The Smoldering Hot Royal Guard

I'm taking a break from my epic attempt to read/catch up on THE WHEEL OF TIME to visit my comfy, cuddly world of YA fantasy by knocking out three books written by some remarkably talented ladies. One is a debut (THRONE OF GLASS), one is book one of a new series (FALLING KINGDOMS) and the other is the final installment of a popular series(THE CRIMSON CROWN). It's also a run on reading some epic fantasy in the vein of what I write. Now, I'm not going to do full blown reviews. I don't like doing book reviews for an assortment of reasons I won't list here, but as I'm about a quarter of the way through the second book of my read (FALLING KINGDOMS) and I've noticed something that all three have. It's sort of a trope, I guess, though I can't be completely sure. I'm calling it (and I'm sure that TV Tropes already has an entry, but I'm sticking with mine for now) the smoldering hot royal guard. And I kind of like it.

Now, the term smoldering comes from the movie TANGLED, a vastly underrated Disney Princess movie. Now I know there are plenty of folks out there that will get their claws sharpened over the Disney Princesses but I for one love them if for no other reason my daughter's love of them. (In particular, Belle from BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, who was really the first of the "new generation" of Disney princesses...anyway I digress.) TANGLED is a fun, adventurous, epic level romp that joyfully plays with the tropes of both Disney Princesses and the fantasy adventure genre and I don't think it gets the credit it deserves for being a good film. Anyway, there's a hilarious scene where Flynn Rider is held captive by Rapunzel and he tries to "seduce" her with his good looks, especially with his signature move, the "Smolder."

Now it's played off hilariously and full of winks and nods. Now, Flynn Rider is decidedly NOT the Smoldering All American Boy that I'm talking about. He's really Han Solo Lite...I mean he's even got the vest...but that's a blog post for a different time. I just wanted to sort of put that picture in your head...okay, maybe not that picture but something like it.

Anyway, if you look the word smolder up in the dictionary, it means "to burn sluggishly without flame with much smoke." And metaphorically speaking it fits this trope to a t...especially three characters from the respective books that are it.

In fantasy, royal guards are a dime a dozen. They are engrained into the psyche of fantasy writers. We usually just call them The Royal Guard, though sometimes we'll come up with something clever like the Kingsguard or in real life the Secret Service or something like that. Anyway, they are as much a part of the fantasy genre as the faceless mooks, the Dark Lord or the Action Princess. And I've noticed that in all of the above books/series, there is a royal guard that is smolderingly hot. I wish I could explain it better, but I think it makes sense if you think about it.

Now, let me say again I love this trope. This isn't a criticism, it's more of an analysis than anything else. All three characters have similar traits, attributes that connect them. Generally speaking, the royal guard just isn't any mook guard. He's usually a commander or captain or something like that. He can be a noble but he's not always a noble, it almost depends on what's convenient to the writer at the time. All three are inconvenienced in some way by the female protagonist of the story. Usually this involves their being assigned to the princess's detail. There is an immediate attraction between them and an equal amount of revulsion that eventually turns to respect and a deeper attraction. There is always a wall between the two and that just adds to the smoldering. See the royal guard can never be ravingly angry ever because guards are always under control (part of the trope!) so there's always a smoldering anger underneath as the guard does his job. It's all part of the tension. To make matters worse, the guard either is close friends with the king/duke/prince/love interest of the female protagonist OR despises the love interest/betrothed of the female protagonist. (I'm resisting calling her a princess because that is not always the case.)We can kind of understand why they always seem angry. But it's not just the tension from the romance, it's the very tension that have in their relationship with the nobility around them. It's tenuous. They aren't the same as the people around them and, on some level, that annoys them too, even if they are in enough control to not allow it to be on the surface.

Storywise, the same things happen to all of these characters. The long gazes at one another when they wonder "What if...", the almost cliched "Ditching the Bodyguard" and the "bodyguard shows up in the nick of time" all play out. But like with all tropes, it's not that you use them, it's how you use them. And all of these writers use them and use them well.It adds depth to a story and raises the tension. We all love the TEAM: ROYAL GUARD/TEAM HANDSOME PRINCE arguments in our work.

