Here’s your challenge – write either a beginning or ending inspired by this image that invokes at least three senses – and doesn’t take place in a museum. Feel free to share in the comments!
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Here’s your challenge – write either a beginning or ending inspired by this image that invokes at least three senses – and doesn’t take place in a museum. Feel free to share in the comments!
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
I’ve been reading Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum, by Michael D. Riley, which is about Baum’s life and the worlds that he created. It’s a folklore that feels very American, and yet it’s a mythology that few have drawn on: John Kessel’s The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Tad Williams’s Otherland (which has some delightfully demented riffs on Oz) are two that occur to me. I’d love to see more using it for sure. A recent anthology, Shadows of the Emerald City, holds short stories influenced by Oz. (I was delighted to find it for $2.99 on the Kindle and am looking forward to reading it.) (Later edit: Let me add Tom Doyle’s well-done story, “The Wizard of Macatawa,” to the list of Oz-inspired works.)
Urban fantasy falls into that fifth catagory, with “fairies” standing in for a multitude of supernatural creatures (I just picked up a Judith Fennell one with a male mermaid). Sometimes the protagonist is human – maybe fifty-fifty, maybe a little more in one direction or the other – but supernatural creatures are always there, in one form or another.
Does that seem like a fair thing to nail into a definition of urban fantasy?
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(Fiction, short story) The thing is, I was never a hero. The first wave of aliens taught me that. The war with them – my older brothers became heroes there, one died in the stand-off at Ucer-25, and we never did discover what happened to the other. My parents celebrated them both, burned scarlet and gold candles that made the house smell like flaming trees and sulphur, every weekend without fail…
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