Day 8
Didn’t get a chance to post this last night, so I’ll put it up now.
It’s odd that I don’t write more fantasy. I grew up on fantasy. As I got older I gradually leaned more toward science fiction, and then in college I had to read a lot of non-genre stuff. Fantasy just kind of fell away, for the most part. It doesn’t help that a lot of fantasy tends to be pretty bad. By fantasy I’m talking about classic sword and sorcery.
It seems incredibly difficult to me to come up with something genuinely fresh for fantasy. I also have a hard time truly identifying with fantasy characters. Really, they’re nothing like us. Complaining that your cell phone reception is bad? Really? Well guess what, Rolf’s village was burned down by a fucking dragon last week. And what are the interactions between ancient people’s like on a day-to-day basis? I have a hard time imagining conversations that aren’t rife with corporate logos and movie quotes.
So here’s a little bit of a fantasy story I might work on. It seems like there are a few things today that we can link to fantasy settings–religion and its influence on people and governments, systems of justice, and politics. Those sorts of stories are pretty prominent in fantasy stories. Kings and clerics and holy wars and what not. So I thought I’d focus on the justice system. I imagine some of the problems police forces run into in a fantasy setting are not terribly different from what they run into today. It’s at the trial and judge level that things begin to get really different. At the most basic level, cops are cops. So I made my main character a cop. About 700 words. Continue reading
