ere lies the meat of this site.  My main reason to want to do my own home page was always to have a place to post my stories, both old and new, so people could see them.  Writing fiction is what I enjoy the most, and hopefully am best at.  I enjoy the articles, daily ramblings, and other features on this site, but those feel more like work; enjoyable work, but not something I'd do just for fun.  Writing is a passion, and ideally a career.

Much of the info on this page is out of date as of October 2004, but updates and a reorganization are on the way.

 • My Writing History
 • Recent Feedback
 • Fantasy and Horror
   • Fantasy
   • Horror
 • Epic Themes in Fiction
 • My blog thoughts on writing.
 • My D2 Novel.

Related topics:
 • Book Reviews.
 • Review of prominent horror novelists.
 • Review of prominent fantasy novelists.

They say writers are born, but I never considered being a writer as a kid.  I read voraciously but never really thought about being a writer myself.  I never had any clear, "what I want to be when I grow up" plans as a kid, or a teen.  I was smart enough to know I had many options, but figured I'd zero in more once I got into college, and saw the state of the world at that point.  I never really thought the 9 to 5 business world was for me, and considered sports for a career when I was a kid, since I was always the fastest and most agile of my friends, at least until high school.

My reading was mostly fantasy, stories about sports stars, sci fi, comic books, etc.  All topics, but nothing with any real burning intensity.  That changed when I read my first horror story.

I should remember the date, but I do not.  I clearly remember the book, which was Firestarter, by Stephen King.  I remember reading it with a crazed intensity, never having seen anything like it before.  Real world, real characters, but amazing powers, and darkness.  Evil characters, plots, good guys struggling to survive, and some not making it.  That was all quite new to me, after the mostly fairy tale fantasy or hero worship biographies I'd read up to that point.  I didn't think immediately, "I could write like this", but I was hooked on horror, and over the next few months I obtained every Stephen King novel published to that point (mostly for about a quarter each at the swap meet) and went through all of them, some multiple times, as fast as I could turn the pages.

At some point over the next year or two I began to get the idea of being a writer when I grew up.  I loved horror, good horror, bad horror, whatever type, stories of weird, magical, demonic things happening in our world fascinated me, and I knew I had ideas for similar tales in me.  However I didn't have a burning desire to start writing then, I just had that as a long term goal, and felt quite sure I would eventually attain it.

I couldn't type then, and didn't want to write badly enough to do it long hand, (I've always hated writing by hand, so slow and cramping and generally illegible) but I sort of had the idea in mind that I'd be doing that as an adult, and probably doing it with horror.

Over the next years I read many other authors, loved Clive Barker's work (his early short stories are still the best collections I've ever read), enjoyed Dean Koontz for a while, until the relentlessly-identical characters and plot in every novel bored me too much, and read miscellaneous other horror, both old (Lovecraft, Blackwood) and new, though not much impressed me enough to get other stuff by those authors.  Lots of guys write one good short story, or have parts of a novel that are good, but most of their stuff is dreck.

I took a typing class in 8th or 9th grade, and wasn't very good at it.  I was fast enough looking at the keys, but had like a female orgasm inhibition thing about just letting go and trusting my fingers to do right as I looked at the words.  Since I was planning on doing my typing from thoughts, rather than transcribing dictation like a secretary, I didn't worry overly about that, and for years when I was first writing I had to look at the keys.  Obviously a mental block, as I knew where the letters were perfectly, I was spending 4 or 6 hours a day, sometimes 12 or 14, typing, but there you are.  I can transcribe pretty well now, sight typing, they call it, though I don't do it often.

So since I had typing ability, and a typewriter at home, I must have been burning to start writing, eh?

Well, no.  I wanted to write, but I didn't want to badly enough to use a typewriter, and have 100's of pages of paper around.  So I started asking about a computer, wanted it for writing and school work, etc. They cost a lot more than than they do now, and of course were about 1/1000th (give or take a few zeros) the power of a modern computer, but eventually my dad, mom, and grandparents all chipped in on one, or something like that. Dad was working for IBM then, so got employee discount on the 8086, which is what I used for like 5+ years after that.  Played tons of old very simple games, and wrote a lot as well.

As part of this website I'll be digging back into my old floppies full of writing, seeing if anything is close to tolerable, so that I can stand to post it now.  Technical issues will be a problem, the old 8086 I had Word Perfect or something on, and I'm sure it'll be incompatible with any modern Windows program.   Even the floppies are a problem, those old ones are single density, 770k, and won't run in most modern double density 1.4 floppy drives.  I can recall spending some time converting things in an old computer, but that the stories lost all formatting in the process.

