Some Raging Reviews

I've been a little remiss in my duties as an owner of Rage of the Behemoth. Since I've already read most of the stories in it, I've let it sit aside for a while. Here are some of my opinions. "Black Water" by Sean T.M. Stiennon is just as good as I remembered it. An excellent father-son story with a very unique hero. "Passion of the Storm Lord" by Robert A. Mancebo is very well written with an Arabian flair and a chillingly portrayed Djinn. "The Beast in the Lake" by Kevin Lumly is the most interesting to read so far because it is the most changed from when I first encountered it. The main character has been completely changed both in name and in motivation. The setting and the climactic fight have been altered. All these changes have tightened up and improved the final product.

The book charges on and I shall give more of my impressions later.

Rage of the Behemoth

Rage of the Behemoth is available for the eagerly awaiting public. I am absolutely thrilled to finally see it hit the shelves after being a part of its creation for the past nine months or so. Verily I say unto thee, this is a rock 'em sock 'em collection of bruising, bashing, slamming, and smashing! Bone crunching blows and spine rattling bellows! Blood! Flying body parts! And yet, a tender side. All this and more!!

You need to get a copy. Now.

Thunder Canyon Reviewed

While Rage of the Behemoth will not see print until June 1st, the advance reviews have started to come in. John Ottinger is first up with a review at Grasping For the Wind. Here is what he has to say about Thunder Canyon:

"Thunder Canyon" brings monster and man together against something much more evil. The hero Rath is seeking revenge for the death of his lost love, in a very Braveheart fashion, though with a more positive ending. Draper writes a good tale of friends found and revenge taken.

It's always nice to get positive reviews, especially because I really like this story. I tried to capture the essence of that old Klingon proverb, 'Revenge is a dish best served with an 8" blade through the throat.' (Or something like that.)

Ugly Babies

Once, long ago, I watched an instructor at Marine Corps Basic Communication Officer Course look down at our class and tell us that sometimes when we plan things they just don't go right. When that happens we need to be able to call an ugly baby an ugly baby. He then looked right at the student responsible for leading the planning of our latest debacle and said, "And that, Lieutenant, was an ugly baby." What he didn't know was that this lieutenant was passing around pictures of his newborn just a day before. Later, during some break, that lieutenant started complaining about the instructor and disgustedly couldn't believe that he would call his baby 'ugly.' Several of us standing around looked at each other with upturned eyebrows. Apparently our fellow student wasn't bright enough to figure out what the instructor was talking about. Which, come to think of it, was why he'd planned such a botched up comm system. But that's not relevant right now. The point I'm trying to make is about the last few stories I've evaluated for Rage of the Behemoth. There were a few that just weren't very good. (One was absolutely excellent and had that sock-you-in-the-gut 'Wow!' feeling that I'd been looking for.) I'd thought when I started this that there would be some good writing lessons to pull out of it. There have been those but the majority of what is submitted just lacks greatness. I suppose they really aren't ugly babies so you can just forget that clever anecdote I began with, but the point remains that there is just an enormous wave of mediocrity that has to be slogged through in order to find the gems. So the slogging will continue even though we are closing in on the end of days as the available slots are filling up. The best in heart stopping, bone crunching fantasy fiction is coming your way.

Details, Details

One of the submissions for Rage of the Behemoth I read lately had an interesting problem with it. As writers, we always strive to provide our readers with enough details to make the story come alive. We want them to see, smell, feel, hear, and taste what the hero is going through. We want them to know what the hero's hopes, motivations, and fears are. We want them to understand enough of the setting so that the action makes sense. We do this by providing details relating to all these things so the reader can build the picture in his or her mind. Sounds simple enough.

The problem becomes picking out what details to put in and what details to leave out. In any scene there are a million things happening and to put them all in would make a story unreadable. We just can't focus on too many things at once. The submission in question struck me as over detailed and with the wrong details. There were too many descriptions of unimportant characters and they came too soon in the tale. I felt like I was listening to the Brady Bunch theme song: "Here's a story, Of a boat of raiders, Twelve in all and looking for a fight..." It was too much to keep straight.

