squawking.  I illustrate the problem well enough and then rarely spend as much time on solutions.

And truth be told, that’s kind of unavoidable.  One of the best/worst things about writing is that there’s plenty of ways to identify a problem and no clear cut method of identifying a solution.  Just as there’s no roadmap to succeeding as an author, there’s no easy way to say which rules you need to enforce and which rules you need to relax on.

But in providing identity to the problems, I hope that some people will learn a lesson that I learned way too late for my liking.  Like many, I was obsessed with rules.  I thought there was a hard and fast way things needed to be at all times, I was stringently unwilling to budge on these things and it’s apparent in a few instances of Tome of the Undergates.

It will haunt me to my dying day, I am sure.

Lest I begin to ramble, though, keep in mind that, as all rules are meant to be broken, everything I say here is also up for interpretation.  Some people do everything I advise against and still pull it off.  Some people do everything I recommend and still manage to create a poor story.  All I can do is advise you to invest in your characters more than your world, invest in their psychology more than your rules, invest in their rebellion more than their obedience and you will rarely be disappointed.

Kind of useless advice, isn’t it?

First things first!  I’ve gotten tons of submissions for the first part of The Skybound Sea ARC Giveaway Contest!  But I need more art!  I need more faces!  The field is prime to compete, with only one or two entries so far!

I hope I get some anyway, or I’ll probably cry.

And while I’m busy shoving links in your face that you probably didn’t want to read, I’ll go ahead and put this transcript of my chat with SFF Writer Chat on twitter right here.  Right here in your face.  Picture me taking this link in my hands, my sweaty little palms, and rubbing its against your cheeks.  Inhale its aroma.  Feel its thousand prickly kisses upon your flesh.

If you don’t read that, I probably won’t cry.  It’s full of lovely information, of course, about me and what I do and who I am as a person and a writer, but you probably don’t care about that, do you.  Still, it’s a fairly average interview until you read and get to the point of what kind of romantic elements I’ve got in my books.

And then things get interesting.

I sometimes think that an unfortunate part of writing genre fiction is choosing which cynics to appease.  There are people who won’t read one book because it has elves, people who won’t read another book because it has elves that it doesn’t call elves but you know they’re elves so why not call them elves, there are people who won’t read another book because it’s not like George R.R. Martin enough, there are people who won’t read another book because it’s too much like George R.R. Martin, there are people who just don’t like to read outside their comfort zones, period, and those zones frequently extend to a few concepts written by a few authors and no further.

And that’s a shame.

Because I think romance is one of those elements that’s gotten swept aside, out of the purview of epic fantasy and into the realm of urban fantasy…or romantic fantasy…or anything written by a woman.

If you’ll read that transcript, you’ll note that Bryan Thomas Schmidt brings up the idea of the romance in The Aeons’ Gate trilogy as being “male-centric.”  Curious about that categorization, I asked Bryan about it earlier today.  I wasn’t upset, of course, merely interested in why he came up with that particular way to describe it.  He went on to explain that he thought the romance was less “sappy” and more “gritty.”  Ultimately, he agreed that these are not inherently and exclusively male traits, but I think it’s fair and unfortunate (unfairtunate) to say that, as a general rule, “romance” and “epic fantasy” are generally considered to be like Lucy and Desi’s bedroom: they can make eyes and talk to each other, sure, but they sure as shit better not get into the same bed.

And maybe we, as readers, are a little to blame for things coming the way they are.

Personally, I didn’t write the romantic elements of The Aeons’ Gate to be male-centric, nor did I really intend for them to be exceedingly gritty or sappy.  An author’s sole obligation, and what he or she can’t help, is to present life as he or she sees it.  When it came to romance, I did just this.  And to me, romance is not something neat and tidy.  It’s harsh, it’s disagreeable, it doesn’t always make sense (in fact, it frequently doesn’t, hence why I often find myself in love with small, angry women when my ideal match is a towering sasquatch).

It is difficult.  The stakes are tremendous.  Killing requires hatred and hatred is based on taking.  The worse you can do is wind up with the same you had before.  Love, though, requires giving.  And failure to find it means you have lost something dear and precious and are much smaller than you were.

Summarily, all story is conflict.  All characters are defined by their conflicts.  And there is no greater conflict than romance.

