Is George R. R. Martin The Slowest Author Ever?

Every reader knows the misery that comes of waiting for your favourite author to finish the next book in the series that has pretty much taken over your life.  Fans of the fantasy genre know it better than most – out of all mainstream fiction, high fantasy easily clocks up the greatest average waiting time between instalments.

Of course, the logical parts of our brains understand this; writing, editing, proofreading, marketing, revisions, settling copyrights and sorting out how many different dust jackets you're going to give the hardback take a lot of time. Sadly, that logical part is too often over-ruled by the primordial screeching monkey-child part that has been left dangling over a heart-rending precipice to match the one your favourite character was just flung off.

And no, that is not a spoiler for Game of Thrones. Even I'm not that mean.

Ah, Game of Thrones. Or, in its paper-bound incarnation, A Song of Ice and Fire. George R.R. Martin's sprawling fantasy saga is infamous for the long waits between the publication of each book. They're so long, in fact, that the next season of the TV adaptation has already caught up to and, in many ways, overtaken the books. You can tell how much stress this puts on the loyal book fans - once the formidable Night's Watch, guarding the flowering realm of the show-watchers from spoilers, now suddenly under threat from the very folk they sought to protect. Or keep in the dark so that we could laugh and feast upon their anguished, unsuspecting tears, depending how you look at it.

Our whinging is not for nothing; even by the standards of the genre, Mr Martin's writing speed is glacial. To put things in perspective: the most recently published of the Song of Ice and Fire Saga, A Dance with Dragons, came out in 2011. Its predecessor, A Feast For Crows, came out six years before.

How can you justify a waiting time like that? If it were anyone else, Mr Martin's publisher would have had them walking the plank after half that time. Luckily, the worldwide popularity of the books allows 'Evil Santa' (as he is affectionately known) a lot of leeway. Enough that he can begin a series before most of its current fans were even born, and still be talking about sequels as many of them begin having progeny of hteir own.

That said, he isn't alone in his ivory tower of agonisingly slow creative processes. The two published instalments of Patrick Rothfuss' similarly popular Kingkiller Chronicles  came out in 2007 and 2011 – and the non-appearance of the proposed trilogy's conclusion means the wait between book two and three may match that of Mr Martin's recent opuses.

However, popularity is no excuse for slow publication. The longest wait between J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books came between 2000 and 2003, when The Order of the Phoenix took two years more than Ms Rowling's usual yearly intervals. Jim Butcher's Dresden Files have been vaulting off the shelves yearly, with some even appearing within months of each other.

But, I hear you cry, but that's urban fantasy – that can't be comparable to the sheer effort of creating and sustaining the continuity of an entire fictional world!

To that, I ask you to listen. Listen to Robert Jordan cackling in his grave.

The Wheel of Time saga is legendary as a feat of dedication within the fantasy genre and without; twelve books published over twenty-two years, by two different authors (Brandon Sanderson took up the mantle after Jordan passed away in 2007). And yet, despite every circumstance thrown at the series, including – in case you didn't notice – the death of the author . . . there was never more than a three year gap between the books.

So, is George R.R. Martin the slowest moving entity since your grandmother's home-made custard? Are we justified in our rage at being made to wait half a decade just to find out if our favourites live to play the game another day?

I think not. Song of Ice and Fire fans, I have a proposition for you. Go and find the nearest Tolkien fan. And give them a great big hug.

The Lord of the Rings films appeared one after another between 2000 and 2003. The novels appeared between 1954 and 1955.

But how many years of campaigning, bargaining, editing, lawmongering and nail-biting did it take for legions of loyal Tolkienists to see their beloved Professor's rendition of the iconic Beowulf myth?

90 years.

Winter Is Coming . . . a whole lot faster than that.

Party Members, MacGuffins, and Fetch Quests - The Sad State of the Love Interest

I don't like romantic sub-plots. Never have - I think they're over-used, repetitive, and usually feel detrimental and extraneous to the narrative. I understand why they exist in theory, but in practice, every time I see the tell-tale signs of a budding romance (usually between the male lead and the only female character present), I groan and give the author a mental smack across the knuckles.

The worst part is, all the things I hate about romantic sub-plots - and romance in general, really - could be resolved pretty easily. Mostly through diversifying the roles, genders, sexual orientations, races, priorities and characters of those involved.

Sounds like a lot of beans to heap over one piece of toast, doesn't it? And no one likes tokenism - it's like those nasty little cheap weiner-sausage-yuckies that sometimes sneak into the mix and leave a bad taste in your mouth.

But it's all much, much simpler if you think about it in more empirical terms. Ask yourself one question.

Is my love interest a Party Member, a MacGuffin, or a Fetch Quest?

Confused? Allow me to explain.

A love interest who is a Party Member is exactly the sort of love interest you want - a character with motivations and a personality of their own, who would have a role in the story even if the romantic element was removed. Want a good example? Hermione Granger, from the later installments of the Harry Potter books. Her romantic attachment to Ron is brought up only when relevant, and it is built up organically through their engagement as characters, friends, and fellows in their mission. She's a Party Member first, a love interest second.

Meanwhile, a MacGuffin love interest may have a big role in the story . . . but it's nothing to do with them, really. Like the object for which I have named them, a MacGuffin love interest serves as a motivation and endgame for the protagonist, but in a passive way. This character has no more use to the narrative than that which is imbued by their status as love interest. A prime example would be Edward Cullen in the Twilight saga. Whatever he may otherwise be doing, his purpose in the narrative is to be a goal for Bella, dangled before her like a carrot on the end of a stick. She may have other things to prove and resolve along the way, but all Edward gets to do is sit at the finishing line, making sure he's at his very sparkly best for when the conquering heroine finally rocks up to claim her prize.

On the other end of the scale, we have the Fetch Quest love interest. Like its cousin the MacGuffin, the Fetch Quest love interest has no purpose in the narrative other than being the love interest - but this time they're not so much an endgame as something to do when the rest of the plot needs a break. Think Peeta and Gale from The Hunger Games - particularly the latter two books. Katniss has a much bigger goal and better things to be getting on with than deciding who she wants to snog, but the narrative obliges her, occasionally, to break flow and sit down and have a little romantic moment with one or the other, just for the sake of keeping that pot boiling, never mind that whatever's inside has evaporated, burned, and stuck to the bottom to annoy the heck out of whoever finds it in the middle of their delicious supper.

As you may have recognised by now, the literary world is full of MacGuffin and Fetch Quest love interests. The MacGuffin is usually more the domain of the female-targetted market - a symptom of another unfortunate endemic in the book world, wherein female protagonists may be as kickass as they like, but their final epic purpose cannot escape being bound up with romantic fulfilment. The Fetch Quest, meanwhile, dominates across mediums - from the oldest form of video games, rescuing kidnapped girlfriends and princesses in 8-bit, through to the bajillion-and-one Not Another Dirty Harry detectives sweeping up sultry temptresses and earnest-but-sexy reporters as they chase down Not Another Russian Stereotype.

