I’ve another little faerie tale to post. It is told in the voice and tenor of my characters from Redmantle. One of the strangeties of Speculative fiction is that the characters never have any sort of fantasy life. With the exception of the adventure books mentioned in Rigney’s Wheel of Time (WoT), it seems that people in fantasy and scifi aren’t people at all. It’s as if the writer, having stretched himself to create a fantasy world where his magic/tech/alien is real, he’s overtaxed and can’t let his character’s be real enough to have a fantasy life of their own.
There is the obvious bugaboo about not wanting to break the forth window or remind the reader that they are in fact reading speculative fiction. But I say that failing to allow characters to further fantasize about things and realities that are NOT possible in your world of fiction does exactly that. It makes the characters less than fully fleshed. They become hyper literal automatons with no imagination of their own. Thus when they arrive at creative and ingenious solutions it just smells of magic bullets and cheating!
Real people tell foolish, simple and fantastic tales. It’s part of the condition, like religion or philosophy. That’s why I have faerie tales. The tales in these stories are no more real to the characters that tell them than they are to you. No less so I’d wager either. But they reveal the rich fantasy life and imagination my characters possess in their own right and make those characters somehow more human.
But now I have a dilemma. I have another called The Bullfinch and the General , but I realize it may be too soon since the last tale to post another. Well having taken the time to rant I guess I know what to do. I’ll simply wait until after new years and post it as the first blog of 2011. Thanks for your patience and I hope you like it.