There is something appealing about the idea of a charge falling for/ being attracted to their body guard. The trope extends beyond the fantasy world. The movie THE BODYGUARD comes to mind almost instantly. It goes further back, Lancelot (in some ways) and Guenevere had a similar situation.

In THRONE OF GLASS, Choal is the Crown Prince's best friend and really could be the archetype of this trope. He seems angry all the time and it works. (Look, I have a thing for angry characters, okay.) FALLING KINGDOMS has Theon. (Which I have a hard time with only because Theon Greyjoy is a sniveling little s**t and this Theon isn't.) And CRIMSON CROWN has Amon. These guys are great characters that define this trope. I'm sure there are others that I haven't experienced and it makes me want to experiment with the character type in my own work. I like the conflict they feel: between their own feelings, their sense of duty and their loyalty to their friend, though that may not always be the case.

A Reflection on Douchebaggery

I am completely and utterly fascinated by the resurgence of the insult "douchebag" and the general concept of "being a douche." The literal implications of the two ideas aside, has there ever been a clearer verbal descriptor with such an elusive and flexible definition? Almost all of us could easily, with very little thought, name someone we have relative intimate knowledge who's behavior, attitude and demeanor fit the ambiguous term "douchebag." Right? You've got a name or a face in your head right now. Need help? Sigh, this was the quintessential douchebag for my generation:

In addition to being fascinated with the resurgence of the word, the writer in me is completely drawn and in love with writing about characters that are douchebags. Now this comes from a brief Twitter conversation I had with some folks about the idea of an "unlikable protagonist."

In my series SEASONS OF DESTINY, in book one: WINTER'S DISCORD, I (and other people) noticed in the query that Ben, the protagonist, comes across as being very "douchey." He's not really, but he kind of is and, to me, that makes him a much more interesting a character to write about and even read about. Now, this isn't the only reason I'm thinking about it. I watched a movie a few nights ago, AMERICAN REUNION.

Now, if you are of a certain age, the AMERICAN movies are part of our pop culture canon. Now, while the first movie came out when I was 26 and it was about teens, I think I was the real target audience because it essential left me with a feeling of nostalgia for those days of my life and the attitudes that I had in those days. I think the same thing can be said for the remaining sequels (I'm ignoring the straight to video/ Comedy Central AMERICAN PIE movies for the sake of this essay.) I found AMERICAN REUNION to be "meh" as a movie...it had it's moments, but it was pretty much a tired retread of some of the same ideas they'd done in previous movies. Anyway, I was drawn to a character that I didn't think I would be and it is strictly because of my sudden interest in "douchebaggery:" Stifler.

Now, they sort of retcon some of Stifler's character for the purposes of the story that instead of being the cocky gym teacher/football coach, he's now a temp in an office where he's completely stifled and basically not allowed to be the cocky/douchey Stifler that we know and love. As the movie goes on, he begins to realize that the old days are gone and will never return, no matter how much he tries. In many ways, he gets his comenuppance throughout the story. I was much more fascinated with Stifler's attempts at his own version of redemption throughout the story, his inability to let go of the past and his revelation that he is indeed the problem (a theme that has been explored in the previous WEDDING movie far less effectively). In that movie, his redemption is an actual redemption where he makes up for his mistakes with actions. But in REUNION, they take a different tact. He is the group's douche (or DICK, using a more appropriate 90s vernacular to describe his role) and the realization of that helps define him as a character. His redemption comes in his own realization as to who he is, beneath the douchiness is a person that is deeply loyal to his friends. He is "their" douche and it is up to him to fill a number of roles: keep people in check, protect them when they cannot protect themselves, do the unsavory things that need to be done that the other members of the group won't do and even act as one end of the moral compass for the group at times. This is the very definition of an "unlikable" protagonist. And he's my kind of protagonist. He's all of our kind of protagonists.

Don't believe me? Who are the enduring, most likable people in our favorite pieces of literature or pop culture? Let's think. Let me list a few that I can think of.