I don't know why this is - industry demands, lack of creative freedom in authors (or maybe just lack of creativity altogether) - but, as I have said before, and I will no doubt continue to say until I demand it carved on my headstone in my cantankerous, rattly death-throes, it does not have to be this way, and it should not. Diversity and development are central parts of the literary tradition - it's a simple matter of doing what we always do, and digging in to undo and reform parts of the old engine that need to be updated if it is to continue its progress into the modern world.

Let's leave the old tropes in the past, where they belong. We are entering a new age - one where your gender, race, and sexuality should have nothing do with your worth as a person, or your role in the world around you.

Let's make every love interest a Party Member - one book at a time.

~ Charley R

Chapter One

It's been a long time coming. Two years, in fact. Two years coming. Wow.

You lucky souls who have stuck with me for several years may remember the long-ago pre-industrial misadventure that was 2012's NaNovel, Ikarus. No, scratch that, you probably don't - to my mind I've hardly mentioned it since. Unsurprising. Between then and now, I did my A-Levels, moved to university, moved house (twice), and wrote and published another novel. Just, you know, while I was at it.

Since university, the amount of writing I've done has fallen off dramatically. Since books, the study thereof, and writing extensively on that subject has pretty much become the focus of my life, I fell a little out of love with reading and writing for pleasure. It comes and goes in spurts - a reading week here, a cancelled lecture there - but the burnout has been strong, and I've been seeking other ways to wind down, to get my mind out of the dementedly complicated alleyways that the study of literature entails.

Luckily for me, I have two things that saved me from falling out of writing altogether: incredible friends who also proudly call themselves writers, and an over-active sense of guilt.

One of these wonderful friends - guess which one, go on, I dare you, I probably only mention her every third post or so - has the ability to straddle both.

On top of that, Ikarus was the start of something between us. Namely a war of who can cause the other the greatest degree of emotional anguish in the most maniacally evil way possible. But more on that another time.

At long last, I was finally dragged out of my Slough of Unproductivity, and began work on what I feel increasingly may be my magnum opus somewhere down the line. With the incentive of providing weekly installments to the people who waited two years for the rewrite that I promised would eventually appear, I set to work on writing again.

By the end of that week, I had a Chapter One. My first Chapter One for a long, long time.

And I absolutely, undeniably, irrefutably hate it.

Getting back into writing a novel after a long, long period of not writing a great deal at all is a bit like trying to remember how to ride a unicycle.

 First: You take one look at the thing and immediately baulk and the apparent complication of the endeavour - you don't want to do this, you'll be awful, you'll disappoint yourself and everybody who's come to watch you.

Second: You take hold of the unicycle and take a deep breath. You cling to the wall and tell yourself, it's okay, you're not going to remember how to ride it in just one session. Just for now, you'll work on getting up. You can fix your balance and presentation and really unflattering facial expression later. Right now, you'll just get up. That's all.

Stephen King (along with the world and its gerbil) informs us that first drafts are always awful and we should be perfectly prepared to accpet that, and write the wretched book anyway. I know this. I've known this for years. That's not the point.

The point is the third part of remembering how to ride a unicyle - realising that you never knew how to ride it in the first place.

There's no way to remember how to write. There's no specific methodology to it at all, save that you impose on yourself. I haven't had a proper writing methodology for the better part of two years - not for novels, anyway.

It's not about a rewrite, or editing, or even anything terribly specific about Ikarus itself. It's about coming back to something I haven't been doing for a long, long time, and finding my feet again. It's about picking up the unicycle and saying to myself, okay, let's take this slowly, let's start at the bottom.

I've got my unicycle. Chapter One is there, in the light of day, physically present to be hissed at and ignored until the right time for its revisal comes. It's there - like me, wobbling atop my unicycle with my hands outstretched, making a face that would see Jabba the Hutt crowned Miss Universe.

It's there. And I'm learning how to stand up again.

The next thing is forward motion. I can't wait.

~ Charley R

Don't Write A Childrens' Book

Those of you who follow my YouTube channel will doubtless know that, when it comes to letting children read, I tend to get a little wound up. "A little" here translating as "tense as a ten-mile crossbow loaded with elephants made of watermelons".

You may also be aware that I tried to write a childrens' fantasy novel for NaNoWriMo this year. And that I failed horribly.

Writing for children, surprisingly, is not easy. Nor, I have come to think, should it be.

The books we read as children are, essentially, our first contact with a cultural force completely independent of our immediate experience. Removed from the immediacy of the moment, we take up a new role - that of the observer who, while not part of the events taking place, is nonetheless affected by them.

When in the role of the observer, we see more. The more we see, the more we thinks and, one way or another, the more we learn. This is not only on the moral front, either. We learn, through reading, to expect. We learn standards.

Those standards are the reason why writing for children is so difficult, and also so important.

If childrens' books were not good books in their own way, the standards we were exposed to would also not be good ones. We would learn to expect less. We would learn that the way we were considered and treated by these books was not with any real degree of respect for our intelligence and potential. We would learn, in the end, that books reflected the real world: childrens' voices do not count for much, and thus do not mean much. So their books, too, don't mean much.

Reading is about more than entertainment. Yes, particularly for children, reading should be enjoyable - elsewise they might just be put off altogether, and that's a slippery slope indeed. However, a children's book should not just be something hammered out to keep the little tyke entertained for a couple of hours while you get on with something more important.

Children's books should be of a standard where you know that they are learning something. Even if the book is not teaching them a lesson - which, let's be honest, most books do whatever their audience - presenting a child with good books presents them with good standards, and that in turn inspires something vitally important. Respect.

Adult reviewers tear books to shreds for not respecting, or even testing, the intelligence of the reader. An adult book that talks down to its readers, shows no effort on the part of the author to be anything more than mindless entertainment hashed out for the sake of a bank account boost towards an expensive car or a slot on the morning news show, is not a book that occupies any particularly important space in our lives or in the wider world of cultural expression.

Why, then, are we happy to let things slide as being "for kids"? I'm not saying we should be forcing expansive material down their throats from the instant they recognise their own names on the page, but the sheer number of celebrities who turn to writing childrens' books in the vain hopes of staying in the spotlight and gaining a moment's positive attention is horrendous. Looking at you, Katie Price.

If you're going to write a children's book, don't do it dismissively. Don't underestime what a book means to a person, particularly to a person who has not read that many yet. Books have legacies. Books shape us. Books teach us.

If you're going to write a children's book, write a book that might do for a child what that well-loved and lovingly-mauled old paperback on your shelf taught you when you were huddled up in the library during a damp afternoon.

Don't write a childrens' book. Write adventure, write fun, write peril, write hope and fear and loss and love. Write a damn good book.

Write a damn good book, and the kids really will be alright.

