I’ll be the first to admit that I am no literary scholar.  I enjoy Tolkien stories and  C.S. Lewis adventures and even Lord of the Flies. But I don’t enjoy them because they have something to teach me about life.  I enjoy them because they’re fascinating, engaging reads that allow me to see things in my minds eye that I’ll never see with my real eyes.

So what does this have to do with Steampunk?  Well, I’ll admit only a very little.  There are some who believe Steampunk has a philosphy that is an “aesthetic technological movement.”  Now I don’t disagree with their assessment.  The forum post I linked to was actually a very intriguing read.

However, I simply don’t care.  I love steampunk and the idea of steampunk because it’s a mixture of all things fantastic.  All the things that I love, fantasy, sci-fi, different eras of the past; they’re all rolled into one with steampunk and it tickles me to no end to see this in work and with such harmony.  Although Fantasy and Science Fiction are often lumped together, I also see the two genres claim sides and rarely do I find people who read both kinds of stories with equal fervor like I do.

The first encounter I had with Steampunk was through another medium that I adore for its ability to show me fantasy and make it amazingly beautiful:  anime.  The show, Robot Carnival, was recorded by my older brother at college and then brought home for us to ogle to our hearts content.  I probably would have worn that VHS tape out if he’d let me, I watched it so many times.  Robot Carnival was made up of nine different short segments done by different directors.

There were only a two shorts that reminded me the most of Steampunk. Presence, directed by Yasuomi Umetsu, about a man who creates a robot girl in order to gain affection he feels he is lacking from his wife and family, then destroys her, but is still haunted by memories of her forty years later. A Tale of Two Robots — Chapter 3: Foreign Invasion, Directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo, which is set in the nineteenth century and is about two robots powered by humans inside of them. While each had robot elements in them, I still think they were steampunk in style and execution. They just had a feel to them.

Of course, at the time, I didn’t even know what steampunk was. Not until I came across Castle in the Sky a few years ago.  And after doing some reading, I came across that term.  And eventually remembered other things that I’d seen that had Steampunk elements to them.  A more recent movie is the Golden Compass, which I admittedly haven’t seen, but the books certainly have a steampunk feel to them.  Though obviously steampunk isn’t the main theme to the series.

I admit that most of my experience with Steampunk has been through movies.  However, I’m rectifying this currently.  I’ve read HIS DARK MATERIALS in its entirety and will soon be cracking open the shiny new copy of Steampunk I recently acquired from Barns & Noble.  I’m almost giddy with anticipation and even partly reluctant to start because I know it has an end and I truly have a love/hate relationship with endings.

And so why do I bring this all up?  Because I’m going to try my hand at creating a steampunk novel.  Like I said in my last post, I’ve got the beginnings of a story that I hope will develop into a novel that’s both fun and exciting to read.  And if there are humorous parts in it as well, that’s clearly by accident, because whenever I try to write comedy it falls flat, but if I let things flow, they tend to come out on top.

Though I’ll be writing steampunk, I’ll continue to cover some other subgeneres on this blog that I love,  including cyberpunk, dieselpunk and perhaps take a peek into what clockpunk is all about.  And then I’ll move on to other sci-fi and fantasy subgeneres. (Which apparently includes *gasp* elfpunk!)

So little time and so many books to read.

Tags: Fantasy, Research, Sci-fi, Steampunk, Writing

Washue and Squirrel

In a previous post I mentioned that when I converted a short story blurb to not reference WoW, that I ended up with a somewhat steampunk like story.  Well, the idea intrigued me so much that I just couldn’t resist.  I’m going to create a story with “Little” Washue and her wolf friend Squirrel.  I’m not sure where the story will take me, but it will most certainly have adventure, intrigue, explosions and at least one case where Washue gets to satisfy her urge to punch her nemisis, Elsie.  For this story, Washue will be a human girl.  I think, regardless of how I roleplay her in WoW, that I can take the essence of her, put it into the body of a gangly teenaged human and still come up with an adorably loveable character.

And just like with WoW Washue being based off of my daughter, “steampunk” Washue will be based off of her as well.  And I’ll even go one step further to dedicated the story to my daughter in hopes that she’ll continue to be bright and out going just like Washue, no matter what life throws at her.

In my next blog post I’ll be discussing all things Steampunk.  This post I’ll simply share a short blurb from my rough draft with the working title of The Adventures of Washue and Squirrel.  If you enjoyed it let me know.  And if you didn’t, most definitely let me know.  See story after the cut!

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Fantasy, Sci-fi, story excerpt, Writing

I came across an NPR story contest they are naming Three Minute Fiction.  The contest is to submit a work of fiction that can be read in three minutes and can be no longer than six hundred words.  I came across it via a twitter post from a fellow WoW player, who also has a blog about writing and wow.

