Some readers have picked up the message on my Nonsuch Blog about the ‘one more fantasy book and that’s it’ entry. I thought I’d explain a bit more about it here.

Karen Brooks, another Australian fantasy author and yet another who has been battling her own cancer (she wrote about it in the Courier Mail, so I feel I can mention it here!) sent me a lovely anecdote about a woman who had been fighting cancer. Some time after this woman had finished treatment, her friends noticed that for several weeks she was no longer answering her telephone. Growing concerned, they were just about to send in the police to break down her door when the following message popped up on her voicemail. “My friends. As you know, I have been going through a personal crisis recently. As a result I have been making some profound changes in my life. If I have not returned your call in the past two weeks, then, my friend, I am sorry, but you are part of that change. Goodbye.” Click.

I got a good belly laugh out of that one, but it has deep meaning for anyone who has battled a life-threatening cancer. Most everyone makes some profound changes in their lives. I am not ‘out of the woods’, nor will I ever be, this is a killer cancer and I just don’t know when it will strike again, as it assuredly will.

So there have been some big changes in my life. One of these is fantasy writing. There is every chance I will move on. In the meantime, there is one more book to come in the DarkGlass Mountain trilogy (this was finished before I became so ill, but the cancer treatment interfered with its editing process). That book, The Infinity Gate, should be out in May next year.

After that, there will be one more fantasy book, The Devil’s Diadem. I signed HarperCollin’s offer memo for this last week (really Stephanie, it is in the post!). There’s always been a fantasy book I really, really wanted to write … and for various reasons I never got around to it. The Devil’s Diadem is it. So this book will be one for me, no holds barred, full on fun, everything I always wanted to put into a fantasy novel but never did as I was too busy second guessing myself as to what everyone else wanted. I am loving writing it. Should be out in 2011.

So that’s the news. As to where I am off after this, well, that’s for me to know and everyone else to wonder. (Read: I am not actually all that sure, but I am having fun exploring various possibilities.) If you want to keep track of me then keep up on the Nonsuch Blog, which I am also really loving, and where I discuss most everything: http://nonsuchkitchengardens.com/wordpress/

You can read more about The Devil’s Diadem at Sara’s website. Sara Douglass is the award-winning and bestselling author of seventeen fantasy novels published by Voyager, including the Aurealis-winning Battleaxe. Her next book, The Infinity Gate, will be out in May next year.

People fascinate me.

During my teenage years, I dealt with my peers in a very simple, direct way: I ignored them. I don’t think I said more than two words to anyone until I became a high school senior, and to this day I can barely remember the names or even the faces of most of my fellows. But even if I didn’t interact with anyone, and became famous for spending all my time tapping away on a laptop in the corner of the common room, that didn’t mean I was completely shut away from people. No, I watched. For a while, in the full grip of teenage angst, people were objects of study to me. They had never made much sense as far as I was concerned, but over time I became more and more interested in trying to understand how they worked and why. I think it had an interesting effect on me, because, honestly, most people don’t bother to do that. They don’t have to.

I did, and like most people with a disability I overcompensated somewhat.
When I got older and more mature I finally learned that I could, in fact, relate to people properly and have real relationships with them. Or maybe I relearned it; I think everyone forgets that it’s possible to like other people while they’re a teenager! Not surprising; when you’re a teenager you spend waaay too much time around other teenagers, and nobody likes doing that. Nobody likes being a teenager much either, come to that.

However, to this day I haven’t lost my fascination with people and what makes them tick, and for myself I think this is my greatest strength when it comes to what I write. I analyse my characters. With some of them I don’t even have a complete picture of what they look like in my head, but ask me about the psychological makeup of any one of them and I can tell you everything. I know what their formative influences were, how their environment and parents shaped them through childhood. I know their secret fears and insecurities, and their desires.

I don’t look upon myself as a puppet master, or a neurotic servant swayed this way and that by the whims of imaginary people who seem more in charge of my destiny than I do. I don’t even really think of myself as an artist. I think of myself as a psychologist, asking them “how do you feel about that?” for every situation I put them into.

Back-story is what fascinates me. People’s lives, their hopes and their fears and their relationships with each other – that is what excites me. Not magic, or battles, or giant griffins roaming the skies. Those are pretty neat, but ultimately they’re just trappings. Character is what matters most, whether human or griffin. This is what I believe, and have done for a long time.

I’ve said what I set out to say, so I’m technically done here. But, to prove my point – and because I just plain love doing it – I’ll give you a demonstration and analyse a character right here for you. My protagonist is probably the most complex, but I can’t do him for fear of spoilers, so here’s another more minor character who has yet to be introduced.