~ Charley R

There's Nothing Wrong With Power Fantasy

Power fantasy. Harder to find two words in modern culture that leave worse tastes in one's mouth - mostly thanks to the fact they mostly find use justifying mindless, borderline-problematic blockbusters where story gets trampled to death to make room for more explosions, generic growly dialogue and explosion bonanzas that make Michael Bay look subtle.

In the world of books, this usually translates into Jack Reachers, Scarpettas, totally-not-a-Sherlock Holmes' and Absolutely Another Chosen One. Now, believe you me, I'd be the first person to rip into any one of these the instant it came within shredding range . . . but not for the reasons you'd think.

You see, friends-of-mine: there's absolutely nothing wrong with a power fantasy.

A power fantasy is, essentially, any imaginary scenario whereby a perceived underdog revolutionises themselves so that they come out as the top dog and hero of their situation. This can be anything from imagining giving voice to that witty comeback you kept behind your teeth when your Maths teacher called you out on your terminal inability to process basic trigonometry to a great big X-Men, superpowers, fight the bad guy, explosion, win the girl, go home to fame and fortune and all the Wotsits money can buy.

As you may have guessed, this story is old as time itself. However, its not on that ground that I wish to defend it - simply because something is an acceptable cultural construct doesn't mean that it can't or shouldn't be challenged and altered to suit the time.

The fact is, a power fantasy is fundamentally a positive thing; it's catharsis, it's self-actualising, it's an ideal to strive for, and a healthy way to process the occasionally overwhelming difficulties of day to day life. 

The issue with power fantasy as it's viewed generally is that has come to be viewed as something excessive and harmful. The phrase "power fantasy" has been dragged out in front of me as justification for all manner of loathesome things: the non-inclusion or overwhemling sexualisation of female characters, the use of mental illness to fill in for the fact a villain has no proper goal or method of operation, the fact that a character being anything other than white and straight sets them up to be either fetish material or cannon fodder from the get go.

However, that right there is not power fantasy itself. That right there is just the fallout of the dominant societal class / race / gender having a greater pull on the type of power fantasy that makes its way into our media. Other power fantasy may exist, but it is marginalised and, in general, improperly categorised as "unrealistic" or "juvenile backlash".

For an example of proper power fantasy, I give you: the wonderful Scott Lynch.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Gentleman Bastard series; in the second book, protagonists Locke and Jean end up on the high seas on board a pirate ship captained by an infamous, hard-bitten, ass-kicking ... black, middle-aged, mother of two.

Someone wrote a very snotty letter to Mr Lynch, demanding an explanation for this horrific breach of realism. Mr Lynch responded thusly.

"Shit yes, Zamira Drakasha, leaping across the gap between burning ships with twin sabers in hand to kick in some fucking heads and sail off into the sunset with her toddlers in her arms and a hold full of plundered goods, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy from hell. I offer her up on a silver platter with a fucking bow on top; I hope she amuses and delights. In my fictional world, opportunities for butt-kicking do not cease merely because one isn’t a beautiful teenager or a muscle-wrapped font of testosterone."

There you have it, folks, in two words. Amuses and delights. That is what power fantasy is about: it's a romp, it's a laugh, it's a backflip-bellyflop into unadulterated fun unhampered by the constraints of the miserably constrictive laws of our own reality and history. 

And most importantly, it's for everyone. Everyone is an underdog to their circumstance in their own eyes, and we are all gifted with the unique imaginative capabilities to escape that.

Everyone can, and should, have and enjoy their very own power fantasy. And you know what? That's freakin' awesome.

~ Charley R

Narrative Bias, Wizards, and Maltesers

Freshers Week! That glorious week at the beginning of the new university semester, filled with socials, events, meetups, booze-ups, and the next stage of the eternal struggle to keep that traffic cone atop the head of the Boer War general in the high street roundabout!

In other news, I read four books in three days while I waited for my housemates to stop running up and down the corridors at 3am.

I had lots of fun with these books . . . but that doesn't mean I'm above using them to make a point.

Hold onto your hats, friends. Let's talk narrative bias, character flaws, and Maltesers.

I started reading these little delights, The Dresden Files, while I was away on holiday, curled up on my sofa-turned-bed in Prague and polishing it off on the bed-wrongly-considered-sofa in Vienna.

I have so many reasons to recommend this book - it's inventive, it's funny, it's engaging, the world is believable, the plots manage to balance over-arching threads while retaining a nice snacky episodic feel.

These books are probably the literary equivalent of Maltesers; you can keep dipping into the box for lots of little bite-size entertainments, without being overwhelmed by the size of the individual treats. I wouldn't call them high art - more if Harry Potter got a gritty American reboot at the hands of Neil Gaiman.

Although, going back to that old nerdy adage, Harry Dresden would beat the stuffing out of Potter in a fight. And then he'd fluff his duster, make a snarky quip, and dash home to feed his cat before getting an early night for a full day of work tomorrow.

However, much like Maltesers, as much as I like this series I know full well it's hardly five-star cuisine. That's not a bad thing - I'd rather eat Maltesers for a week than force myself to start discerning between different flavours of caviar. I do enough of that with my degree.

That said... Maltesers are full of problems, and if you eat enough of them they'll start leaving a bad taste in your mouth.

Let's start with a couple of biggies: sexism, and racism.

On the whole, I was really, really impressed with how The Dresden Files dealt with its female characters. There's plenty of them, ranging from heroes to villains in every colour, creed, race and skill-set the relatively small-scale casting register will allow. They're relevant to and deeply involved in the story, and they're complex enough to feel just as real as the protagonist. That's a rare thing in mainstream fiction, particularly a first-person story from a male narrator.

Likewise, there's plenty of variety in the races and even religious beliefs of characters: there's a Muslim wizard, a Native American wizard, a Christian knight who fights demons, and the hero's girlfriend is generally indicated to be mixed-race by physical description.

The way these characters are involved in the story is wonderful, and one of my favourite things about the series. There's just one problem.

Harry Dresden.

Now, one of the best parts about The Dresden Files is Harry himself - he's funny, he's loyal, he's resourceful, he believes in doing the right thing above all else, and he's just enough of a shlub to make us support his scrappy underdog battle against the forces of darkness and early morning wake up calls.

Harry is also a chauvinist. It's a self-confessed flaw, and one he acknowledges causes both him and his female friends and associates a lot of trouble. This is great! A main character with a serious flaw, who acknowledges that flaw without unrealistically metamorphosising into a reformed individual at the slightest hint he's wrong. It's part of him, and a part of him he's as chagrinned about as everyone else.

Everyone except the author, it seems.

Note that I call this issue a "flaw" and not a "challenge". You see, while Harry is frequently called out on the inappropriateness of his tendencies - withholding information from women who are on side to help him, feeling he needs to protect them to the detriment of himself and them both - the narrative never gives him reason to stop doing it.