I suppose the only way to guard against this is to have some good beta readers that can point out what the author has lost focus on. While us writers can see all kinds of things in our mind's eye, we need to be able to pick out the relevant things and put them in a context that a reader can follow all while telling a compelling story. This ain't always easy, folks, but it's why we get paid the big bucks.

Rejection Machine

Like the Doomsday Machine in Star Trek, I am continuing through the submissions to Rage of the Behemoth. This morning's rejection started out with great potential. (Hint for all submitters: Blood in the first line is a winner!) There was death and carnage quickly. There was a sympathetic protagonist with a clear goal of survival ahead of him. But then things veered off track and it became apparent that the author did not have the experience necessary to craft the tale, i.e. the writing felt shallow and undeveloped. Maybe I'm saying this because I turned 40 last month but an author needs to have some worldly experience to be a successful writer. Take this Paolini kid who wrote Eragon. It is clear from the writing that he didn't know much about how real people think and interact with each other. I understand that the other books are better but his debut read exactly like what it was, a big novel written by a fifteen year old. This is why I say that there must be some emotional connection with the protagonist. Unless it's there you have nothing more than a collection of happenings strung together. You might follow all the conventional structures of storytelling but you'd still end up with something unsatisfying. So while this morning's story showed some promise and I'm sure the author will improve over time, it just wasn't there yet.

Writing Lessons From the Soulless

This afternoon I read an interesting submission to Rage of the Behemoth. I recommended rejection because, in short, the story lacked soul. This is an odd thing to try and capture but you know it when it's not there. The words were all correct and they formed proper sentences which were strung together in perfectly grammatical paragraphs but the overall effect was... blah. Blah is not what you're shooting for in fiction (unless you're writing chick lit) and it especially has no place in heroic fantasy. I read the whole story and kept wondering when something was going to happen in a way that made me say 'wow.' Wow is what you're shooting for in heroic fantasy. In my comments to the editor I said the story was 'correct, but not good.' It was a strange thing that I don't think I've really seen like this before. Usually if a story lacks excitement and emotional connection with the characters there is almost always several other things wrong with it as well. This story had correct structure and proper pacing with an interesting setting and plot... but no soul.

We Don't Need to Know

This morning's submissions to Rage of the Behemoth all suffered from the same thing. (Although one of them was good enough to pass up the chain of command anyhow.) They all had way too much stuff at the beginning. I learned this lesson a while back and wrote about it concerning "The Battle of Raven Kill." For the most part, we just don't need to know all the fluff that you the writer think we need. The stories I've written lately have all started with scene and action already in play and I think they are stronger for it. Backstory can usually be picked up in context or worked in some other way. This also helps you trim down the verbiage to the barest minimum to tell the tale. Better writing is the result.

Debut of the Rogue Blades

Jason Waltz has transformed Flashing Swords Press into Rogue Blades Entertainment. He will continue to focus on the anthologies and other fiction projects that he's begun but also plans some expansion into other areas. It's entertainment that's the direction now, however we can serve it up. I will continue to read submissions for Rage of the Behemoth and the timeline for that has not changed. There may be a slight alteration and broadening of the stories we're looking for but they don't change the basic necessities of strong characters and big creatures with attitude problems. Keep writing and submitting great stories!

A Positive Ray of Hope

I've discovered something positive that I tend to like about stories and thought I should share it here. I just read a submission that I unfortunately had to recommend against because the writing just wasn't good enough. That's not the positive part. The positive part is that it contained a mysterious encounter with a creature of the fey. I always get a kick out of reading other people's take on the fey folk. This one was fairly standard, old woman in the forest with a sure strength and enchanting eyes, but it was pretty well done. The fey really make excellent herald/mentor characters due to their otherworldly perceptions. They have that tendency to cut through all the human B.S. and get to the heart of the matter. Of course, any protagonist worthy of writing about will not understand it because he or she will try to frame everything within the confines of aforementioned human B.S.

This is a way to illuminate our connection with God. His ways are strange to us even though they are in our best interest. We have trouble communicating with God and receiving the fullness of His plan because our own frail, sin-based natures have a way of corrupting our understanding and implementation of His intentions.