I submitted a story that I’d originally written for a very good friend of mine in WoW whose character, a orc warrior, has been like a big brother to my tauren hunter.  He expressed concerns about my character changing because she was suddenly interested in a boy.  I wrote the story to assure him that even when she’s old and gray with many children and grand children that she’ll still be the same person.

Obviously I can’t submit a story with World of Warcraft elements and claim it as my own so I edited it to remove any reference to WoW proprietary story elements.  What surprised me by doing such is that it reads a bit like a steampunk story.  Perhaps I can write Washue stories after all and simply create a steampunk world for her to live and thrive in.  The idea appeals to me a great deal and I just may continue in that vein of thought as I move forward with developing my writing.

Tags: contests, Fantasy, submissions, Writing

Maltese Falcon Movie Poster

I’ve been fascinated by Film Noir since I was an early teen.  My first glimpse of the genre was “The Maltese Falcon” starring Humphrey Bogart.  I can remember sitting in my basement with my father and being riveted by the movie.  Black and white films have this quality about them that is hard to come by with color films.  Perhaps because with black and white it’s all about the lighting.  With Noir films the lighting is even more important because of the lack of bright scenes; most of the film is dark to fit the mood of it.

The term Noir has always fascinated me as well.  Noir, the french word for black, was first used by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, when discussing some of Hollywood’s films.  From then on, Noir grew and expanded in curious ways.  No two people can seem to agree what exactly constitutes a Film Noir.  Though there are some themes that seem to be universal through out.

• The Average Joe Protagonist – Average Joe as the protagonist allows us to use his eyes to see the darkness of life and to bring it into plain sight.  Average Joe is just that, average, nothing special, he could be any of us and that’s why the people watching identify with him and the terrible things he sees as the story unfolds.
• The Femme Fatale – A woman who isn’t afraid to use her charms to get what she wants.  Sometimes the Femme Fatale is doing it on purpose because she can’t see any other way to get what she wants.  Sometimes she gets her way without realizing it’s because she’s so good at seducing men. (Though how you could be unaware of this is truly beyond this non-femme fatale.)
• The Seedy Plot – Whether it’s extortion, murder, sex crimes or any other number of despicable things, the plot of a Film Noir is all about Average Joe being hired either by the Femme Fatale or someone else and getting in over his head in a situation that he’s usually woefully under prepared to deal with.  Be it a dead body in his place, a Femme Fatale tempting him to do the wrong thing even though it feels so right, extortion by the highest bidder or all of the above, Average Joe has to use his average wits to get out of the seedy plot he finds himself mired in.  Some Noir end on a tragic note, with no real justice done, while others end with a more positive take, like Average Joe getting the non-femme fatale as a prize for finally exposing the bad guys to the authorities.

Film Noir were usually taken, at least in part, from Hardboiled detective novels from around that same time period. Hardboiled novels are just that, stories that show you the hard truths of the criminal side of things as viewed by a protagonist who isn’t a hero, just someone trying to live life without going under.

All of this, is leading somewhere in my mind, which is usually full of twists and turns.  And that is, of course, the title of this entry, Fantasy Noir.

The Fantasy genre is one of magic and other things of myth that are of a fantastic nature.  Basically anything that isn’t possible in our world is fantasy. (Science Fiction being things that could be possible through science and technology, if given time for us as a race to achieve those things.)

So what do we get when we put together Fantasy and Noir?  Why we get a sword wielding mercenary who gets hired by a Femme Fatale to recover her lost magical artifact and instead gets imprisoned by a blood thirsty warlock who is going to use him as a sacrifice in order to summon forth unimaginable powers, of course!

I only recently came up with that lovely combination myself.  Sadly I wasn’t the first to do so, however, it would seem that Fantasy Noir isn’t something that many others think to do with their writing and film making.

Blade Runner Cover

Though Blade Runner was hardly fantasy, it is certainly a new spin on the Noir Genre, something they call Science Fiction Noir. A futuristic setting, but a similar take on a bleak world with an “Average Joe” protagonist who ends up in the middle of a struggle that he really never intended to get involved in. The twist of the main character, Rick Deckard, in Blade Runner was that he originally worked to put down rogue synthetic humans and yet he finds himself, after retiring, being asked to do it again and in the process falling in love with a woman that he can almost believe isn’t a synthetic. Blade Runner was even more progressive, I suppose you can call it, because it is also labeled cyberpunk due to its technology driven yet slum-like atmosphere.

Now back to Fantasy Noir. The idea came to me on a whim when a friend teasingly challenged me to write something for a World of Warcraft character that would be set in a rainy, steamy atmosphere with lots of bluesy, saxaphone music as a back drop. How could I resist such a challenge? I wrote a short story about my night elf rogue trying to drown her sorrows in a bottle of whiskey while it poured rain outside. The setting was a jungle port and the tone of the story was more sexual than bleak, mostly because as the story progresses, my character reveals she almost slept with a total stranger because he intrigued her but ends up drinking alone because the local enforcers show up to cart the man away for the extortion of pretty women.