I don't have any clear memories of anything I wrote way back then, so when I get around to looking that stuff up (I've got boxes of old floppies of my writing) it'll be interesting to see.

I moved up to a Pentium 133 some years later, with Win 95, and wrote tons more, pre-internet days.

My first exposure of any type to a professional in the field was dealing with an agent friend of my mom's, who read a novella I'd written and pronounced it quite good.  I'm sure I have it somewhere on a floppy, though as I think back I don't remember it being a very workable story, and I realized that not long after writing it and paying the agent $100 to look it over.  So his opinion that it was almost publishable lowered my opinion of him.  I don't take praise especially well.

I took a year after high school to work on my writing, convinced I was brilliant enough even at that point to get published and earn money, and that there was no need for college.  I wanted to write full time, but I also hated the last 3 or 4 years of high school, being constantly bored and learning nothing of any real use, and I had no desire to go to college for more of the same.

I might have been right about my writing viability, but I was as bad at the business end of it as I was good at the writing, and did virtually nothing towards getting published.  The experience of paying all my bills, food, rent, car insurance, etc, was certainly informative though, and being about $4000 in debt to my dad (at a merciful 0% interest rate) after 12 months was more than enough incentive to try college, even if it was just Community College.

Somewhere around here I had my second professional exposure, dealing with an agent who looked at some short stories and parts of a novel I was working on, and also pronounced it of publishable quality.  She had no experience doing horror though, so recommended I find an agent who did, assuring me my work was good enough.  Her opinion I took more to heart, since she'd agent'ed numerous novels, but I again did nothing really towards getting published, aside from meeting Clive Barker at a book signing and asking him for the name of his editor at his publisher, which he told me and I relayed to the agent I'd been talking to, since it had been her suggestion that I ask Clive about it in the first place.  I still have three of his old paperbacks that he signed for me; it was the first book signing I'd been to, and I didn't know the rules for how many books to bring in, and I couldn't afford his new book in hardcover, which was probably Imajica, going by the time line.  Published in 1991, which would have been around my first year of college.

My mom was always very supportive of my efforts, and did a lot of pushing and helping on making agent contacts, etc.  As I recall, she even called and/or wrote to the editor at Barker's publisher, and talked to his assistant who said they they didn't accept anything unsolicited (a very common story for aspiring writers) but since this was a special case if I sent something in she'd try and see that it was looked at. 

I don't recall doing anything about that, since I was working on lots of stuff, and doing what I always did; thinking that whatever I'd written 6 months ago was utter crap, and realizing that I'd probably think the same thing of my current work in another 6 or 8 months.  The fact that I was probably right didn't change the fact that I made almost no effort to get published despite multiple decent opportunities, and despite work that was as good or better than most of what I was reading in paperback at the time.  Just because I wasn't happy with my work and knew I could do better didn't mean it wasn't good enough to possibly make me some money, or at least get me some contacts and started towards being published for real.

College was good for writing, and other things.  After hating high school, the endless pointless classes, busy work, 20 minutes of each class wasted taking attendance, etc, college was so nice.  Mostly for the hours, 3 hours a week in most classes, and I generally took courses where that meant one three-hour class a week, and then nothing until next time.  Homework I didn't mind, it was all of the time-filling garbage in actual class that drove me nuts in HS.

Plus there were women I was interested in, and interesting to, after all of the immature kid's stuff in HS, when I dated almost not at all.  I took a wide variety of classes in college, but of interest for this section of this site is mostly the creative writing.  There was an excellent class in that, where the course was entirely based on writing.  Each student had to write three stories over the semester, and bring them in with enough copies for everyone. The next week we'd bring them back and pass them to the authors, marked up with our comments, as well as discussing each story for 20 or 30 minutes.  The discussions tended to be somewhat nit-picking, and the teacher for 249 A and B was not very good.  There was also a 252 A, B, C, and D, and I took all of those, 6 semesters in a row, and the 252 teacher was much better.  Bonnie ZoBell, I'm surprised I remember the name.  The 249 guy was Andrew something, and all I remember about him was his awful hair and poor taste in stories.

I don't recall really learning anything in particular in any of the writing classes, they were just easy A's and enjoyable to take classes that let me do what I most wanted to do, which was write.  I matured over that time, and grew better able to see my own writing objectively.  There were also some great people I met in those classes, (Hi Danielle and Mindy!) women I spent a lot of time with, who really helped open up my mind to new perspectives and ways of thinking.  I was always interested in complicated and powerful female characters, probably influenced a lot in that aspect by Clive Barker's brilliant characters, and loved to meet intelligent women I could get to know and spend hours talking about things with. 

