Kristin Janz

My story “Clear Skies in Pixieland” just came out in the first issue of Nine, a brand-new e-zine.  If you’re interested, you can buy a copy of the magazine (or even a 3-month subscription) here.  The authors will receive royalties if the magazine sells enough copies, so if you buy one, you’re helping out the authors as well as the publishers!

“Clear Skies in Pixieland” is a contemporary fantasy loosely connected to “The Kiss of the Blood-Red Pomegranate”, which appeared in the December issue of Aoife’s Kiss.  The shadowy villain mentioned in TKotBP actually shows up in this one.

This is an important story for me, because it’s the first one I finished after deciding that I wanted to make a serious attempt at writing and publishing short fiction.  Before that, I’d mostly worked on novels.  I’d written a handful of short stories, even submitted a couple to magazines, but I’d give up after they were rejected two or three times (with those earlier stories, giving up was probably a good idea).  This was the first story I wrote after deciding that I was going to write short stories, and I was going to keep submitting them until they were accepted.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the version that you can read now in Nine doesn’t bear much resemblance to that first version that I started sending around.  The basic premise is the same, but it’s been almost completely rewritten.  Twice.  As I learned more about writing, I would take another look at that old story, and realize that I could probably do better.  So I did.

There are eight other stories in this issue of Nine (hence the name), one by Hugo- and Nebula-nominated author Ken Liu, who is also, coincidentally, one of my husband’s coworkers.  I haven’t read his story in Nine yet, but I really liked the story he had in last October’s Clarkesworld, “Staying Behind”.

So, check out Nine!  Tell your friends.

Unless you’re a quantum physicist, that is.  After years of listening to fantasy writers who haven’t studied any quantum mechanics using it to justify everything from magic to visitable alternate universes, my husband Donald (who did his PhD in quantum computation) finally wrote a blog post explaining how it doesn’t really work that way.

Those of you who know all about my love for elves will appreciate why I’m linking to this.

Need I say more?

Actually, I probably do.  Those of you who are not uber-geeks may not realize that it’s trendy within fantasy writer circles (and uber-geek circles) to look down your noses at any fiction containing the “e-word” as a blatant Tolkien rip-off.  Because Tolkien invented the word elf, right?  (Well, no, he didn’t, but never mind that.)  This whole anti-elf-snobbery irritates me to no end, especially since I’m trying to write an epic fantasy series with elves in it, which I don’t think is a Tolkien rip-off, and it would be nice if someone paid me money for it one of these days.

What makes it even more irritating is that it’s apparently perfectly acceptable to have a physically attractive species of mystical long-lived hominids in your short story or novel, as long as you don’t call them elves.  They can even have pointy ears.  It’s just the word that pushes people’s buttons.  Seriously.  I have a short story that I’ve been trying to sell, in which one of the characters is an elf, and although it hasn’t been accepted, I have yet to receive any negative feedback from editors on that character’s obvious elfness.  Because in that story, I changed the name of his species.  I won’t tell you what I changed it to, but it still sounds a lot like elf.  Whereas when I do use the word elf in other short stories set in the same world (featuring the same elves), any feedback from editors tends to include disparaging comments about the elfness of those characters.

I insist on using the word elf in some of my stories (and in my novel), despite obvious reasons not to do so, because I’m writing about cultures where humans have interacted with this other species for thousands of years.  If there were a real world where that were the case, I think the humans who had the most interaction would use a word that felt familiar to them.  “Elf” is the closest familiar English word to the type of alien people I’m trying to describe.  That’s why I use it.  (The story in which I used a different word has a human protagonist from a culture that hasn’t interacted with these folk nearly as much, so they seem more alien and weird to her; hence I decided it made sense to use an invented word instead of a familiar English word.)

Anyway, go read the article I linked to on the Black Gate blog (and thanks to Donald for bringing it to my attention).

I recently finished reading the first novel by new author Courtney Schafer:  The Whitefire Crossing.  It was one of the free books I got at last year’s World Fantasy convention in San Diego.  I definitely recommend it, if you enjoy epic fantasy.  The plot is tight and suspenseful, the main characters are interesting, and the secondary world in which the story takes place is one you want to learn more about.  The premise is that a young smuggler named Dev takes on a dangerous job, trying to smuggle a runaway apprentice mage into a neighboring country, while being pursued by the apprentice’s furious master.  It ends on a not-quite-cliffhanger, where there’s a pause in the action but it’s also clear that Dev’s story isn’t finished.  But the back cover of the book does warn that it’s “Book I of The Shattered Sigil“, so that’s okay.  I definitely want to read Book II, to find out what happens next.

While I did think the book was excellent, it did have a couple of flaws.  We’re told over and over (and over, and over) about Dev’s motivation for accepting such a dangerous assignment:  he needs the money to keep the daughter of his deceased mentor out of slavery.  But I thought this could have been shown more effectively, perhaps by drawing more parallels between the young girl in danger and Dev’s former lover, who was sold into slavery at a similar age (not in a creepy way; just in the sense of him not wanting the same thing to happen to his mentor’s daughter).  Also, the villains are cartoonishly evil, and I tend to prefer stories that explore the complexity of what makes someone evil (or good, or in-between).  But the characterization of the two protagonists (Dev, and the young apprentice Kiran) was complex and interesting enough that I could overlook those flaws, and the author used the alternating viewpoints very effectively to tell the two halves of the story.  As an author myself, I was definitely paying attention what Shafer was doing there; also to how skillfully she handed the unfolding of the plot and the building of dramatic tension.

The cover, by David Palumbo, is also excellent, and is one of the reasons I chose to read this book over the half dozen other new 2011 novels I got for free at World Fantasy.  Not just because it was pretty, but also because it signalled pretty clearly what sort of book this was, and all other things being equal I’ll usually choose the epic fantasy novel first.  But the fact that the cover was attractive and professional-looking certainly didn’t hurt, nor did the fact that the book was published by Night Shade Books, one of the best-reputed medium-sized publishers of fantasy.  (These are all things that I think about as I write my own novel, and listen to the debates about self-publishing vs. traditional publishing.)  Though on the other hand, a few years ago I read a free-from-World-Fantasy novel published by Penguin, with a cover by a much more famous artist, and that book was awful.  (I’m not going to say which book it was, since my motivation in discussing books on my blog is to recommend books that I think people should read, not slag other hardworking authors.)

It’s good to see epic fantasy being written by other women, too.  I don’t particularly seek out the work of other women writers; I read whatever interests me, no matter who wrote it.  But most of the big name authors in the field tend to be men, so it’s encouraging to see other women writing great fantasy novels and getting them published by major houses.

If you’re a writer, Courtney Shafer’s website also has some excellent, candid information about the process of finding an agent and getting published, so be sure to check that out!