Reflections on A to Z

Badge for completing A to Z Blog challenge
A to Z. This was my second year doing this, and obviously I enjoyed it enough in 2011 to return. (It wasn’t just that I’m an indexer and alphabetizing appeals to my sense of order, honestly!)

I did things differently this year — I chose a theme, I wrote some of the posts ahead of time, and I tried to comment on a lot more blogs. Continue reading

Z is for Zelazny and Zette

Roger Zelazny largest body of work is The Chronicles of Amber. Amber has everything you could want in an epic fantasy — magic, swordplay, internecine rivalry, missing persons. . . . I hate to call it epic, though, as our world figures into the storyline (albeit as a shadow of the true worlds). Is it portal fantasy, with the Pattern acting as a portal? Or epic? Or something else?

(For the record, my favorite work by Zelazny is Doorways in the Sand. I’m a sucker for a book where one of the major plot points is chirality!)

For something that’s more clearly epic, I turn to Zette — Lazette Gifford, who has been working on a new epic fantasy and blogging about it this year — on her world-building, outlining, and writing. I think it should be lots of fun when it’s done: Project Water, Stone, Light. (Her most recent post on this project is about finishing the first book, not liking where it ends, and be ready to expand to a second book.) I particularly like the legend she posted on January 7. It begins:

A thousand years ago. . . .

. . . And over the high pass, though the place even then called The Barbarian Gate, came ten thousand invaders, and ten times as many following, intent on conquering the wide green lands of Tygen. The king and the army stood their ground at the headwaters of the Habur River, knowing they could not win against such odds as came at them from the cold northern lands.

The messengers sent by the barbarian king laughed to see them so unsettled. The king grew enraged and the four Prelates of the temples grew angry. The Prelates lifted their magic and created out of the messengers dog-like things, and those went yipping back to their master.

And this brings me to the end of my A to Z of epic fantasy. I’ll be posting a reflection post on May 7, and I’ll keep talking about epic fantasy — I read and write it, so that’s only to be expected. I hope you’ve enjoyed the blog challenge.


This is a post for the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge. My theme is epic fantasy, and blog posts will cover authors, books, tropes, themes, or anything else I can think of to fill the alphabet. Check out some of the other bloggers participating or follow my blog by e-mail if you like what you’ve read.

Y is for You Never Know

I had real trouble with this one. I couldn’t come up with any Y words that directly said “epic fantasy.” I played with ideas, like using a list including words like yataghan and yogurt to talk about how specificity aids in bringing a world to life, or using Yahtzee in the title and segueing into the use of games in fiction, or talking about Yog-Sothoth (although Lovecraft is most definitely not epic fantasy), or saying something like “Y is for fantasy spelled backward” (though I couldn’t figure out where to go from there). Continue reading

X is for Xanadu

Xanadu is not, properly speaking, epic fantasy. Xanadu is the Mongolian name for the summer capital of the Yuan Dynasty, Shangdu. However, the name has passed into Western culture filled with overtones of a more magical place. From its first descriptions by Marco Polo to the famous poem “Kubla Khan” by Coleridge to its use in music, movies, and astronomy, the word and the place have captured our collective imaginations. Continue reading

W is for world-building

World-building is an important exercise, even outside of speculative fiction. Authors need to decide where to set their story, and if they use a fictional town or city, it still has to feel real. Still, for me, I find more work goes into the world-building when the first step is “decide what world I want to use.” (This is true for both fantasy and science-fiction, of course.) Continue reading

V is for Vallejo

That’s Boris Vallejo, illustrator extraordinaire, in case there was any doubt. He’s done other work — at least one Star Trek tie-in novel cover, and National Lampoon’s European Vacation poster, for example — but one of his illustrations of a scantily clad (or unclad) woman or man, muscles clearly defined, often with the background vanishing into clouds, is instantly recognizable. It’s hard to choose a favorite, but two of mine would be Icarus and Golden Wings.

I was fortunate to see him as the artist guest of honor last year at Renovation SF (though I missed the opportunity to see him at Philcon!). Definitely a highlight!

How about you? Do you like his work? Have a favorite painting? Or find some other style more appealing?

(Yes, there are other artists I like as well. But I needed a V post, and my husband suggested this one.)


This is a post for the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge. My theme is epic fantasy, and blog posts will cover authors, books, tropes, themes, or anything else I can think of to fill the alphabet. Check out some of the other bloggers participating or follow my blog by e-mail if you like what you’ve read.