Most of the students had problems finding time or motivation or inspiration to get the three stories a semester done, while I'd generally do 6 or 8, turning in three of them, and I can remember several times when I had one all done, and got a hot idea more or less the night before class, wrote 20 pages, and turned that one in, usually in very rough form.  I'll be posting those short stories here over time, and I've not read any of them in years myself, so it'll be interesting to see them.  I hope they aren't horrible.

My writing then was much too ambitious in scope for short stories.  I usually had one good idea to seed the story in my mind, and then I'd go from there. I remember getting a lot of stories from songs.  A new song on a CD I'd like and I'd just hear a story in it, and put that on repeat and write for 4 or 6 or 8 hours.  Some line in the song, or just the overall mood of it, would inspire me, and the story would come, seldom anything at all like the song in finished form, other than perhaps mood.  Not that anyone but me would have known it from the story of the song, it was just how my mind worked.

So my short stories from then are usually full of cool ideas and things happening, but I always tried to do much too much, tried to have no static characters, wanted conversation, action, life-changing events, etc, and that's really not possible in 15 or 20 pages.  Or 30 as mine would often go to, threatening to blow up to novella size, in most cases.  You'll notice that this hasn't really changed now, I still write 30 page short stories that could easily be 80 or 100 pages, and I still try to have too many character changes and events in a short space.

The more polished writers in my classes would do shorter, neater things, almost always very navel-gazing and philosophical, or else with gimmicks, like one part of the story would be written backwards, or from the PoV of an animal, etc.  They sort of left me cold; where I'd see good writing, and interesting characters, but it seemed pointless since there just wasn't any plot.  It would be people sitting in a bar talking for 15 pages, or some guy in a shower thinking about when he met his wife, but there was never any dramatic tension or plot or action.  That's a perfectly-acceptable form for a short story to take, but I always wanted more.  I'd often comment, "You write so well, but I wish you'd do something with a plot or some action, and mix in your good characters and conversation and such with that, it would really be great."

They never did.  It wasn't like they were aesthetes or snobs or something, we got along fine in class (I was early 20's, very long hair, wore leather jacket and pants often with black cowboy boots, and most of my stories had wild violence, lots of sex, etc.) but they wrote very differently than I did, and I think that probably their stories were much "better" in terms of being polished and what critics would like, but they never seemed to have much energy, and there was virtually never anything happening, other than conversation.

I never tried to get anything published, I always knew my writing was pretty good, but would be much better and knew that I wasn't writing as well as I could, or wanted to.  I didn't feel any pressure to get published.  Most of what I was writing was better than what I read in fiction magazines or many anthologies, and certainly better than the pulp garbage that most published horror fiction was (Anne Rice), but that didn't mean I thought it was good enough.  The agents I'd talked to, and people in my writing classes all said my stuff was good enough to be published, and I agreed, but that didn't mean I was motivated to do it. I wrote a few query letters to agents picked from Writer's Market, but nothing really came of it, and I wasn't driven to get published.  I could always write more and better stuff, after all.

Once out of college I started trying to do some novels, since I didn't think there was any real money to be had in short stories.  There isn't, of course, but you need to get published somewhere to get that on your résumé so that agents and publishers will take your novel seriously.

And yes, I've been telling myself that since high school, and no, I've not done anything about it in the last few years.

I finished a couple of very long novellas in the college time, and people liked them, but I knew they weren't novels.  They were long long short stories, there weren't enough acts, enough characters, enough dynamic events to be real novels.  I was aspiring to the sort of brilliance we saw in Clive Barker's and Stephen King's prime, when novels like Weaveworld, Imajica, It, The Stand, and others were written.  (Yes, they are sadly past their primes now, at least based on their work in the last 5 or 6 years.)

Comparing your work to the best novels you know of is a great thing to aspire to, but I should have kept in mind the hundreds of quite pedestrian, but still readable, novels that were being published, and often becoming best sellers, earning their mildly-talented authors a living, or even riches. It's great to see the shortcomings in your own work, but don't so focus on them that you ignore the good parts of your work, and that it's "good enough", to be published and perhaps earn you a living.

And yes, I've been telling myself that regularly for 10+ years, and no I've not done anything about it.

Reader Assumptions

One interesting phenomena is when readers read too much about the author into his writing or characters.