So for those of you who may stumble across this post while trying to figure out what kind of story is most likely to get past the first screens for Rage of the Behemoth, there's your tip of the day.

Less is More

I've now encountered this phenomenon twice in the past week of reading slush: The author puts in a completely unnecessary scene. One instance was a flashback to the two main characters' first meeting and another was an odd encounter that has no impact on the story and is never referred to again in any meaningful way. These examples point to a lesson that is taught frequently in books and seminars; make everything in your story important. Every word should move the story forward and point towards the eventual resolution. The flashback scene should have been in the context of some current situation and could have been much shorter but instead it felt like it was tacked on with no purpose. The random encounter should have had some material effect on the character or the story and should have been tied back into the final scene. Otherwise, in both cases, the reader is left wondering, "What the heck was that all about?" My advice to all writers is to avoid presenting your readers with a scene that evokes that thought.

Something Doesn't Belong

Here's something that I've noticed in a few different stories I've read and recommended for rejection. It's the use of modern language and dialogue in sword and sorcery. People, I can't tell you how annoying this is. Whatever voluntary suspension of disbelief has been built up is completely shattered when the characters continue to use modern colloquialisms when talking with each other. If you want your fiction to be believable then you have to watch how your characters speak. (If you really want to score bonus points then you'll also watch how they think but that's for another time.) The only way this can happen in these submissions is that the writer just doesn't know any better. I hope they're not sitting at their computer and thinking about how hip they can make their characters because if they are, they shouldn't be writing S&S. Throwing a bunch of archaic language around is not the solution either. There is a seriousness and formality that is commonly used and that sort of speech has become the convention. If you have to have a character which talks differently than all the rest, which is a good idea, then make up some mild slang or quirky turns of phrase. Work it into the story and let other characters reveal how different it is. Whatever you do, don't make your characters sound like their working at, like, The Gap. Y'know?

Rage of the Slush Reader

OK, well I wouldn't quite call it rage but perhaps 'mildly irked.' So far I can only find one story that I can give a recommendation to. It was good enough to pass up the chain but even that one lacked oomph. This anthology is called Rage of the Behemoth. That means there should be some raging behemoths, people! This isn't called Sunny Bunny and the Happy Day. Can someone please write a story where we see some destruction on a city-wide scale?

Anyway, here's a quick writing tip that I pulled from one of the submissions. It falls along the lines of knowing how your story is going to come out and making sure the characters drive it there with no distractions. This story had the main character follow a map to a dungeon complex in order to find a treasure. That's a pretty basic plot that works for a lot of great fiction. The characters then fight their way through traps and demons and such and come to the conclusion of their quest. They find out that they need to give their map to someone in the complex. The author then wastes two or three sentences describing how one of the main characters went back out to the horses to get the map. Here's the tip: You have to be smarter than your story. Sure, it's quite realistic to not have an Important Thing when you come to an Important Point in real life. But as an author, you don't have time to waste with this unless there's something nasty waiting outside with the horse clutched in its blood soaked jaws. It's not difficult, just have the character slip the map into a pocket. Shoot, you can even (shocking gasp) rewrite the scene so the forgetful character remembers to do it.

Just trying to help.

Raspberry Slushies Anyone?

I've been brought on board the editorial team of Flashing Swords Press as a member of the Prose Acquisitions cell. I tried to get the title of Vice President, Fiction Acquisition Directorate but that was a non starter. Basically I read the slush and give recommendations to the editor, Jason Waltz. The stories I'm reading are intended for publication in the new anthology Rage of the Behemoth. There're two things people ought to know about the kinds of stories we're looking for. 1) The behemoth needs to rock the house. Hard. 2) The characters need to have something to emotionally connect with. Aspiring writers need to understand that while we're looking for epic action and mass casualties there's nothing of interest if the reader can't connect with a character and live the tale through them. This is Storytelling 101, folks, and it's necessary to get past me. There are a few other requirements and they can be found here. Follow them and I'm sure you'll knock my socks off.