Rather than presenting Harry with any reason to change his ways, the way the story is written paradoxically calls attention to the issue ... and then completely ignores it. Even after he talks about Karrin Murphy's ability to take on a plant monster with a chainsaw, Harry goes straight back to describing her, and every other female character, in terms of their physical attractiveness. He tells us how pretty they are before going into any concrete physical details, like hair colour or why they're currently chewing on the corpse of some hapless local schmuck in a dark alleyway.

The story never gives Harry a reason to believe that his flaw needs to be addressed. Even when it nearly costs his girlfriend her life, he never believes he was wrong in withholding information from her that could have kept her out of the situation entirely. And even when he does share that information, it never helps - and he is always right back where he started, acknowledging the flaw while never doing anything about it. Why? Because the story never engages the issue in the plot.

Three books later, I'm still getting annoyed that the arcane power of the queen of the sidhe is being placed second to how wonderfully her blouse clings to her nipples.

Friends, a flawed character is a wonderful thing. Make them sexist, make them racist, make them homophobic, make them supporters of SOPA to any degree you like. Make them realise this, or don't. Get them called out on it; make them change, or make them resist, whatever.

Just please, if you make this issue an acknowledged one, by the character themself or by one of the others . . . address it. Treat it like something relevant. You don't neccessarily have to change it entirely - faults run deep in even the best of us, after all.

But please, for the love of Maltesers and those who eat them - address it. Don't treat it like just another part of the story that can go on getting stuck in your reader's teeth, even though you've had the mascot stick a warning label on the box in big red shiny letters.

~ Charley R

Malice and Valour: A Study In Multiple Viewpoints

On Monday, I was ill. Not drastically ill, but just miserable enough to make standing upright a deeply unpleasant experience - the sort of illness best weathered by remaining horizontal and taking a few well-placed naps.

In between my naps, of course, I read. Reading, ironically enough, is something I'm usually able to do during the greatest bouts of sickness, despite the fact I can't seem to do it when under any sort of motion while hale.

The book that kept me company throughout the afternoon was John Gwynne's Valour, the sequel to his debut epic fantasy Malice. I received Malice as a fun birthday present last year, took it for a fun romp through well-trodden territory, and happily settled in and laid it to rest about three days later. I did not even know it had a follow-up until I was raiding my local library toward the end of the holidays - but more on that event later.

And now here I am, on the other end of Valour, anguished and clawing at the walls, waiting for the next one.

What a reversal of fortune, eh?

As a disclaimer, this post is not going to be a review of Malice or Valour - I wrote those on the UK Amazon page, if you're curious and want to poke them for yourself. It's more an exploration of what changed between one and the other that turned me from vaguely interested to near-backflipping with delight when I heard there were two more books on the way.

As I said before, Malice is fairly standard fantasy fare when it comes to plot and premise - apocalyptic war impending, Good God vs Evil God, farm boy hero as chosen one, interesting side characters steal the show, yadda yadda you've heard it before.

Malice, however, did several things right that made it stand out for me a good few leagues above most other fantasy novels of this ilk. For a start, it had some really interesting mythology and politics at work that made for a much deeper and more complex world than the premise lets on. Likewise, said mythology is well-integrated into the entire world and its workings rather than just lurching out of nowhere and plonking itself on some poor character's head, as saviour-ordaining prophecies are wont to do, leaving everyone else a little nonplussed and wondering why they should actually care beyond the designated "end of the world or else" clause.

In fact, it was everyone else that saved Malice from the oblivion of mediocrity.


There must be something about authors named John and their ability to make me care for people I wouldn't ordinarily be inclined to give much of a toss about these days. Now, I really really like multiple-narrative books when handled well. I feel they're more expansive, more engaging, and lend greater strength to a complex narrative that can't be kept track of by one character's worldview. However... I've been rather spoiled by the wonderful depth of George R.R. Martin's writing, so there aren't many that can win me over these days.

Until Valour came along, and made me care again.

When I started reading Valour, I'd forgotten the better part of the events and people from Malice, save one or two that I'd liked somewhat more than the others. I remembered the bare bones of the plot, but, again, little more than the few things I'd liked.

By the time I was five chapters in, I had a near-complete memory of almost everything.

Why? Because everyone else was there to fill me in.

The cast of the series- The Faithful and the Fallen, a mis-leading name if ever there was one - is large, but the narrators number no more than half a dozen. This is the first great thing I like about this series - everybody who's talking has a reason to be talking. We don't just get one of every flavour from the off in the hopes of seeming expansive, leaving half of them sit around with nothing to do because it's only Act One and they don't even stagger onto the stage until Act Two.

The new voices of Valour are spared being wrong-footed by previous tedium and given a chance to make themselves engaging, just as the older characters did in the first book. I actually found some new favourites among these new additions - trumping even the aforementioned George R. R. Martin, most of whose more recent additions I have grouped somewhere between "unremarkable" and "would actively go out of my way to throttle".

From this premise, we get to the best thing about multiple viewpoint stories - you're always interested in someone. The special thing about Valour is that it's not always neccessarily the same someone.

Of course, I had my darlings, as every reader does, but as everyone's stories moved at different paces, Gwynne lets the stories with a quicker pace lead the way while the others can slow-burn in the background for a bit. This keeps the story pacy without it being forced into headlong abandon, giving everyone time to sit back and have their quiet, character-building moments while someone else keeps the stakes in the foreground by getting into, out of, or around some form of action and excitement.

This is done so well that, for the first time in a long while, I have actually found myself being actively invested in a Chosen One. As he's not having to shoulder the entirety of the narrative himself, trying to be interesting while everyone else is succeeding far better over his shoulder, a lot of pressure is taken off him. He gets to step out of focus, do less, and subsequently do more because the author isn't worried about you falling out of love with him, and by extension the story, because he's not your only access point to it.

Finally, there's the investment balance. To use a financial metaphor: readers have a certain amount of support to lend to different "sides" in a narrative. In a standard fantasy like this one, there's roughly your basic two: "Good" and "Evil"(quotes used for ambiguity's sake). Mostly, a narrative will encourage you to put your investment in the "Good" side, where most of your protagonists are. So, of course, even if you get a viewpoint into the "Evil" camp, you've invested elsewere already, so you don't care quite as much for anything that's going on with them.

Valour has feet in both camps - as well as some elsewhere entirely. Your investment can go anywhere and everywhere your favourites go, and depending on whose turn it is in the limelight at a given moment, it can transfer situationally. The balance of the narrative is good enough that even if you don't particularly like the characters in question, their part in the bigger story, and their relationship to other characters, is connected well enough by the over-arching plot thread that you can and do get invested in their moments. Whether you mean to or not, in some cases.