A common mistake readers make is assuming any "I" character is the author.  Stories are written from first person all the time by authors who have nothing whatsoever in common with their protagonist/narrator.  Most novels delve into multiple characters for some first person, or at least showing that character's PoV on issues, or describing the action from their view.  It's a story, not a diary entry, characters in a story share some elements with the author, but readers often seem to assume it's autobiographical.

I had that a lot in college, when I'd write a story with four female and two male characters, and one of the males was near my age, people would comment things like, "your character was annoying when he did..." and I'd think, "My character?  Why is the one somewhat similar in physical appearance to me mine, while the other five are invented and fictional?" Often in such cases the one they were acting like was me was actually the farthest from being like me, or else one of the other characters was one I much more agreed with.

The same thing happens with events in stories.  Whatever seems possible readers assume is autobio, while the rest they take as invention, when it's all invention.  I'll write a story where a character kills and skins 10 people, robs banks, has the power of invisibility, and can transform into a toad, and in one minor scene he eats a mustard and peanut butter sandwich.

Readers will ask, "how long have you liked mustard and PB sammiches?" This is just a hypothetical, but of course I don't like such sandwiches.  It was just something I made up for the story, same as the flying and everything else. So why assume the one thing reflects the authors opinions or experiences, while knowing that none of the rest does?

This happens with stories with opinionated main characters.  I recall once in college I'd done 2 stories that semester with female main characters, and then my third had a guy who used some slurs against gays as part of how his character was.  One guy talked to me next week before class, asking why I hated "fags".  And of course I didn't, I was no more than character than I was the women in the other stories.  But no one asked me after the first two stories if I really had a vagina.

I don't know what can be done about this, or if anything needs to be done.  It's just an observation I've made after writing so many tales, and seeing the reactions and feedback from readers. My first D2 fantasy tale, A Paladin's Lesson, has a Necromancer battling a Paladin.  The Necro wins, and I had readers assuming I was all sold on playing as a Necromancer in the game, when he wasn't a character I was at all interested in.  He was just a character in a story.

Recent Writing

For the last 3 or 4 years, the amount of fiction I've done has dropped way off.  I've been writing a lot, but the sort of non-fiction you see on the rest of this website.  Articles, interviews, features, and tons of email, as part of running (with a couple of other people), an enormously popular and content-rich D2 website.  I've done dozens of articles, hundreds of content pages, written numerous very long strategy guides, made thousands of forum posts, written FAQs and everything else you can imagine.  That did earn me some money, back when Internet ad revenues were not totally in the toilet (as they've been since mid 2001), and I've also done some freelance web design work, which pays pretty well, but damn it's boring and tedious. In the process I've learned how to do all the aspects of running a website, short of actual programming of java or the like, and I know enough to do everything on this site pretty easily, from design to SSI to graphics.

So lots of writing, of a sort, but not much fiction.  The only new stories I've written in the last 3 or 4 years are short stories for Halloween, that were posted on the Diablo II site. They were extremely popular, at least judging by the feedback I've gotten on them, so it seemed I could still write, when I put my mind to it.

Update: The above was true as of late 2002, but after I got back into the habit of writing fiction more often, mostly for the D2 site holiday stories, I managed to carry on, more or less. As of July 2004 I've been very busy writing a fantasy novel for the past half year, and it's going well. You can read more about how it evolved from a potential fan fiction serial to the original novel it is now on this article page, and I talk about my writing progress frequently, in the daily blogs.

Feedback

These are all quotes from readers of my fantasy stories, posted Halloween for the last 3 years on Diabloii.net.  All the stories were very rough when posted, all written in a mad rush the last day or two before Halloween, and often in two parts so I could get part one up the 31st, and then have time to write part two in the next day or two.

I wanted to let you no I have read most of the top selling fantasy novels your is at the top if you have more tales please can you tell me were to find them.
--Jeff

Just had to drop you a quick note to compliment you on your story "Haunted Castles Beat Treats." I went back and read it at least 4 or 5 times before I finally printed it out. I've have read some of your other stories ("The Magistrate Suit" was good too), but I like HCBT best. Out of all the stories I've read so far, I felt it was one of the most engaging and original. I would love to see further adventures of that family, or the necromancer for that matter (what happened next Hallow's Eve?). I think HCBT could have won the Halloween story contest easily.

Anyway, just wanted to write and express my admiration, and I'm sure I don't have to tell you to keep up the good work. ;) Thank you for providing the opportunity for an exceptional literary journey.