And to be honest?  It’s worked out very well for me.  Some of the most ardent followers of the romance between Lenk and Kataria are men.  Beer-swilling, football-watching, hooting dudes who desperately hope that these two emotionally damaged kids find love.  And the vast majority of Kataria’s fans, angry and irritable shict that she is, are women.

I suspect that when Bryan, when he suggested that most romance was “female-centric” (inadvertently, mind you.  I don’t want to appear as though I’m putting words in his mouth), he was sharing a view that I think a lot of us have that’s been shaped, forged and tempered in the novels of today.

There are a startling number of “clean” romances.  The vampire is in love with you and only you, because you’re so special.  The awkward flirtation around the lawyer only gets better.  The weird guy in the suit has nothing else going on and his only desire is to tie up the inexperienced young lady and fondle her.  To me, these ring false.

I’m not saying they are false, mind you, to me, they ring hollow (this likely explains why I am still single) and thus, I don’t write that romance because I’ve never seen romance as being quite that clean.

And I wonder…do others?  Do you?

To me, I’ve seen an evolution of fantasy in which emphasis begins to swing back to conflict.  The heroes aren’t always perfect, the villains aren’t always horrible, the problems aren’t always solved by throwing a ring into fire and the world is often a big, fat, ugly, messy, plorbly schmorbly piece of what-what.  And to me, a conflicted romance is just the evolution of that.

But I note that romantic elements are a pretty rare thing in fantasy.  Given our current obsession with grimdark, a lot of the relationships tend to go no further than poorly written sex scenes.  And when they do go further, they’re often as clean: the farmgirl falls in love with the hero because the hero needs a girlfriend, the princess falls in love with the prince because what else is she going to do, the otherworldly angelic fey queen isn’t doing a lot today–sure, she has a tennis lesson at six, but she can move that around a little–so she might as well spend a few chapters fucking the hero’s brains out before he goes on to finish his next quest.

And because it’s my nature to turn inward wherever I see a problem, I wonder if the average fantasy reader just don’t need no stinkin’ romance.  And I wonder if perhaps it’s time we challenge that notion.

The Book Smugglers is one of my favorite blogs because they do just that, and they brought up a point from a post long ago that I sadly can’t remember the name of.  But the point was clear: a lot of people don’t read stuff like romance because they are taught to fear the feminine.  Sappy, squeaky stuff isn’t supposed to be interesting.  We’re supposed to want blood and death and worldbuilding and politics.  Somewhere along the lines, the gulf between romance and fantasy became canonical.

But I think we’re doing a disservice to ourselves, as readers and writers alike, by not thinking that there must be more.  There must be more going on with these characters.  There must be some attraction to explore beyond “the root of his cock” and “the glisten of her honey.”  As writers, I think we can afford to think on this more.  As readers, we can surely afford to be more open about it.

As a genre, I think we can do this.

A question that comes up with unsurprising regularity has once again arisen in my inbox, like a recurring rash whose ensuing itch I do so love to scratch.  With apologies to the sender of this email, I’d like to post it here.

Dear Mr. Sykes,

I am a rookie Fantasy author from Arizona and am just about to complete my first novel in my planned series.

Considering that not to long ago you to were an unpublished fantasy author who lived in Arizona i was wondering if you would care to explain how you ended up getting ”Tome of the Undergates” published and any other advice you might like to give.

I would greatly appreciate any help you could give me. Becoming a writer has been a dream of mine for a long time and now i’m ready to put my stories out there.

I’d be delighted to give you advice, my friend!  And truthfully, I’d answer these kind of questions more often if it weren’t so darned hard to do so.  See, asking “how do you write,” “how did you get published,” “how do you make it big in this crazy world of publishing” is a little like asking “how should I go through puberty?”  It’s a very strange question to hear and one is never quite certain how to answer it, because, like puberty, getting one’s written word published is a different experience for everyone and to most of us, it’s a whirlwind blur of memories great and terrible that we can’t really recollect but we’re sure we got lucky at least once during.

But, that we may both be more helpful and put this terrible analogy to rest, I’d like to provide some actual answers that you can probably use.  These are the base answers, the ones that you should always return to, for they are the only ones that are provably correct and common to all published authors.