And so, invested I am. Add The Faithful and The Fallen to the series whose next installments I shall track with the ferocity of a hungry seagull who smells your beach barbecue from the other side of the bay. John Gwynne might not have broken out the sausages again just yet, but I've had enough of his burgers to know that, when it comes, I will be back. Until then I shall wait, and watch, and squawk dementedly at every piece of news that comes my way.

In the meantime, dear readers, why don't all of you tell me about your favourite multi-narrative stories? What are your favourite things about their use of multiple narrators? Or, if you're not into that, which series currently has you waiting anxiously for the next addition?

Leave a comment, and let me know!

~ Charley R

Fifty Shades of Grey: A Good Thing

Warning: this post contains potentially upsetting and triggering imagery, and discussions of upsetting and triggering topics. Caution is advised.

When news that E.L. James' infamous erotic novel was heading toward the big screens, I did not believe it. Quite frankly, I did not want to. I had taken one look at the book, read its reviews, read responses to those reviews, and been thoroughly disgusted. This disgust was only hammered home all the further when I cautiously took a look at a few samples from the book, to see it for myself.

I was disgusted. As, it turns out, were many others. Fifty Shades of Grey, as fast as it became a bestseller, also became infamous as the worst thing to happen, not only to erotic novels, but to erotic fiction, women in fiction, and even in feminism, almost overnight.

However, one has to look closer at the much bigger picture in order to see that, actually, Fifty Shades might just be heralding something truly wonderful.

I am not going to be dealing with the details of the sexual politics and practices taking place in this book - the BDSM community is far better qualified in those examinations than I will ever be, and while what I wish to discuss is not entirely divorced from the problems discussed here, it is not with those exactitudes that I wish to tangle today. 

Female-oriented erotica is hardly a new phenomena, and nor is its general treatment. One only has to take a skulk about the lower shelves of your local Oxfam's books section to see hundreds of schmaltzy romance titles featuring bare-breasted maidens in the arms of hunky boytoys clustered among the dust bunnies, relegated to the shadows by disgruntled interns who would rather not recognise the existence of the dreck their poor employer has been saddled with.

Herein lies the metaphor for female sexuality as viewed and expressed by the public majority of readers. It's not that books about the subject don't exist, or that they are not wildly successful - it's just that they're clearly absolute rubbish, enjoyed only within the circles of sad, lonely women with no standards for plot, characters or writing quality. Nobody expects to walk into a bookstore at see something likeMaster of Desire or Tender Is The Storm sitting on public display in the New or Bestellers lists of your local Waterstones.

While Fifty Shades of Grey certainly doesn't hold up much better on any of these fronts, it does prove something very important - that female sexuality can be, and is, popular and portrayable in mainstream erotic fiction. However dubious and warped the execution, E. L. James has essentially proved that a book whose sole premise is based around the sexual encounters, desires, and experiences of a woman is not something that is excluded from the public consciousness on the grounds of any intrinsic indecency.

The importance of this proof is massive. Whether or not you agree with the graphic portrayal of sexual relationships in books or film, the politics behind it cannot be ignored. 

Fun fact: a film featuring any graphic sexual content must be rated R. However, if a film's sex scenes focus more than usual on the pleasure of the woman, it is almost automatically upgraded to an NC-17 in the new MPAA ratings. Examples include The Cooler, a violent flick which had to cut a scene featuring consensual oral sex on a woman in order to drop back to an R rating, and Boys Don't Cry, which had to cut a shot of a female orgasm to miss an NC-17 rating, with no comment being passed on the rape and murder of another female* character in the film's climax. 

Think about the ramifications for this for a moment - portrayal of overt female pleasure is more highly restricted than graphic violence, sexual assault, and murder. 

Fifty Shades of Grey, of course, cannot be mentioned without touching on the fact that it, too, contains its fair share of abusive treatment wrongfully portrayed as the fulfilment of a romantic fantasy.  It is a deeply troubling specimen of a book - the rearing head of an undercurrent in a deep, dark sea at the bottom of female-oriented erotic literature. It is regressive in its message, poor in its written execution, and in my opinion a new low in the depths of shlocky, unpleasant, ill-educated erotica. 

But that does not mean that there may not be better books. Books who, thanks to the success of this lumpy, mis-shapen goliath, may find the walls broken down in its wake, and be able to come dancing through with stories and messages of their own. 

Books where female pleasure is explored, and celebrated. 

Books where non-conventional sexual practices like BDSM are portrayed with interest and accuracy.

Books where authors and readers alike can push through new avenues of erotic exploration and create little revolutions of their own.

Fifty Shades of Grey is not a good book, not by any stretch of the word. But what it has done, and proved, and what may rise from its legacy, are undeniably wonderful.

~ Charley R

* - the character in question is actually a female-to-male transsexual, with female genitalia. Not female identifying, but physically female-sexed - hence the issue.

I Hate Female Characters - And It's Yoko Ono's Fault

As most of you will probably be aware, The Beatles are the most famous thing to come out of the UK since cholera, and have been just about as ubiquitous in their effect on society and culture, in music and beyond.

For many years they ruled the world, a sextet of talented, intelligent, memorable individuals universally adored by the public and critics alike. Though they went through their difficulties - everything from artistic disagreements to religious disaffection as well as the standard substance abuses and attachment to gag-inducing haircuts - the band remained united by a friendship that endured through all the ups and downs of their rise to superstardom.

But then, from the blackest pits of hell, came disaster. Onto the scene of this triumph of platonic endeavour burst a flapping, shrieking, malevolent force that singlehandedly brought about the end of an iconic age of music and brotherhood.

And that, according to popular belief, is how Yoko Ono ruined the world.

While neither a fan of The Beatles or Yoko Ono myself, I am more than familiar with the story, and the feelings that lie behind it.

In the figure of Ms Ono I have come to recognise that which, without a doubt, I despise most in all of book-dom: the nagging wife, the overbearing mother, the petulant daughter, the spiteful fiancée, the sexy seductress, the wailyweepy damsel-in-distress, the scheming sister. She whose very existence seems to have been to ruin a relationship I have come to love and treasure, and on whom descends the full force of my deep, burning, utterly irrational hatred.

Such was the cultural impact of her involvement in the last months of their existence, and the interpretation of her actions, that Yoko Ono has since come to be demonised on a level I do not think I would be exaggerating in saying was comparable to Hitler. The aftershocks of Yoko Ono's story are still being felt today.

However, the story of Yoko Ono is also a story of me - and how I came to hate female characters.

Yoko Ono was to fans of The Beatles what a female character came to mean to me, subliminally, through much of my reading life. She was an intrusive force, an interruption to the lives and adventures of the characters I had come to love and feel for throughout the course of the story. Her arrival signalled a threat to the relationships in which I had invested myself, a halt to the story while she sank her claws into one of my beloved characters and devoured their life and soul, neccessitating a complete reconfiguration of priorities, circumstance, and strategy.