Sincerely,
Pauline Gates

I am a avid fantasy fiction reader, and if you wrote a book, like that I would buy it. (I also generally don't buy the books, just borrow)

Finally all I can say is "MORE MORE!!"

Lui

I've read your stories and love them. They are some of the best short stories I have ever read in my life and I have read A LOT(this summer alone I read over 40 Sci-fi & Fantasy novels and short story collections). I think you should write stories and such for blizzard either as in the strategy guide (A story like in the Xwing guide- that was the best strategy guide I ever bought) or as a plot for a diablo warcraft adventures.

Well thats all - Koran

PS: Have you published any short stories or novels? I would love to read them. Oh and definitly keep writing.

These aren't random, I looked at several mails to pick them, but I have 20+ emails basically identical to these, from the 4 stories I've posted over the last few years.  The last of the 4 had more mails of the "I liked it until the end!!!" but they were much of the same "Your work is better than most published I see!" theme.  And I'm fully aware that most readers aren't exactly experienced at objective evaluation of a story, and probably think most everything they read is the best thing they've ever read.

It's nice to hear praise from readers, and I know (or at least think I do) that my writing is as good or better than most of what's published.  Of course I then tell myself that most of what's published is crap, and my stories have their good spots, but need work over all.  Which is true, but again, being as I have no money, and would like to get some to be able to go back to writing full time, I should take the encouragement of readers and do... something.

Fantasy and Horror

I enjoy superstition and magical things in stories, probably since I'm such a rationalist in real life, and don't believe any of that sort of stuff.  No Astrology, heaven, hell, good luck, guardian angels, reincarnation, psychic powers, ghosts, etc.  Science provides us with answers to life's mysteries, and while I'd love it if there really were ghosts, spirits, magic, psychic powers, or heavenly white-robed Santa Clauses that kept track of who was naughty and nice and passed out appropriate punishments in the afterlife, the evidence that there aren't is just too overwhelming to ignore, if you have any objectivity when you look at the issue.

So does my logical nature make me want to have magical, unexplained things in stories?  Is this why I like Fantasy and Horror so much?  Dunno, it might be the case for me, but I suspect most horror and fantasy fans are superstitious/religious to a fault, and they like the stuff without believing in it, or seeing it as any contradiction to their own beliefs.  For every raving Christian nutcase out burning Harry Potter books, there are thousands of people who would describe themselves as Christians, or Jews, or Muslims, or whatever, who enjoy Harry Potter tales, or any other fantasy stories with magic and monsters and such.

At any rate, I have no explanation why I enjoy stories about things I know don't exist.  I like my reading to take me away from real life, put me into another world, a more interesting one, with any luck.  And setting it in the future, or the past, or neverland, is a good start.  I've never seen any point in reading or watching movies/TV about the real world, I mean you can look out the window at that for free. Sure if the real world is presented in interesting fashion, like say Pulp Fiction, it's great, but that's as much fantasy as Tolkien, since it's full of characters unlike anyone you'll ever meet, doing things unlike anything you'll ever do.  Fighting a dragon or bringing Uma Thurman back from a heroin overdoes are equivalent, in that way.

Read on for my discussion of my specific tastes and theories about fantasy and horror, and more on how my style of writing them comes about.

Fantasy

I've always been a big fan of fantasy, and I've probably read more of that than any other type of writing, even horror, if only because the fantasy got a big head start.  I've never written any fantasy other than these few Diablo world stories.  These are all technically fan fiction, in that they are set in an existing gaming world, but my stories here are very loosely based, with the character types in the game inspiring my characters, but I don't use any (or very very few) actual names of items, locations, monsters, etc in my stories, and they have nothing to do with the overall plot of the game.

I find the world Blizzard Entertainment created for their games to be very rich and interesting, and I like to set my tales in parts of it not really covered in the games.  I could easily change a few descriptions and class names in these stories and call them original fiction, and they wouldn't be the most original fantasy world imaginable, but they'd have nothing to tip off a casual reader that they were inspired by a computer game.

The game being known to most of the readers of the stories makes things easier, since I can just mention an Aura or skill, or spell, or class of character in the story, and the reader knows what it is, saving me some explanation.  My versions of the characters and their skills and such tend to vary widely from the way they actually are in the game, which is known as "artistic license" or else "being too lazy to fit the story details exactly to the game details".  It will be interesting when I get some readers who aren't fans of the games, to see if they (the non-D2 fan readers) have problems following the action since they don't know what the skills or classes are.