Her father died when she was young, and she spent most of her early childhood without a proper home, forced to move constantly and often in physical danger. Her only constant source of security was her mother, and so she grew very dependant on her, looking on her as the support that held her world up. However, she never had a proper home until her childhood was over. Her mother was a strong-willed, stubborn and fierce woman who expected her daughter to be the same and constantly taught her to be tough-hearted and to trust no-one. The mother was also a leader of other people, greatly respected and loved by those around her. Her daughter grew up influenced by this as well, surrounded by others who reinforced the mother’s influence. Because of this she became a loyal supporter in her own right, and because she believed absolutely in her mother’s cause she never considered rebelling and instead strove to please her at every turn. Others admired her for this, and placed their own expectations on her in the process.

The daughter reached young womanhood, and her mother forced her to go and live away from her – still able to contact her, but otherwise thrown on her own resources. The daughter became respected like her mother, and took on a leadership role in her new home without complaint. But because she had never had the chance to grow close to anyone but her mother, she remained distant and unemotional, disliking overt shows of friendship or love. As she reached sexual maturity, her mother forbade her to become involved with any man without her approval. So the daughter remained chaste and when she was attracted to someone she would never show it and would punish herself mentally for wanting to stray.

She spent many long years this way, completely obedient to her mother and completely unable to recognise her own resentment toward her. Over time, discipline from a parent becomes habit and by this time the daughter was no longer able to change herself and would always fit into the mould her mother had made for her.

The result of all this was that the daughter treated the men in her life with unforgiving hardness and rigid self-control. She loved them fiercely, since her mother had raised her to be fierce, but was incapable of ever showing her heart to anyone no matter how much she felt for them. Ultimately, with her mother long dead, she grew to be very much like her – and even treated her own children in just the same way as she herself had been treated. Our parents teach us how to be parents ourselves when our own time comes, and it was the same for her.

In the end, now an old woman, the daughter looks at herself and realises that she has become her mother and has made some of the same mistakes – mistakes which have made her lonely. But there is nothing she can do about it.

And there you go. That may have seemed comprehensive, but that’s not even a complete profile! I simplified it somewhat, and didn’t even go into the effect that her religion had on her, or her cultural heritage, or her political beliefs, or… well, let’s just say the list goes on, and I’m leaving it at that because of spoilers and because I don’t want to bore you take up too much space. That was this one character’s framework. She was shaped especially by her upbringing, which was very rigid. It puts her in contrast with my protagonist, who more or less raised himself and has the same obsessive drive to achieve his goals as I do. It makes him rather intriguing, and also rather immature. But that’s a story for another time.

And the psychology of griffins is another story altogether, though I went into it a bit in my post about them.

I think that to write characters, it’s important to have some level of understanding as to what makes them tick. You don’t have to go into it in as much insane detail as I do, but it does help. And more than that, it’s just plain interesting.

KJ Taylor lives in Canberra, Australia, where she is continuing work on The Fallen Moon trilogy. The Dark Griffin, book one of the Fallen Moon trilogy, is her first novel published with Voyager – she also wrote The Land of Bad Fantasy (Scholastic).

The Power to control the driving force of the universe has come to light ...

The new book from Traci Harding will be out soon, and to celebrate, we’ve built an online temple so you can read the first chapter, explore more about the characters, and take part in a competition to win not just this new book but also the Ancient Future trilogy – for yourself or to give to someone who might like Traci’s books!

Go and visit the Being of the Field page.

Book Seven of the Dragon Mage

The 15 Days of Deverry Party  starts today with the release of The Silver Mage. Everyone is invited!

The Silver Mage is the final volume in the Celtic inspired cycle of interbraided lives, personalities and events in the alternate world of Deverry, through eras and generations of Deverry’s historical and chronological time!

15 Days of Deverry is an online celebration of the successful conclusion of Katharine Kerr’s vision for this Celtic knot of inter-braided novels. The 15 Days stands for the 15 titles that constitute the cycle’s sequence.

A community at livejournal, deverry15 , is now up and running – so go and post away to your heart’s content!

Two wonderful Voyager authors will be at Angus & Robertson bookshop, River Plaza, Queanbeyan from 11 – 1pm – this Saturday 31 October (Hallowe’en):

Tracey O’Hara, author of Night’s Cold Kiss

K J Taylor, author of The Dark Griffin

To quote Katie: ‘ … since she writes urban fantasy and I’m… well, a bloodthirsty character-murderer, I guess they figured it was appropriate for the holiday.’

Duncan, author of The Wounded Guardian. will be at Borders in Westfield at Hornsby on Sunday 1 November (a great way to start the month), at Borders in Tuggerah on Sunday 15 November, and at A&R Warringah Mall on November 22, in all cases from 11:30 – 1pm.