What guise she came in did not matter - she was always there, waiting, just waiting to get her claws into my story and drag it into the woeful pits of forced romance that made me want to throw the book across the room in frustration. Oh, she might look innocent now, riding under the guise of a side character, or a mentioned relation, or (gods preserve us) a fellow protagonist, but sooner or later she would show her true colours. And I, full of suspicion and vitriol, would be waiting for her.

I was, of course, wrong. Just as wrong, in fact, as the fans of The Beatles were, in becoming so focussed on one element that the wider aspects of the whole completely fell off the radar.

Yoko Ono was not the only reason that The Beatles broke up. And not every female character is a narrative saboutage waiting to happen.

What is at fault here, rather, lies at the throbbing, tumorous heart of the greater issue that these irrational mistakes are born from - that one mistake can have far wider ramifications than anyone could have expected.

I do not consciously seek out to regard every female character I encounter with mistrust and suspicion. I would love nothing better than to be dementedly excited at the sight of their skills and interests, to chew my nails and claw at my hair and laugh and cry and shriek along with the ups and downs of their narratives, to treasure their relationships as I do those of the other characters... but, just as the die-hard fans will forever dig up new revelations regarding Yoko Ono's meddling with the vision and direction of The Beatles in their last months, current trends in writing refuse to let up in the slew of female characters who prove my every suspicion is grounded in truth.

The greatest injustice in this matter, and the greatest subsequent tragedy, falls upon the hated few. Yoko Ono was, and is, a visionary artist, musician, thinker, writer and individual, before and after she met John Lennon. Every female character, too, has a story of her own, completely apart from the role she takes upon being introduced to the established dynamic.

But nobody cares, because her story is not the one they are reading.

Nobody knows, or cares, about Yoko Ono herself. Nobody cares to realise that she had a following and a reputation and a life of her own, that it was John Lennon's interest in her that brought them together, or that it was he who invited her to provide feedback on the direction of his failing band in the hopes it could be saved.

Nobody cares, either, why the female character has come into the story, or acts the way she does, or why her introduction must neccessitate such a change. Things were fine the way they were before she came in, after all. Why should she have to come in and shake things up, pull things apart, ruin everything that we have come to know and love? Why is she even here?

Why do I still believe this, even when I know I'm being foolish?

Because of bad writing? Because of sloppy characterisation? Because of tropes, conventions, and endemic habits of writers who need a cheap conflict to keep their story interesting? Because the neccessity of the romance plot has yet to be challenged? Because the love interest is treated only as an accessory to the hero? Because blaming a woman has been a cultural practice from as far back as pre-history? Because heteronormative phallogocentrism is so pertinent that clearly a female character has no other purpose in a story than to Get Her Man by any means possible?

All may be true, or false, to a lesser or greater extent. But, really, it all boils down to one, very simple, reason.

Because her story is not the one we are reading.

Because nobody cares enough to write it.

~ Charley R

Positivity (And Happy Heartworms)

Ideas are like worms: you don't always see them, and they don't often look like much, but they are undeniably vital to the survival of their environments. Luckily for us, ideas don't live in the dirt, and aren't as prone to being eaten by birds.

Where the idea-worm lurks, instead, is among the winding words and wisdoms of a story.

Stories have all the advantages of dirt, being as ubiquitous in our culture as earth is to the ground beneath our feet. The author, like the gardener, cultivates this natural mass and draws from it beautiful works of their own. Every story, like every flower, is different.

Different also, like the worms that live in different soils, are the ideas in every story.

Stories provide the most direct routes to the heart and mind of every person, and the ideas we discover in our reading can touch us just as deeply as ideas we garner from personal experience. These ideas can go on to shape things vital to us: our opinions and priorities and beliefs about ourselves, the world, and our place in it. Most importantly of all, though, ideas can inspire us to do.

Everything, though, begins with the meeting of idea and heart. This, my friends, is what I am going to call the heartworm*.

The memorability of a book has a lot to do with the ideas that book conveys, the manner in which it does so, and the heartworms that produces. Even books that deal with the same subject matter are set wildly apart by their treatment of that subject matter; you can make a link from Othello to Mein Kampf if the only thing you're looking at is racism, for example.

However, it is that treatment of theme and subject matter that determines the kind of earth you're creating with your story, and the sort of heartworms that will live in it.

You always hear that you can't guess the author's views on a subject by the ideas in a book, but I'd be inclined to disagree. Whether or not it is the absolute truth of your opinion, the way in which you present an idea is nonetheless part of an organised, intentional effort to tell something to the audience - and that, in turn, will reflect a lot on their reaction to the story, the idea, and you.

This is where happiness comes into it.

I am a great advocate for positivity in all matters, but particularly those with an ideological basis. In debate, you're far more likely to get people engaged and interested in your idea if you present it to them in a manner that suggests that engagement and interest is welcome. This is not to say you pander to them - compromise rarely makes anyone happy - but you respect their right to disagree, and show you are aware of other aspects of this issue that you, perhaps, are not entirely capable of encompassing in your own right.

Do not simply put the worms into the earth and expect them to flourish. You have to put work into that earth, tinker and tamper and turn your thumbs black until it is best suited to showcasing the wonderful worms you produce.

A particular trend that I have noticed in the media of today - not just books, but newspapers, magazines, blog posts etc -  is their tendency toward inspring fear, anger and guilt. These feelings are not invalid, far from it, but I do not believe that success is something that can be founded in encouraging people to hate and fear things, ideas - and each other.

Vehement and extremist language is brilliant at doing what it does, but if you want to create an idea that really changes something, I do not believe the answer lies in making people afraid and angry at the world. Anger makes for a strong starting point, yes - but real change requires a dedication, a unity, and a belief that things can and will get better.

For my part, I want to see more happy heartworms - stories that inspire by example, that show people that, although a world may be full of awful things, that there is something to aim for, and improvements to be made.

I want stories that inspire, as well as critique.

I want stories that lead, as well as warn.

I want stories that not only show us an idea, but what those ideas can do.

I want to fill the world with happy heartworms, and see what the world can do.

~ Charley R

* - I am using this phrase in a purely metaphorical sense. There is no link between this post and the advocation of actual heartworms, which are horrible and painful and just about the worst things to advocate beside amateur dentistry and frostbite. For the love of pancakes do not Google these things**.
** - I warned you.

Please Sir, May I Have Some More? - Bookish Tropes We'd Like To See More Of

Last week, I posted a short list of things I think the book world has seen a little too much of lately. This week, we're turning the concept on its head, and getting a list of things that, like sad puppies at the back of the pet shop, go sadly neglected simply because they are not in plain sight for people to spot and adore out of their tiny fluffy minds.

More Diverse Characters

More characters of colour, more queer characters, more disabled characters, more characters with complex cultural history beyond the typical "Half-Human/Half-Sparkly" divide. More. Just ... more!

