Contemporary or Fantasy Janet Lane Walters #MFRWAuthor #BWLAuthor #Fantasy #Contmporary

Fantasy vs Contemporary

 

I recently finished a contemporary romance and am now working on a fantasy. Bothof these books are either part of a series or part of a trilogy. Been thinking about what happens in my head when I enter these worlds. What changes?

When writing contemporary stories, I’m familiar with the world. Much depends on finding a location for the stories but… I generally use a fictitious town I’ve created. One for each group of stories. I seldom use places that exist. Once I did and that was Santa Fe but I only used enough to give a sense of being there.

When writing fantasies, the worlds are completely made up. Here is where creativity and research comes into play. There are features in ancient civilizations that can be turned into fantasy worlds.

So the difference between the two is working with the familiar and with the imagined world.

The characters’ names and language are things that can be different when going between contemporary and fantasy. I try to make the names sound not of this world but I don’t do what some fantasy writers do and mane the names of the characters unable to pronounce. With the language, I try to make things common to the contemporary world easy to identify. Like choca for cholate and kafa for coffee. My entomology and my foreign dictionary often come into play here. In some of my fantasies, things exist that don’t occur here such as bihorns rather like huge horses or dragons.

So slipping from the modern world to the fantasy world means creating things that are unusual and also familiar to people.

The Beetle Battle, by J.C. Kavanagh

Award-winning sequel, The Twisted Climb - Darkness Descends

I often use personal experience when writing - if it's something I've heard or empathized with, or witnessed with my own eyes, my own heart, then I can write about it from my perspective. Personal experience often lends a more credible telling of the tale and hopefully lead to a closer connection with the reader. I use my home and sailing experiences in both The Twisted Climb and Darkness Descends. For example, shortly after we bought our property, we discovered 20-year-old vines twisted around many of our pine trees. They had slowly died a 'strangled' death. I used that twisted vine experience in the 'Drunk on a Slinky' chapter of Darkness Descends. Another example is from my sailing vacations. We sail to a gorgeous place called The Bad River, home to the Devil's Door Rapids, and I used these places as dream world locations in Darkness Descends.
 
My home is in a rural area surrounded by thousands of trees and nature in all its forms - birds, deer, racoons, porcupines, skunks and our neighbour's Guinea Hens, chickens and geese. So when I came home from our August sailing vacation, I was saddened to see a good number of our pine trees in distress. The needles were reddish-brown and the bark was splitting. My partner and I were walking around the property, wine glass in hand, when we stopped to listen to an unusual sound. It was a crunching sound and the source was one of the pine trees beside the man-cave/shop.
 
My heart wrenched.
 
I'd heard about this sound.


Adult pine bark beetle


This munching sound. The sound of hungry mouths chewing and chewing and destroying.
 
It was the sound of ten thousand hungry pine bark beetles.
 
These are voracious little fother-muckers that destroy swaths of trees. From Mexico all the way to British Columbia and now, Ontario, these pests are destroying pine trees wherever they fly and lay eggs.
 
We live near a provincial forest and are also surrounded by Christmas tree farms. Many of the tree farm properties have been decimated by these pests and, until now, I felt badly for them but never once thought that the trees on my property would be subject to the horrible critters. The provincial forest had a controlled burn this past spring in an attempt to halt the pests from spreading.
 
Yeah, well, that didn't help me or my trees.
 
I'm researching ways to halt the spread of these destructive insects and save the healthy trees. This is what I've learned from the 'Net:

Bark beetles kill the host tree when the adults bore holes through the tree’s outer bark and

into the inner bark layer of the tree. The adult beetles then

excavate tunnels where the female beetle lays eggs.

When the eggs hatch, the grub stage (larvae) further damages

 the inner bark layer as they construct feeding galleries.

Eventually, the combined excavation by adults and larvae will

girdle  or encircle the tree’s inner bark and cause death.

 
Further to the above, it seems that the best way to eliminate the beetle is to cut the tree down in the winter. And then 'chop and burn.'
 
My partner and I are on a new mission: Beat the Beetle. And take care of our forest.
 
This is a battle we don't want to lose. Our trees are counting on us :(

Several of the pines along our driveway are plagued with the beetle.
Note the reddish-brown needles.

My favourite twisted pine is also infested.

Looking upward, this pine tree is 'home' to thousands of the beetles.
It's where we first heard the 'munching' sound.

Note the tiny entry/exit holes in the bark. The crystalized insect (centre) appears to be a June bug.
When the tree is first attacked by the beetle, it exudes sap in a defensive effort. This June bug is a casualty.

 Mother nature...

J.C. Kavanagh

The Twisted Climb - Darkness Descends (Book 2)
voted BEST Young Adult Book 2018, Critters Readers Poll and Best YA Book FINALIST at The Word Guild, Canada
AND
The Twisted Climb,
voted BEST Young Adult Book 2016, P&E Readers Poll
Novels for teens, young adults and adults young at heart
Email: author.j.c.kavanagh@gmail.com
www.facebook.com/J.C.Kavanagh
www.amazon.com/author/jckavanagh
Twitter @JCKavanagh1 (Author J.C. Kavanagh)

When Goals Come Between You and Your Passion

 

Lao Tzu

The idea for this blog came when one of my fellow authors asked me, “What are your goals for the next five years?”

This should have been an easy question to answer. In my previous profession as a business owner, I lived on a steady diet of goals: annual targets, monthly objectives and even daily goals. There was no way around it. Businesses need goals and without them, become directionless. I felt a constant need to compare myself  to my past achievements and to others in the industry. Indeed, a business without goals is one destined to die.

Several years ago, I sold the business and became a writer. Just as with a new business venture, I planned what books and how many I would write over a given time period. I tied everything together with timelines and spreadsheets. In other words, I brought exactly the wrong mentality to the writing world.

Not long into my first book, I realized that my plans were holding me back. Constantly checking back to where I was “supposed” to be became demoralizing. Worrying about plans interfered with the creative process. Ideas don’t magically appear on schedule nor does the imagination heel to spreadsheets. They take their sweet time and, in my experience, usually blossom outside the time spent at the keyboard---during evening walks or drives in the car.

I concluded that writing success should be measured by how satisfied I am by what I put on paper, rather than by writing a certain number of pages per day. The passion and engagement that I pour into my work give my story more impetus than any number of tick marks on a to-do list.

Is this an argument for anarchy? Of course not. I use planning devices to help me maintain the arc of the story or to chart the progress of my characters. But in the actual process of writing, it is better to remain in the moment and let feelings and emotions flow freely from the imagination to the page. And, if well written, the reader shares in this engagement and passion.

Lao Tzu wrote 'A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.' I find this to be the correct approach to writing: to take joy in the process. It made me a better writer.

Mohan Ashtakala is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," a fantasy, and "Karma Nation," a literary romance. Please check him out at www.mohanashtakala.com. Published by Books We love: www.bookswelove.com.