• Han Solo: Dude was a slick, hot rodding smuggler and a complete douchebag. Look at the way he treats Leia in the first two SW movies. Look at the way he treats everyone. That smirk. The way he stood. Christ, he shot Greedo, drove the SW Universe equivalent of a Trans Am and wore a Corellian bloodstripe down his trousers.
• Jaime Lannister: Do I have enough room to list all the reasons the Kingslayer is a douche?
• Countless Shakespeare characters: Henry V, Falstaff, Hamlet, MacBeth...I think you get the point.
• Mat Cauthon: Supreme douchiness...he would have been on the Randland equivalent of the Jersey Shore. (Actually, almost all of the male characters have spent time on Douchebag Island at one point or another.)
• Mouth from Goonies: The archetypical loud mouth douche from one of the best pure adventure stories of the last 30 years. 
• Holden Caufield: Now to be fair, I read Catcher In The Rye when I was in my 20s, so maybe my perspective is skewed a bit, but Holden is the prototypical literary douche.

SO douchebags exist. Unlikeable as they may be, they are out there. Embrace them, fellow writers, they are far more interesting characters than many of the characters I read today (many of whom might actually fall under some version of the definition of douchebag). 

Tarmon Gai'don Is Upon Us

Today is a day that there a lot of people have waited 22 years for: the conclusion of perhaps the most epic of epic tales: The Wheel of Time. With the release of A Memory of Light, the Third Age comes to an end and thus begins the Fourth Age. I wonder how many thousands, and I have no doubt there are thousands, of people that have skipped work/school to read. I'm not one of them because, well, I'm out of work because of my surgery not because I want to read but I just finished book five. I'm a long way from Tarmon Gai'don. But that doesn't mean I don't have something to say about it.

One of my favorite things about being an English teacher/avid reader/writer is to hear about how people discovered a book they love/that influenced them. The excitement and love in a person's voice when discussing a book they love enthralls me. I hear it in my own voice when I talk about A Game of Thrones or Henry V or Fences or Dragonlance (I'll talk about Dragonlance in another blog post.) And WOT is one of those books/series. 

I'm late to The Wheel of Time party. I read The Eye of the World sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s. The way I remember it was that the paperback was on the shelf at the grocery store where I worked. I knew it was an important part of the "fantasy canon" (more on that later, probably another blog post), so I decided to buy it. It was okay. Not earth shattering. A Tolkien clone combined with some of the politics of Dune on some level. Toughed through it and The Great Hunt, remembering it fondly. I remember reading it while floating in my then girlfriend now wife's aunt's pool during the summer. To this day, I think of that time of my life every time we drive over there. Again, it was good, but not earthshattering for me. I quit The Dragon Reborn and didn't pick it up until many, many years later. And the only reason I did was because someone left four or five of the books on the desk in my classroom. Book three started to draw me in and by the end of The Shadow Rising I was officially hooked.

Now, I'm still early on and from what I've read the "problems" come in later volumes, but through The Fires of Heaven it's pretty amazing. J.K. Rowling is the media darling when it comes to integrating her knowledge of mythology, folklore and legend into her work but why Jordan never gets mentioned in the same breath is a travesty. It really shows the sort of bias (I'm not sure if that's the word I'm looking for there) there is against good old fashioned epic fantasy in the media. Jordan has weaved so much into these stories, I almost always read them with my computer or phone or Kindle nearby to look up things that I might miss or overlook as I'm reading. I've commented that I admire the freaking stones Jordan had in writing these books.

Now let's talk about the books. Big books. Big, epic books. Books with literally THOUSANDS of characters and hundreds of story lines. Books that made it okay for us, as fantasy writers, to tell even bigger stories. It pushed us to recognize the importance of myth, legend and folklore...not just our own but that of our characters. Can it get confusing and overwhelming? Sure, but that's part of the fun, isn't it? I'm really looking forward to finishing the series. No matter how you feel about it, it is a remarkably important part of the epic fantasy canon. Without it, many of us that write epic fantasy don't exist. Without it, there's no Westeros, there's no Malazan, there's no...well, I think you get my point.

