Three whales this morning - they came out of the water enough that we could see there was one large and two small and think they might have been humpback whales. Vida pura, indeed.Lots of skipping around, often what I do when I’ve got several projects in the works.
So here’s the breakdown and total:
650 words on Circus in the Bloodwarm Rain
673 words on “Carpe Glitter”
534 words on “Prairiedog Town” (working title)
200 words and editing finished on a story in a semi-accepted state, plus sent off to the magazine that requested the changes.
Total word count: 2058
Not too bad, particularly when I’m working on getting back into productivity’s swing.
Today’s new words in Spanish: aire acondicianado (air conditioner), apogon (power outage), ballena jorabada (humpback whale), cafetera (coffeemaker), calambur (pun), picadura de mosquito (mosquito bite), la puerta de teja metallica (screen door), reinicializar (to reset, usually a machine).
And Wayne woke me this morning to watch three whales (we think a large humpback and two smaller ones) in the surf.
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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."
~K. Richardson
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Urban Fantasy: Well, Sort Of
How wonderful were those early books? I loved those illustrations.Actually, I want to talk about something that shaped American fantasy as we know as well as a series that I encountered early and have loved ever since and that’s L. Frank Baum’s Oz.
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.)
At the same time, it’s part of Baum’s theory of fantasy that can be used to lead the discussion back in the direction of urban fantasy (beside the alternate direction where I go on about how much I’d like to see urban fantasy that draws on Oz and what forms that might take). Baum posited six kinds of fantasy:
Stories that deal with marvelous machines and inventions of the future.
Stories that take place completely in the imaginary world without the appearance of any character from our own world.
Stories that explain origins (like Baum’s story about Santa Claus)
The adventures of American characters “in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches”
The adventures of fairies in our own world
The animal fairy story
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?