I may write more fantasy, it's very primal and pure, in that you can just plunk down characters in a world, and have them battle evil (or good) without interference.  Setting such epic type tales in the real world is much more complicated, since you have to factor in technology, society, law enforcement, help the reader to suspend their disbelief at the amazing powers or spells or monsters that don't exist, etc.

Fantasy requires fewer details and is less complicated, as well as coming with automatic suspension of disbelief. 

In my reading experience most fantasy is much less accomplished than horror, partially since it's easier to write, as detailed in the last paragraph, but also the authors seem to crank it out at a tremendous pace.  Readers of fantasy are mostly there for the plot and characters, and aren't picky about just how cleverly the author uses foreshadowing, exposition, how realistic the conversations are, how true character motivations are, etc.  All generalizations, but I expect a lower quality of writing in fantasy than in horror, and I generally get it.  I'm not speaking of the real pulp stuff in either genre, slasher horror stories and the 87th book in some Conan-clone series are both going to be dreck, you know that going in.  I'm talking about comparing the best sellers and other mainstream tales in horror to those in fantasy.  Not that horror writers are exactly turning down Nobel Prizes in literature, but I'd say Stephen King is a better writer than almost any fantasy writer I've read, and I don't consider King all that expert a writer.  A great story teller yes, but his actual technical skills with words aren't overwhelming.

Horror is my first love, and my most natural type of writing. Everything I write tends to have horrific elements in it, whether I want it to or not.  It's just how my mind works, when it conjures up the worlds and events in my stories. I enjoy gruesome, horrifying details and events, and like to see characters in weird, bizarre settings that never would exist in reality.

People who don't read the genre often think Horror is what you see in bad "horror" films.  Crap like Friday the 13th, where some maniac with super powers is chasing people around with a knife or a chain saw, and forever popping around corners and out of closets.

Scares and gore and stupid women always getting murdered in the shower, that's what horror's made of?  Not really.

Very few horror stories have things that are meant to be "scary".  The reviewers say things like, "You won't be able to read it alone!" but I've never felt that way, or very very seldom.  You might need to close the curtains on a dark window when reading Salem's Lot at night, but mostly horror stories are just interesting fiction with a deadly struggle against some sort of evil.

Horror can be a stalker, or a maniac, or a monster, or going insane, or worrying your child is dying, or ten million purple demons flying through a hole in the sky.  There is a lot of variety, and the small scale, unimaginative slasher film is a very very small portion of horror writing.  I can't recall ever reading a story with as little imagination as a typical horror film, to be honest.

Most good horror has a really good idea driving it.  Something generally supernatural, an amazing revelation of a secret behind the rational facade of our world, that the heroes of the story must learn about and confront, or learn to live with, or battle, almost always with the rest of the world remaining ignorant to the struggle going on in secret.

Authority figures are usually in with the enemy, or ignorant of events, but they must be feared and avoided since they wouldn't understand and would probably interfere.

Horror is much harder to classify into simple little boxes than Fantasy, since there's so much more variety allowed in Horror, in terms of setting, events, character development, etc.  Fantasy is almost always a good vs. evil struggle with global proportions, usually with some nobody as the main character, often a nobody who rises to enormous power or responsibility, fueled by some ancient prophecy.

Clive Barker has written the best horror stories I've ever seen, and they are just barely horror at that.  There are fascinating stories, and lots of non-horror fans love them, for the brilliant writing, and the variety of characters and events and magical worlds he creates.  His novels are basically dark fantasy set in the modern world, usually epic stories with dozens of detailed, dynamic characters.  His best work is my greatest influence, in terms of characters and events, and how the worlds seem so much larger than just what you see taking place.

Epic Themes in Fiction

Epic themes in literature have great appeal to me.

I mean "epic" as an adjective here, not a noun.  Epic as a noun would be something like, "Homer's epic, The Illiad."  That's potentially appealing, but not what I'd talking about. 

Epic as an adjective refers to larger than life themes.  You most often find those in fantasy literature, with massive struggles of good vs. evil.  The plot of Lord of the Rings is epic, but you can see that sort of thing in smaller moments.  Many small scenes where one individual battles nobly or triumphs over unbelievable odds, is an epic moment, in my mind anyway.  Such scenes often choke me up, inexplicably enough.