Now, if you read this blog or know me at all, you know I am an unapologetic George RR Martin/Song of Ice and Fire fanatic. I was on board with ASOIAF relatively early. I regret having not been on board with the Wheel of Time books. I'll be plodding towards Tarmon Gai'don in the coming months and blogging about it as I go. For now, I'm burning through some YA fantasy to get back in the mindset (Throne of Glass, Falling Kingdoms and The Crimson Crown) for writing then diving into WOT.

The Next Big Thing

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to enjoy the latest HOT Internet meme: THE NEXT BIG THING! That's right it's where your talk about your next big project. Now, as with all memes, there's some open interpretation to what exactly that means. I've seen some writers talk about the project they are working on now, the one they are editing/revising/rewriting now, the project they are going to work on next, the project that's out in the wild seeking representation or being shopped to publishers....it takes all kinds.

The thing that makes me happiest is that I was actually TAGGED by another author. Jeff Salyard, the author of the very good looking epic fantasy series The Bloodsounder's Arc, tagged me. (To be fair, it's on my reading list and I should be getting to it soon.) I'll talk about who I'm going to tag after I finish the meme. So, here goes:

I'm going to go with WINTER'S DISCORD, the first book of my YA epic fantasy series SEASONS OF DESTINY. It's been a while since I've talked about it, so why not give it a shot.

1) What is the working title of your next book?
Winter's Discord

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?
The actual genesis of the book, the first thought was simple. I had just bought and was reading the brilliant THE TOUGH GUIDE TO FANTASYLAND and wanted to write something that was kind of a deconstruction of a lot of the ideas in that book in a story very similar to George RR Martin's A GAME OF THRONES. I was sitting in the parking lot of St. Joe's hospital waiting for my wife to finish her shift at the gift shop where she worked, looking over the city of Syracuse and the hills to the east of the city. The opening scene of the novel popped into my head. I know, it sounds cliched (and a lot like the GRRM story about AGOT) but it is true. I scrambled around my wife's car looking for a scrap of paper, found one and started scribbling away. Now that scene is very, very different in a good way.

3) What genre does your book fall under?
YA fantasy with an epic taste.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
 The main POV characters are all teenagers and I have to be honest, I'd want all unknowns to play the kids. But for the adults, I'd seriously want the Frat Pack to play most of the adult roles. No, really. For the Bachelor Prince I'd want Ben Affleck, his brother the King would be Vince Vaughn. Ben Stiller would maybe play the spymaster Yvan. It's very hard not to try and cast Sean Bean as my Ned Stark expy Thomas Grange. His lady wife Emma would be played by Christine Taylor. I'd pepper in all the other Frat Pack/Apatow guys into different roles. The only teen role I'd cast by someone somewhat famous would be Veronica Maglore, who HAS to be played by Allison Scagliotti. She was who I imagined in that role when I wrote it.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Ben Grange and his friends are thrown into a dangerous situation they do not entirely understand and made to pay for the transgressions of their fathers and mothers as winter of discord threatens to tear apart everything they love.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I am represented by the amazing Bob Mecoy.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
About seven months. Rewrites took much, much longer.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin. The Seven Kingdom's Series by Cinda Williams Chima. Dragonlance Series by Hickman and Weis. Song of the Lioness by Tamora Pierce. The movie Your Highness (no, really).

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?
The desire to write a young adult epic fantasy worthy of the title "Game of Thrones for teens." 

10) What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?
Come on, it's Game of Thrones meets DeGrassi...what's NOT to pique your interest????

As for tagging, I have plenty ideas of who to tagged, but I didn't want to go nuts and impose on anyone, so naturally I asked two of my closest writing allies: Mike Winchell and Kenneth Mark Hoover. If anyone else that reads this here blog and wants to do the meme, feel free to "tag" yourself. Enjoy. 