U is for unicorns

Unicorns — and other magical beasts — are hallmarks of fantasy. They do not, often cannot, exist within our world, so their mere presence tells us that we are elsewhere and elsewhen, even if we see no overt magic. Unicorns are traditionally precious, pure, and innocent, and only attracted to others who share these virtues. In Harry Potter, their blood can be used to extend life. In The Last Unicorn, they are hunted and trapped because of what they are (and a unicorn is the main character of the book — you have to love that!). I think the most unusual treatment I’ve seen of unicorns is in Alethea Kontis’s short story, “The Unicorn Hunter.”

Do you like unicorns? What’s your favorite magical creature? What’s the most unusual way you’ve seen a magical creature used?


This is a post for the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge. My theme is epic fantasy, and blog posts will cover authors, books, tropes, themes, or anything else I can think of to fill the alphabet. Check out some of the other bloggers participating or follow my blog by e-mail if you like what you’ve read.

T is for Throne of the Crescent Moon

If you love the Tales of 1,001 Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights), you must read the books of the Crescent Moons Kingdom, by Saladin Ahmed. So far, only the first book is out — but that means you don’t have to work hard to catch up. You just have to exercise patience waiting for the next one. This is epic fantasy with a medieval Middle East bent, rather than the medieval European bent that is so common — khalifs, ghuls, djenn, and the pleasures of cardamom tea.

The main character is the last real ghul hunter, more than ready to retire, called on “one last adventure.” His assistant is a holy warrior, who is often appalled at his teacher’s behavior and amazed that his prayers are listened to. Oh, there’s also a teenage girl who shape-shifts into a lion and who has been ostracized by her people. And a Robin Hood-esque character called the Falcon Prince.

Lots of fun, lots of excitement, and lots of danger!


This is a post for the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge. My theme is epic fantasy, and blog posts will cover authors, books, tropes, themes, or anything else I can think of to fill the alphabet. Check out some of the other bloggers participating or follow my blog by e-mail if you like what you’ve read.

S is for scope and stakes

First, I’d like to apologize for being late with this post. S was supposed to be up on Saturday, but life’s been a bit rocky for me lately. I’ll try to get the rest of the posts up on time. Too close to the end to give up now. Now, on to the actual post:

The scope of a story is what makes it epic. It’s larger than life — in stakes, in distance, in time. (Or in the number of characters or books, but that’s not necessary.) As a friend of mine said on my “G is for good vs. evil” post (over on my LJ, which my blog cross-posts to), there are epic stories that are not fantasy (or SF), such as North and South by John Jakes. Continue reading

R is for Range of Ghosts

Even if I didn’t already love Elizabeth Bear’s writing (see my review of Carnival last year), I would have wanted to pick up the book as soon as I saw her basic description on The Big Idea on Scalzi’s blog:

[I]t seemed to me that the obvious solution was to invent a different sun. Or maybe a whole slew of different suns.
So I did. Everybody gets their own sun! Or suns. And a set of skies to go with them.

How cool is that?! Not just suns, but moons, too. Then you add in descendants of Genghis Khan, or that world’s equivalent (Mongke Khagan) — you want to go find this book already, don’t you?

Picking up the book, I found it every bit as gripping as I’d hoped. Temur is on a battlefield, surrounded by the dead, both men and horses. His throat was cut, and he should by all rights be dead, but instead he lives, crossing the battlefield and looking for safety, somewhere where the very fact of his existence isn’t going to bring death to those around him. And the pace, excitement, and tension pick up from there.

Digression for those who read my post on Orullian — when Bear changed viewpoints, she didn’t lose me. I don’t know whether this is because she named somebody fairly quickly (from the first such scene — “Mukhtar ai-Idoj, al Sepehr of the Rock, crouched atop the lowest and broadest of them, his back to the familiar east-setting sun of the Uthman Caliphate.”), because I was already predisposed to trust her as an author, or because of a combination of the two. I think primarily it’s because she’s good with point-of-view; the first trilogy I read by her (the Jenny Casey books) mixed first-person and third-person point-of-view flawlessly.

(And do you notice how she worked part of what makes this not our familiar world into that sentence? “The familiar east-setting sun of the Uthman Caliphate” first of all puts the sun’s direction opposite to our own and underlines the fact that it is so only for this country; others have their own rules for the sun, some of which she delineates right afterward.)

Definitely recommended!


This is a post for the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge. My theme is epic fantasy, and blog posts will cover authors, books, tropes, themes, or anything else I can think of to fill the alphabet. Check out some of the other bloggers participating or follow my blog by e-mail if you like what you’ve read.