Part 1

A Writer Goes on a Journey calls Twilight clichéd, and considering the sexist views throughout the series, it’s not hard to see why. The story revolves around a helpless heroine who is constantly in need of rescue by supernatural men. She has no sense of self outside of her relationship to them. Given the demographic—teenage girls—the popularity is disturbing, or at least revealing. It did make me wonder though: How is speculative fiction representing gender? Are we writing brave new worlds of equality or reinforcing more traditional roles?

A quick way to assess gender bias is to give the protagonist a sex change and see if the plot still holds. I tried this on my first love, LOTR. (I am a huge Tolkien fan. I actually leaned Elvish when I was a teen so I could write in my diary without fear of discovery!) However, when Frodo becomes female, the story just doesn’t work. Tolkien wrote in a masculinist hegemony, and it shows.

Eowyn, the maiden of Rohan, has to disguise herself as a man ...

He portrays women via the male gaze—maidens with flowing hair, long dresses, and male protection—fathers, brothers or husbands controlling their lives. Eowyn, the maiden of Rohan, has to disguise herself as a man to ride into battle and kill the Nazgul lord. She must reject her feminism and lie to achieve her goals. This tells us something about the gender constructs of Middle Earth.

In the Shire, we don’t meet any females aside from Sam’s Rosie, who gets a few paragraphs, and Bilbo’s hostile aunt, who gets perhaps less. The temptation is to assume the females are in the role of child rearing, bread-baking and other domestic tasks. If Frodo were ‘Froda,’ he wouldn’t make sense as the ring bearer without reconstructing gender norms in the Shire—a full rewrite.

For example would we find ‘Froda’ living sequestered with bachelor Bilbo for all those years, and later living alone with her faithful servant Sam? Although a homosexuality is not implied when these figures are male, heterosexual complications arise with the gender switch. We have no model for it in the present ‘life in the Shire’ and to avoid jarring the reader the ‘feminist’ qualities of hobbits would need more development.

To remain consistent to the work—where females must become like males to have an impact—hobbits might have to be written as an androgynous race (much like the Dwarves). In this way female hobbits would lose the feminine identity and gain effectiveness. Another possibility is to give them ‘higher powers’ as in the race of Elves.

How many parts of Lord of the Rings would change if the main character changed gender?

Conceiving that female hobbits could be rewritten to accommodate ‘Froda’ as ring-bearer, Smeagol the Gollum would have to switch gender as well. As a shadow figure—the dark side of the psyche that knows nature’s ways and the hidden paths yet is damaged and twisted by life—Gollum’s gender must match the ‘light’ figure’s as they do in myths, dreams and fairytales. Again, more rewriting.

What do you think? Is speculative fiction widening our views of classical gender roles or reinforcing traditional ones? Does your favourite hero or heroine withstand a gender switch without confusing plot or meaning? Does it matter? I’d love to hear your comments!

Kim Falconer is the author of the Quantum Enchantment series, beginning with The Spell of Rosette, and continued in Arrows of Time. She is currently working on a second trilogy, and yet has the time to also run Falcon Astrology!

This isn’t actually a Voyager book, nor is it strictly fantasy but it speaks to me as a fantasy fan, so thought I would share it on the blog:

Book Seven of the Dragon Mage

The Silver Mage by acclaimed fantasy author Katherine Kerr is out at the end of this month from Voyager in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, and from DAW in the US.

The 15 Days of Deverry Party Committee are delighted to share the news of an online-everywhere celebration in honor of the publication of The Silver Mage. Everyone is invited!

The Silver Mage is the final volume in the Celtic inspired cycle of interbraided lives, personalities and events in the alternate world of Deverry, through eras and generations of Deverry’s historical and chronological time!

15 Days of Deverry is an online celebration of the successful conclusion of Katharine Kerr’s vision for this Celtic knot of inter-braided novels. The 15 Days stands for the 15 titles that constitute the cycle’s sequence.

A community at livejournal, deverry15 , has been set up and will be used to house all links to all things Deverry over the next two weeks and more.

For further information, join the deverry15 community at livejournal where you can ask questions, join the discussion, and make additional suggestions.

We encourage you to post about your experience reading these books, as well as to post your congratulations to the author and her grand vision. You can post about how and when you first read one of the books, what attracted you to the series, which of the Deverry heroes ranks #1 in the Hotness Factor, the overarching themes and structure of the series — or anything else about the Deverry world and books that has affected you. We hope you all will share your own unique views of Katharine Kerr’s achievement.

We’re very excited by the successful completion of this Grand Fantasy Vision, so we’re throwing a big party to celebrate! All of you are special guests. Please come! Post often! Bring your friends, your dog, your cat and your dragon too!