1. Write.

In fact, that’s basically the only way to get published.  At a glance, that might seem just as unhelpful as my previous allegory, but I think it’s probably the last thing on anybody’s mind when it comes to getting published.  I suspect there are a myriad of theories flying around out there as to how it happens: connections, inside bribes, pacts with Satan, what have you (connections are nice, bribes are rare and pacts with Satan are done purely for one’s own pleasure, but they’re not necessary to getting published).  But it’s always going to come down to that.

The best way to get published is to write a story that you love.  If you can write a story that you love that other people also love, that’s fantastic, but it’s also out of your control.  If you can write a story that you love that is also excellent, that’s much better, but that comes with time and practice.  Popularity is something that will come to you, in time.  Craft is something that you will learn with practice (and sometimes many rejections).  Joy cannot be learned.  Joy cannot be trained. But joy is essential to every book and when it’s lacking, it’s obvious to everyone.  Reader, publisher, writer; to anyone, there is no such thing as a good book that is joyless.

By “joy,” I don’t necessarily mean that you need to have buttercups and primroses and leprechauns making out on a stump (if you do, you might enrage some political groups and that would be good publicity; keep it in mind).  But you do have to love what you’re writing, even if you’re writing a bunch of bastards figuring out the best way to hawk a stolen kidney.  When a writer has no love for what he’s doing, when it’s obvious he’s just going through the motions, it’s obvious.  And it’s depressing.  And nobody wants to read it or publish it.

Don’t go through the motions at all, if you can help it.  And certainly don’t go through it before you have to.  Don’t worry about who will love your book, if you’re cornering the 16-year-old unwed Hawaiian mother demographic, if your book provides enough appeal for your average subway worker.  Write what you love and the audience will love it, too.

2. Every Problem You Have Will be Solved by Writing.

Writer’s blocks are overcome by writing.  Writing forces the muse to return to you.  Persistence begets improvement, inevitably.  Every wall can be broken down, given enough headbutts.

When you are rejected by publishers, you should immediately get back to considering what you can do better and then writing it.  When you are rejected by critics, you should immediately weigh their criticism and then go back to writing.  If you are rejected by readers, you should swallow back shame and start again on the next story.

Your first, last, immediate and only response to troubles about writing should be to go back and write some more.  You can’t help but get better at it as you go and you can’t get better if you don’t keep doing it.

Sometimes, it will most definitely feel like trying to climb Everest with a stepladder.  Sometimes, it will feel like fighting a group of kindergarteners.  The response is always the same.

3. Writing is Work.

Work is hard.  Sometimes you don’t want to do it.  You do it, anyway.

These are the only rules there are to getting published.  Anything else is equal parts circumstance and opportunity.  Basically, the best way to get published is to write something that people would want to publish.  Which means writing something.  Which means writing something that you love.  Which means writing something that you love, all the time, even if you don’t feel like it and it’s exhausting and stressful.

This may seem useless to you, of course.  This may seem like saying the best way to be recruited into the Major Leagues of Baseball (do they have leagues?  Or is back to regiments?) is to be good at baseball.  Well, yeah.  How do you get good at baseball?  You do it a lot.

The only bad news I have for you is this.  If this post struck you as helpful, as eye-opening, as inspiring, as earth-shattering, that’s not the best place to be.  That is, if you’re just now realizing that you need to write to be a writer, that’s…well, get to it, anyway.

The good news is that if you found this post to be unhelpful, that if you already knew all of this, that if you’re glaring angrily at your computer screen and saying “well, duh!”  Congratulations!  You’re well on your way!

How will it go for you from there?  I have no clue.  You just keep going and get a little better at it each day until you finally get to a point where you’re happy enough to try.

Like puberty.

I am not a woman.

If I was, I’d probably have a name like Melinda.  A powerful name from parents who knew that I would know hardship in my time and wanted to give me a name that could withstand it.  I would play soccer in high school and later on weekends.  I would pursue an archaeological degree before realizing that I yearned for the structure and rigidity of accountancy.  My wedding would be the moment that changed my life forever, for I would stand at the altar on the happiest day of my life, look back on the time my parents brought home strawberry ice cream instead of vanilla and realize that was the happiest day of my life and this, the day of my wedding, was a mediocre affair that would eventually culminate in the moment I found my spouse dead on the floor twenty years of joylessness later and my first thought would be: “Oh dear.  And I was supposed to play soccer today.”

If I were a woman.

But I am not.

And I cannot speak for women.

Or for men.

But I can speak to women.  And to men.  And fellas, stuff like this has got to stop.