I liked that story so much, I wanted to write more. Sadly, unless I feel like never publishing such stories ever, I couldn’t continue to use World of Warcraft as my setting. So I ripped my character out of that setting, made her into a “jungle” elf, and started up a story I’m currently calling “Five Finger Discount”. I might change the title, but the gist of the story is my character dealing with being used as a pawn and she doesn’t know why and likely never will know why, even at the end.

I was curious to know if anyone else had ideas like mine, so I started doing some research on Fantasy Noir. I came up with a two blog posts discussing Fantasy Noir as it applies to Urban Fantasy. I even stumbled on a post discussing making a D&D game using Noir in a fantasy setting. And then I finally stumbled upon something that was almost exactly what I was looking for.

An author by the name of Alex Bledsoe, has written a high fantasy noir book by the name of The Sword-Edged Blonde.  I’ll be getting my hands on this book as soon as I can because I am truly curious to see just how he combined High Fantasy and Noir.

Though my story won’t be an exact take on noir/hardboiled style, I’m hoping it will at least give that sense as I plunge my readers into a world of elves and wizards and average people who don’t look too closely at the otherside for fear they see themselves all too clearly.

Tags: Fantasy, fantasy noir, Writing

I was given the opportunity to read an issue of the magazine entitled Fantasy & Science Fiction. Website here: http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/ Even better it was given to me for free if I agreed to write a blog post reviewing the issue I received. How could I resist?  To answer my rhetorical question: I couldn’t and didn’t, obviously.

My first impression was one of surprise when I pulled the issue from the manila envelope it was sent in. The magazine resembled a trade paperback book. I was delighted to see it resembled my favorite form of printed material. I must admit my dislike for reading actual stories done in the normal magazine format.

I delightedly dove into the magazine and was, once again, surprised by the magazine.  The stories were not what I was expecting. Obviously my exposure to sci-fi and fantasy has been limited some what by living in a small town when I was growing up and by the amount of money I had to spend as I grew older and got a “real” job.

I was not disappointed by the issue, despite my surprise in regards to its content. Each story and article was well written and intriguing in its own right.

My one complaint was with only one novelet and that was more in regards to the accent the author used when writing dialogue. The novelet THE PRIVATE EYE by Albert E. Cowdrey was set in Louisiana and while he tried to convey a Cajun accent, he merely succeeded in making it into yet another southern drawl. I say this only because I’ve been living in Louisiana for the past seven years and most cajuns do not sound like they’re from South Carollina. Though perhaps it’s just me and how I interpreted the speech patterns.

Despite that minor complaint, I still enjoyed the story. I enjoyed all of them from YOU ARE SUCH A ONE by Nancy Springer, which was written in second person about a middle aged woman who becomes a ghost in her dreams, to A TOKEN OF A BETTER AGE by Melinda M. Snodgrass, which was about a Patrician sent to the gladiatorial ring because he defended his Christian mother. Oh and he killed a dragon who is actually a creature from another world pretending to be a god.

I’d be hard pressed to pick a favorite story, but two of the novelets truly stood out to me as unique and enjoyable.

The first story is THE GODDAMNED TOOTH FAIRY by Tina Kuzminski, which just happens to be a reprint from a previous issue. It’s a curious trip through a night at the dog races with a man and his date that ends with the protagonist discovering his date once tried to commit suicide and the goddamned tooth fairy telling him that if he gives up on his date because of that, he’ll miss his best chance at being happy. The mixture of surrealness, humor and solemnity makes it an amazing read and one I’m sure to visit again.

The second story is THE BONES OF GIANTS by Yoon Ha Lee, a dark fantasy that struck me from the very first page. It’s about a man who is about to commit suicide because he’s run out of jade ammo to kill ghouls. He’s saved by a necromancer who requires his help to destroy the sorcerer who is ruining the valley they are in. The tale is haunting, yet fascinating as the necromancer teaches the man to control the giant bones she’s raised as their mounts. The ending is a lovely surprise twist that I enjoyed as much as the entire story.

All in all, this issue was enjoyable from cover to cover and I’d recommend it to any of my friends or family whom I know would enjoy these kinds of stories.

The best part of this magazine issue was the surprises, both big and small. They renewed my faith in the fantasy and science fiction genres. And they renewed my faith in myself as a writer.

I suggest anyone who enjoys amazing writing to take a look at Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine. They’ve been around for 60 years now. I have a feeling they’ll be around for 60 more. At least I hope they are because I’m about to purchase a subscription.

Tags: Fantasy, Review, Sci-fi