Relevant Family

Killing off parents, siblings and neglected gerbils is a great way to inspire the protagonist to do Hero Things, but it can cut out a lot of fascinating grounds for their continual development. It's also a great way of keeping their backstory relevant and in focus, as other characters attached to that story are in play at all times, affecting the plot and the stakes therein.

Re-imagining The Old

I love vampires, and while I'm not so keen on some of their more recent incarnations, nothing is ever going to shift that foundational love for all things nocturnal and neck-chompy. Radical reimaginings of popular cultural icons can be some of the most exciting and adventurous material for an author to work with. Modern mermaids who have adapted to hunt in modern sewer systems, faeries who join hippie communes to find victims for their pranks, zombies who volunteer as lab subjects for medical students - go wild!

Parody 

I have routinely heard that my generation is the most cynical and sarcastic yet produced by humankind, so I continue to be bemused at the lack of really good, witty parodical writings that we have, as yet, produced. You've got to love a thing before you're ready to tease it to death - and there's plenty to love and rib roaming the markets today!

-*-*-

Ahhhh. This was gloriously cathartic, you know. However, just because it left me feeling thoroughly satisfied with life doesn't mean it'll scratch that same tumourous itch for you. Feel free to leave comments suggesing more of what you - yes you, dear readers - would like to see more of in the world of books!

~ Charley R

Less Is More - Bookish Tropes We'd Like To See Less Of

The book world is full of brilliance ... but sometimes, one little part of that variety gets overused. And then that overuse progresses to the points that you can smell it coming from a league away, like your grandmother's suspiciously sentient lasange.

Relevantly deployed, there is nothing henious in the use of these tropes - au contraire, many have formed the base for some of the greatest stories of our history. Sadly, though, as enthusiasm for various sorts of story comes and goes, some see far too much use, and their relevance and usefulness degenerates into mundane typicality.

We know these tropes well, by now - we know them, we love them ... but maybe we see just a little bit too much of them thesedays.

Love Triangles

Arguably the greatest whinge-producer of any trope this side of fridging, love triangles have been going strong in particular since the rise of new Dark Romance series, where the female finds herself torn, often, between two worlds represented by a pair of brooding, preening supernatural beefcakes.

Like most romance sub-plots, the un-neccessary angst and limitations of character development can really tangle up a story, and while tensions between characters are wonderful grounds for tension and emotional drama, it might be nice to see them coming from other sources than one member's uber desirability.

Chosen Ones

Ah, the great universal Get Out Of Jail Free card for authors trying to shove reluctant characters into their boots and on the road to their great adventure. But sadly, as easy as it is to apply, this archetype and plot arc have been used to an extent that it almost seems like more of a substitute for actual motives than, as it should be, being used as part of an ongoing developmental cycle. Perhaps it's time to give the Oracle Of Vaguaries a week off, and find another reason to save the world.

Party Of Tropes

You're writing a story, not constructing a party for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. While a wide variety of skillsets, outlooks and character types is wonderful, letting those things define the characters' personalities and plot-related arcs entirely is a surefire way to draw criticism from every concievable corner of the readership - if they're not all asleep by this point anyway.

"Open" Endings

I'm looking at you, Mockingjay. While I'm glad to see that "Happily Ever After" has been handed its coat and shown the door, the new trend of supposedly ambiguous endings has been lying on the couch for a disconcertingly long period now - and it's starting to eat its way into parts of the pantry we'd rather it kept its sticky fingers out of.

Closure is not something to be afraid of, and you are not denying the readership anything by giving them a satisfying, conclusive ending to a story that demands one. There is nothing more distressing than dangling plot threads, and it is by far preferable to wrap things up in a way that may not please everyone than to leave everything hanging looser than a 14-year-old boy's boxers.

Besides, for those who don't like your ending, there's always fanfiction.

-

I'm not one for negativity, so I'll be back next week with a companion post for this one, listing a few things I would love to see making a comeback in the world of writerly creativity.

Feel free to leave me suggestions for that post, or even additions to this one, if you feel I've let some grevious swollen cliché slip through my net and make off with a bystander's sausage roll.

~ Charley R

We Need Diverse Books

I'm not usually one to jump on campaigns, because I usually arrive ten days too late for the party, and haven't even brought nibbles to make up for it (and I accidentally replaced the hashtag on my keyboard with some sort of obscure Graeco-Roman squiggle when my American keyboard was feeling particularly vindictive).

This campaign, though, is different. #WeNeedDiverseBooks is a campaign dealing with a subject very close to my heart; campaigning for increased diversity, of all kinds, in the world's mainstream fiction.

It's not that diversity in books does not exist - it does. My good friends and fellow admins over at The Book Chewers drew up a post containing a wonderful list of excellent multicultural YA books that they had all read and enjoyed, and I, too, have read and enjoyed several books by and focussing on minority characters. Heck, I've even written a couple, too.

In short: I am not here to harp on about under-representation and ignominy - not in the least because I feel it would be rather horribly hypocritical for me to do so, given that my demographic of white Western females is really rather well represented, and I don't want to start inciting that those of other origins are some sort of repressed, helpless pack of kittens that we have to rescue from the jaws of the homogenising publishing industry. Because that's not the case at all.

What I want to talk about is why diversity in books is vital to the very nature of books.

This is not a question about one facet of representation alone. It's not an issue fundamentally about race, or gender, or sexual orientation, or religion, or disability, alone. It's about the fact that these things should not be used as grounds to singularly define a person.

Books, fundamentally, are about people. And people are complicated.

The best books are those that realise this, and create complicated, multi-faceted and subsequently realistic characters that form such an important part of an enjoyable reading experience. Books that distill characters to boring archetypes are poorly executed at best and deeply questionable at worst.

I've written posts before about how characters written solely to represent a given minority are set at a serious disadvantage, because the author forgets that this person is, actually, a person, and instead treats them as an avatar for that entire group of people. This means the characters often end up being static, uninteresting, and devoid of any individualistic motive or character that could result in upset or alienation.

Under-representation is bad enough without one's only representation being done in such a way that it makes it seem like authors simply cannot consider minorities on the same plane as those who are not. It devalues the characters and, by extension, the people to whom these characters are meant to be important and relevant.

Writing should not be grounds for tropes and pussyfooting around politically correct portrayals of characters. Writing should be about creating real, vivid, exciting, dynamic, confusing, and complicated people that everyone can read about and get engaged with. Minority characteristics form a very important part of this - without them, what remains is always going to be deficient in failing to make the most of the creative vastness that can come from characters and the worlds they inhabit.

To conclude: diversity in books is not about stuffing in a wider variety of x or y trait in order to create a false sense of equality. Diversity in books is about showing how many exhibits of x and y we see in the world around us, and how each of them comes to light in a different person.

Diversity in books is about what books do best - people. In all their complicated glory.

~ Charley R

It's Worth It

This time last year, I was not happy. It was February, it was cold, wet and rainy, my workload was piling up, exams were looming ever nearer, and suddenly those university offers looked the very definition of conditional. Those that had made me offers at all, in fact.