Something about such scenes of sacrifice or noble triumph get me on an emotional level, but I enjoy them greatly at the same time.  I can't readily think of any examples from film, but one that's fresh in my mind is Aeon Flux. (See here or here or here.)  The original short cartoons I mean, not the bizarre but ultimately unsatisfying series on Mtv.  The original cartoons are shorts, just 5 or 6 minutes long each, and they are brilliant beyond words.  There is no dialogue, no conversation at all, and they are almost entirely action, but what amazing action.  Mostly slaughter on an epic scale (there's that word!) with Aeon or one of the anonymous bad guys slaughtering enemy troops by the hundreds.

The plot of the shorts is very simple, and it's video game styled.  There are two armies, one in black, one in blue.  Aeon is in blue, and she usually kills tons of enemies before dying herself.

Probably the best of them all is War, which starts off with Aeon is on the Black team, and she's attacking up a hill into the enemy (Blue team) base.  She shoots hundreds dead.  One is still alive, tackles her, then eventually shoots her and a would-be rescuer.  He then goes to the wall and looks down to see hundreds of other Black team men coming up.  He shoots down all of them, sliding down a rope firing two uzis while hundreds of corpses roll down next to him.  He reaches the Black base, enters, shoots dozens more, and meets a Black warrior with a samurai sword, who blocks a shot and stabs him.  We then follow the samurai as he runs out and sees a landing blue ship, with soldiers rappelling down ropes to attack.  The samurai kills a dozen as he leaps up the ropes, then stabs another half dozen in the ship, before missing one Blue team female.  We then follow her back down the ropes, shooting dozens of Black team guards, before she breaks out a captive Blue team guy.  They are running out, heading for a puddle of oil that's dripping from some machinery when the short just ends.

If you've seen it, you'll follow me.  If you haven't, you probably skipped that paragraph in confusion.

Anyway, my point is that the one against dozens/hundreds sort of action really works for me. There's no emotional connection with it in Aeon Flux, since it's so impersonal.  It's just carnage on a grandly-entertaining scale.  But I love the concept, totally unrealistic though it is. (The hero in each one fires thousands of rounds in seconds, killing untold enemies while they are all firing back and yet never hitting the hero.)  When I was a kid, like say age 6 or 8 or so, I used to draw little stick figure scenes like that, but with space ships.  There would be one ship attacking a fortified base, one built into a cave, and the base would be a porcupine of guns.  Just hundreds of them, bristling from every angle and direction.  Sort of like Star Wars, but if Luke had been all alone and had had to shoot out every single flack cannon as well as drop the bombs in the ventilation shaft.  I don't think I was inspired by Star Wars; I'm just using that as an example.

That was a common mythos, judging from old video games.  One of the first successful scrolling shooters was 1943, and in it you were a single plane flying over hundreds of boats, large and small, and you had to shoot off dozens of cannons from each one, as well as flocks of enemy fighters.  Lots of other games had similar concepts.

How that sort of thing works in literature is less literal, but with characters that you have invested emotional weight in it's more satisfying.  The sort of "big bang" moment, or money shot, where a character you care about triumphs or is recognized for his/her triumph.

One scene that I can think of, and have the paperback here to transcribe from is at the very end of The Tombs of Atuan, the second book in Ursula K. Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea series.  I'd call it a trilogy, but she wrote a fourth book and then a fifth after that, though I'd recommend stopping after three.  Tombs is long and pretty boring at times, with the majority of it being the main character, a wizard named Sparrowhawk, talking to Tenar, who is a sort of priestess in the religion of culture different than Sparrowhawk's.  Sparrowhawk has come to a forbidden land, and entered a great tomb, one possessed by ancient dark powers of the earth.  Sort of malevolent earth spirits.  Deep in the tombs is a treasure room with half of a legendary treasure, the broken Ring of Erreth-Akbe.  I won't go into a whole plot summation, but Sparrowhawk manages to convince Tenar to help him, saving her from a life of misery in the process, as well as finding the ring, and mending it with the other half, which he possessed. They escape and return to Sparrowhawk's civilization, and sail to the capital city of Havnor.

What makes it work is the utter impossibility of finding the ring.  One half was lost for centuries, and how Sparrowhawk found that half was amazingly-lucky.  No one has ever even come close to obtaining the other half, held deep in the treasure room of a very foreign and enemy land.  This ring isn't just some treasure, it's the key to peace returning to the world, etc, etc.  I said I wasn't going to do a whole plot synopsis, didn't I?

Anyway, Sparrowhawk (AKA Ged) has done it, and brought Tenar with him, mostly out of kindness to her.  He's completed a quest thought impossible, one that no one for over eight hundred years had even attempted.  It's beyond the stuff of legend, and his triumph will never be forgotten.

