I read an article a few days ago about how much it sucks that we have to explain our own writing (which is a pain in the ass in epic fantasy) once it’s all done and it’s marketing time. I agree. Particularly an issue when you have works that are yes, epic fantasy and filled with action and worldbuilding and magic and somesuch, but are also fashioned around self-expression. How do I reduce the essence of this novel down to the basics, so that you can at least hope the people who read it will understand what it’s really about?
Because I was a younger writer when I first began the epic fantasy trilogy The Agartes Epilogues, I still have a hard time nailing it all down. There are so, so many ways to look at it. I hate reducing it down to, “It’s all about people caught up in a war,” because that’s not really it. They’re caught up in it, but my novels don’t exactly go out to do social or political commentary. They’re personal. Every character’s journey is personal. Kefier’s life is beleaguered by a sense of purposelessness, Sume’s suffers from impossible choices. Enosh’s need for control—and the consequences of his actions—drive his own journey.
I’m now struck with fear over The Ikessar Falcon’s upcoming release because the personal journey in this one mirrors my own right now. In many ways, it’s got the same themes as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—that of a parent struggling with decisions, and sometimes indecisions, in a world that’s pretty much turned to shit, and all you really want is to protect your child.
So it was a tricky novel to write because I have to take this and then expand it over the course of over 180,000 words while trying to make it entertaining along the way. How is the world going to respond to a main character (and a woman, at that) who isn’t always bad ass? Whose actions come with the double-edged sword of fear and uncertainty? People have described The Wolf of Oren-yaro as personal, but in many ways, the novel is just the floodgates. The Ikessar Falcon is the flood (at least, the first wave of it).
“I thought of the girl who wouldn’t cry at her father’s deathbed and could feel the last threads of his shadow slipping from me. Have you discarded who you really are because you’re not who you think you’re supposed to be? I must’ve. Trying to find yourself in a heap of broken shards shouldn’t have to be this hard.
–The Ikessar Falcon”
But I’m just ranting, as always. We writers are limited by what we set out to do, by the tools at our disposal, and the many faces of this medium. Entertainment, or expression? Commercial, or art? Can we have both? I don’t know, but it’s an endless puzzle the continues to fascinate me…