Before I go further, I’ll cop to a few things: I didn’t read the whole thread and I don’t really have a lot of intention of doing so.  As such, I don’t plan on really quoting people or throwing out examples or going word by word.  Really, the title alone is something I want to focus on, because it’s the title alone that says something that I feel we should address.

I get a few emails every month or so from people asking advice for writing.  I’m happy to offer it, though I find that the tips I give out seem so pedestrian: write frequently, write often, write all the time.  These are usually enough to cover all the basics.  But now, I feel like we should probably go over a piece of advice that should be like those aforementioned tidbits: so basic that it’s unsatisfying to say it, because it should be common knowledge.

And that piece of advice is this.

Women are people.  Not unicorns.

If you take any interest in publishing at all, you probably know that the majority of readers are women.  This is a statistic.  By itself, it doesn’t mean too much beyond what it says.  Yet somehow, this has been translated in some sects into mystical, cryptic riddles that you find carved in the walls of ancient tombs of lich lords.

Who are these “wo-men?”  Where did they come from?  When did they start reading stuff that didn’t involve vampires?  And, most important of all, how do we, as writers, corner and tame this all-powerful “female demographic” from which they all emerge into the night?

As I said, I’m not a woman.  It’s possible that women do vote in one overwhelming voice.  It’s possible that a lot of them do like reading novels featuring vampires (as it’s possible that a lot of dudes like reading books featuring dark elf rebels with swords).  It’s also possible that I’m totally wrong when I say this, but it’s been my experience that seizing the attention of female readers is a lot like seizing the attention of male readers, in that it’s best done by writing a good story.

I could be wrong about that.  I’m not a woman.

But I am a man.  And I’m also a nerd.  And I’ve seen this sort of strange half-reverential, half-terrified attitude towards girls since high school.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I didn’t know a lot about girls at that age, either.  I’m a little ashamed to admit that there was a time when I, too, thought that there were certain ways you could catch a woman’s interest beyond just being yourself and seeing if she liked you.  When you’re young and alone, you sometimes really want to believe that there is a manual for how to get a girlfriend.  Sometimes you act like there is.  And sometimes you just don’t let go and that’s where we get notions like “friendzoning” and “girls only like guys who treat them like crap” and “why don’t they like nice guys like me?”

We ain’t gonna get too much into those notions.  They aren’t true, of course, but that’s something every guy needs to find out for himself.

What we are going to get into is the fact that they aren’t true for publishing, either.  You can probably point to something like the sales of Laurell K. Hamilton’s books and say: “See?  It’s obvious that women like sex!”  But rather than concluding that a lot of people like sex, some people somehow conclude that these are specifically written to target some foreign part of the brain that is specific to females to subconsciously force them to buy Laurell K. Hamilton’s books.  Not being Ms. Hamilton, I won’t speculate on why she writes the way she writes, but I’m assuming that she probably enjoys writing it.

That, there, is how you get yourself a reader, male or female.  Not coincidentally, that’s also how you write a book.  Enjoy what you do.  Enjoy what you write.  Love the craft as you love your characters as you love your story and your readers will come.

I didn’t really write Kataria with a specific woman in mind.  Hell, even the fact that she is a woman doesn’t play too much into her motivations.  She likes a man, of course (many women do), she also likes hunting, meat and breaking wind.  She’s the favorite of some of my women readers.  And some of my men readers, too.  Some dudes also like Denaos.  Some girls also like Dreadaeleon.  I have no idea why and I don’t really ask (normally because, when people tell me this, I get a really warm, squishy feeling from someone telling me that they have a favorite character of mine that renders me incapable of making a sound more intelligible than “squonk”).

Look, it’s true that a majority of readers are women.  And it’s certainly true that a lot of women read fantasy.  If you’re published at all, then by default, most of your readership is probably women.  You don’t get that by sitting back, folding your hands over your stomach, looking up at the ceiling and asking: “through what mixture of literature and chemical does one induce the female to read?”

You get that by writing a book you love.  Because if you love it, so will they.  They’ll love the relationships, they’ll love the violence, they’ll love the characters, they’ll love it all.  Be they man, woman, child or sentient dogs under two feet tall.

Because everyone knows sentient dogs over two feet tall only read Clive Cussler.

Duh.

Ugly unicorn drawing by Bart Cusik’s blog.