The last paragraph of the story.

Tenar sat in the stern, erect, in her ragged cloak of black. She looked at the ring around her wrist, then at the crowed, many-colored shore and the palaces and the high towers.  She lifted up her right hand, and sunlight flashed on the silver of the ring.  A cheer went up, faint and joyous on the wind, over the restless water.  Ged brought the boat in.  A hundred hands reached to catch the rope he flung up to the mooring. He leapt up onto the pier and turned, holding out his hand to her.  "Come!" he said smiling, and she rose and came.  Gravely she walked beside him up the white streets of Havnor, holding his hand, like a child coming home.

That always makes me smile and sometimes brings a tear to my eye. The line about "A hundred hands reached to catch the rope" is the best one; somehow that feels the most epic in his triumph.  That the crowd is united in love and admiration and joy. I get the same sort of thing when they are united in misery and heart-breaking defeat, though I tend to enjoy it less. I love the fact that a writer was able to pull off the scene, but I'm dismayed by it at the same time.

So I love that sort of scene, but it's hard to make it work.  Just any battle scene with guys cheering their victory doesn't do it, and I don't sob with joy after every (any) sporting event when the home team wins. It has to be an amazing triumph thought impossible, or win over people who didn't believe, or something like that.

The scenes in Aeon Flux don't get me emotionally, but they might if they were more realistic and were built up over time, rather than just cool shots in an action sequence.

I've long had an idea for something in part of a story.  I can't see how I'll ever write it, so I'll mention it here.  There would be one character, probably the main character, who had some sort of incredible power, but that required him to drain the life force (or whatever) from other people to do it.  He could do this draining subtly, in vampire-like fashion, and he's the bad guy, or the hunted or despised for it.

However at some point in the story, there is some impossibly huge threat.  A plague of evil monsters or aliens or maybe a meteor falling from the sky.  Only he can possibly manufacture the power to save the city, or the world, but he must have hundreds of volunteers.  People must willingly let him suck them dry, kill them, so he can build up enough strength to destroy the enemy, whatever the enemy is.

The scene I see has hordes of people leaving their homes and running madly towards the scene of combat.  It could be a middle ages fantasy type thing, or totally modern, with the guy in Times Square. Whatever the case, some people are sobbing and trying to flee, while others are fanatically eager to be there, and run to their sacrificial deaths.

The main character is standing atop some sort of dais, (or maybe on a news van, anything to elevate him) and all around him are hundreds of people, trampling each other in their eagerness to be near.  Waves of light and energy are flowing from him, tendrils coming in from the people as they wither and drop dead, even as others step on and over their bodies, vying to be next.  Their deaths are horrible, agonizing, but still they come, for only through this can ______ be saved.

The main character launches his force bolt or beam or power or whatever, up at the meteor or to the side destroying the attacking monsters, whichever the case may be, and even as he does dozens more people are scrambling to get near enough to die so that he can keep the power going.

I see the scene very cinematically, with overhead shots of him, the heaped rings of dead around him, the energy bolts blasting around, the ghostly vapors of life force coming to him in capillary-like streams, the people jerking and howling in agony as they die, and on and on.  All is blood and sorrow and light and darkness, and finally he is able to destroy the enemy, and leans back, howling at the sky while all around him lie the mountains of dead and dying.

The description here is missing any real emotional heft since it's just slapped down without context, but in my head this is an amazingly cool scene, of the epic type that gets to me personally.  I don't see how it could ever be worked into a larger novel, but it will live on in my head just in case.

I do have several scenes of this type planned for my D2 novel, the one that I keep saying i need to start writing, and yet don't.  A couple of them are quite planned out, and I know exactly when they'll occur and how, and I've seen them very vividly in my mind while thinking them over, usually just as I wake up or just as I'm going to sleep.  I'll love writing them, and probably sniffle like a schoolgirl, when that time comes.  Whether anyone else will get the same sort of charge out of them is unknown, but probably some people will.  I tend to be a lot less affected by emotional imagery and sacrifice in film than other people are; it's just this one odd thing that really gets to me.

Why?  I dunno.

I've often wondered what about it so appeals to me, since obviously it touches something in my psyche.  Anything that moves or upsets a person more strongly than you would logically expect it to is working on them on some deeper psychological level.  Them being able to see why and how is uncommon, and not especially desirable.  Why demystify it for yourself?  If you love something when you see it in a movie or book, why try to explain it and ruin it for yourself?

I'll try to heed that advice, now that I mention it.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.