Those teachers who spent a lot of time in the proximity of our increasingly fragile-minded year group began to come up with a little stock list of phrases and motivations to keep us from hurling ourselves out of the dining room windows. One of the most common, of course, was "it's worth it."

It's worth it. What sort of consolation is that? Promising nebulous futures to someone nearly impaling themselves on the present never crossed me as the strongest of tactics. We don't want promises, we want reassuance. We want things to make sense now, to be okay now.

It doesn't matter what you can promise me about hypothetical joys in an uncertain time to come - it's like confronting me with a plate of jellied eels and telling me that, if I swallow them in exactly the right order and fashion, there just might be a nice tasty pancake for me at the end of it. And when I'm eating that pancake and my soul is filled with fluffy, sugary delight, oh, won't I just feel marvellous? Won't I be so glad I slavered and slurped and spluttered my way through all those vile slimy things for this? Won't I offer just the same advice to the next person to come to the table, already green in the face and wobbling like Bambi on ice in a gale force wind?

No. I won't. Because even if I get to that pancake, and even if it's the best damn pancake I've ever eaten, I'm still going to have half an ocean's worth of ooze in my stomach that'll keep me having nightmares about disused sewage works for weeks.

The pancake will not be an achievement, but a consolation. I will not value the pancake for what it is, but for what it is not. That is, jellied eels. That is, exhaustion and stress and messed up sleeping patterns and a genuine feeling that things just might not be worth it after all.

There is no point in telling me it's worth it if I don't believe that myself.

Life is long, my friends, and sadly there are some plates of jellied eels that must be treated thus, horked down and swallowed as fast as possible that you may, at least, scamper off with a reasonably well-crafted pancake between your teeth at the end of it.

Some things, though, are optional. These things are usually the things that interest us more than the compulsoyr eel plates of school and work and life-as-we-know-it. These are things that inspire us, that grab our attention by the lapels and shake it until its teeth pop out.

These are the biggest, nastiest, slimiest, squidgiest, oh-god-I-think-that-one's-still-moving plates of eels yet.

If you go into one of these endeavours looking for reassurances from others, grasping at dreams of pancakes and depending on the continual huffing and puffing of another person's set of lungs to give you the motivation to so much as raise your fork again, it will not work. You will slink away to a sad and slimy corner and kick yourself for ever believing such a stupid idea could work.

For you, it wasn't worth it. And you should have known that before you sat down in front of that plate.

Sometimes, writing a book can feel a bit like a plate of eels. Maybe the plot's scarpered in the middle, and you're left with a big doughy section of middle that only oozes more pathetically when you try and wrestle it into shape. Maybe you're a good way in, but every backward glance reveals but another gaping plot hole opening under your feet. Or maybe you've dragged yourself through to the end, but the end just refuses to happen. The plot's eloped, the characters are on strike, and you're sitting in a puddle of sludge watching Flotsam and Jetsam get cuddly with your ankles.

When you're sitting in that puddle, do not tell yourself it's worth it. Do not try and cling to certainties you may or may not have. Instead, ask it. Ask yourself, honestly.

Is it worth it?

I do not mean this to be a pessimistic post - quite the opposite. Humans and lemmings are not so very different at heart, except that we happen to be the lucky species gifted with the mental equivalent of brakes. When we career toward an eel-laden cliff, we are able to stop ourselves and, if need be, step away from slimy oblivion.

There is no point in embarking upon something that will not, in the end, be worth it. Time, energy and creative enthusiasm are worth more than the empty whisperings of hypothetical teacher-figures.

Do not turn everything you do into another compulsory plate of eels. Do things you believe in.

If you believe what you're doing will be worth it, it'll take more than a plate of eels to stop you. If you no only believe there will be a pancake, but if you can see that pancake - practically taste it in the air before you - then that question will have answered itself before it's even arrived.

If you believe that, then there's not a thing stopping you.

Anyone fancy a little soy sauce on their eels?

~ Charley R

A New Danger - a short story, from the world of the Overlord!

Finding bits of what looked suspiciously like a limb inside the mouth of a notoriously temperamental kraken should not come as much of a surprise to anyone. Particularly if the kraken in question belonged to the most gleefully malicious overlord known to the world and its cat.

Perfidious Albion took a deep breath, straightened his hat, and tried not to feel intimidated. Opposite him, five and a half feet of condensed evil swung her warhammer lazily in time to the methodical crunching of the kraken's jaw.

"If there's no one to want it back," said the overlord, "I really struggle to see what all the fuss is about."

"With all due respect, Your Malevolence," said Perfidious, side-eyeing the kraken as it started pinging a femur off the walls of its tank, "it's not every day that flying limbs come crashing through peoples' parlour windows."

"You people must have very boring Tuesdays, then."

Perfidious decided not to press any further on that front - his imagination was already going to cry itself to sleep in a corner for the next month, it needed no more fuel today - and changed tack.

"But don't you think it a little odd, O Queen of the Seven Malaises, that you should find yourself in possession of a leg whose description exactly matches that of the one found in the capital today?"

"What's a few thousand miles and a mountain range against some good old-fashioned enthusiasm?"

The kraken, sensing that its unexpected mid-morning snack had become the focus of a discussion, paddled over to investigate. The Soul-Eater stretched idly, and reached over to tickle the end of an inquisitive tentacle, and Perfidious finally gave into the urge to take a half-step back as another tree-sized appendage began probing the ground around his left foot.

"To be quite honest," said the Defiler of Light, setting aside her warhammer to turn her full attention to teasing her collossal pet, "I don't know why you're so concerned. Last month we had three plagues, five kinslayings, a planetary alignmnent and the reappearance of at least seven Long Lost Objects of Untold Power, and you didn't so much as pop around for tea and a crumpet. But one drastically misplaced midsection has you camping outside my door for three days? The neighbours were threatening a noise complaint."

The Black Foe gave the kraken a final pat, and strode back toward Perfidious, head tilted a little to one side and a slither of tooth showing through her smirking lips.

"I'm beginning to wonder if you and your associate goody-two-limbs haven't come down with a terminal case of mental flatulence."

Perfidious sighed. There really was nothing else for it, was there? Slowly, keeping one eye on his hostess, he withdrew from his pocket a small flat disk. It was about the size of his palm, its white surface marked by evenly-spaced black symbols, with a pair of long silver wands ticking in a faintly sinister manner as they wandered in ever-decreasing circles around its face.

The Paragon's Bane furrowed her brows and leaned over to investigate. Then, with a shriek like a gnome with its foot in a waffle iron, she sprang backwards and nearly collided with face of her bemused pet. The kraken retracted its searching tentacles and made a piteous whining noise at its mistress' distress.

Perfidious let out a breath, and as his yellow eyes met her blue ones, he knew, at last, that they understood one another.

"Plot holes."