Time Has Come

When I started this blog I had made the decision that, unlike my old blog, I was only going to blog about my writing and things associated with my writing. I wasn't going to gripe about my job as a high school English teacher at a difficult inner city school in upstate New York. I wasn't going to complain about the trivial minutia of married life, being a dad, why old people leave their blinkers on for miles and miles after they've made their turn. I wasn't going to put up random posts about my favorite goofy video of the day. I wasn't going to pontificate about the things I think I know more about than you like politics or sports. I was going to keep this about my writing. And I've done a pretty good job of that so far. But this week is a weird week and I'm excited about it. On Thursday, I'm having my hip resurfaced. I won't chronicle the lead up to this here, but if you're interested, here's a link to the old blog where I talked about it. My hip has gotten to the point where I am in constant, unrelenting pain and it effects EVERYTHING I do. It sucks and I'm miserable. So, finally, I'm getting it fixed.

Now, this means for the next 3-10 weeks my life will consist of recovering, reading, writing, matching movies and playing videos games. It's very exciting that this is happening and while I'm nervous about what will happen to my freshman while I'm gone, I'm looking forward to feeling better.

And I'll be able to blog more.

Fear Leads To Anger, Anger Leads To Hate, Hate Leads To Suffering

In the past few weeks, I've been smacked in the face with hate and I thought I'd blog a little about it because, quite frankly, it's bothering me. First, from the real world.

Do you ever read the comments section of anything posted online, especially newspaper/news outlet comments section? If you want to be able to identify where and when Western civilization began to fall, you'll be able to pinpoint this as the beginning. An anonymous place for the ignorant, bigoted and downright evil people to comment on something, whether it be people on Welfare or people that are just different than them. The catalyst for this was this article in my local paper about our Muslim Student Association. It was a beautiful piece that represents everything that I love about where I teach. It was also the most commented article on the paper's website the day it came out. Reading the comments makes you understand just how messed up our country is. Sure, there are great comments in it, but most are just deplorable. It upset me greatly. We fear anything that we don't understand and then lash out at it, but we do so under the guise of an internet avatar. It just fills me with sadness. We will never be happy as a country or a world until we learn to respect and love one another. Bigotry and inequality are far more concerning to me than what's happening in our economy...because if society falls the way everyone is predicting it will, all we'll really have left is the way we treat one another. That's all I have to say about that.

A few days later, I'm trolling around the Internet, checking out some of my favorite blogs when I come across a review for a book from a reputable reviewer that I respect a great deal. I'm not going to link because normally I don't see this from the site. Now to be fair, they review mostly traditional genre books, meaning "adult" not "YA." There were a few things about this review that bothered me. It came across as particularly snarky, angry and bitter. I get that reviewers can't love everything, but the way this reviewer seemed to go after the author and the book they wrote just rubbed me the wrong way. If you don't like the book, fine, but that doesn't mean you have to trash the writer as much as you did. Then the reviewer took a swipe at YA, suggesting the book straight out of a "how to" book for writing epic fantasy for the teen audience. (I'm rephrasing and paraphrasing here.) The suggestion that YA can't and isn't as sophisticated as more adult oriented fantasy. (I dare the blogger, actually TRIPLE DOG DARE him to walk up to Tamora Pierce and say that.) The most annoying part about this is that his review was based on "skimming" not reading the book. Well, that's highly effective reviewing right there.

Why are people so afraid of young adult? Is it that they think it somehow distills "traditional" or "adult" literature? Is it because they fear that people are going to mock them or treat them differently for reading it? Is traditional or adult fantasy that much more acceptable than YA? Didn't Tor try re-packaging the Wheel of Time books as YA books in a blatant money grab a few years back? Didn't it backfire because most of their target audience was already buying the books?

I go back to something that Blake Charlton once blogged about and, what he called, the "crossunder" effect. Books like Wheel of Time, or Charlton's Spellwright, or Rothfuss's Kingkiller series or most D&D tie-in books be considered crossunders? Or would that be insulting the authors? Or is it more insulting to the readers?

I found this great list of the Top Ten Tropes in YA. Pay attention to #2. It brought out the comments (well, a few of them). Listen, ladies, I get that for 400 years, men have dominated the business of publishing. I get that the male perspective has been dominant for longer than yours, but that doesn't mean you have to be so angry about it or decide that there is no longer a place at the table for it anymore. Look, I'm a white, heterosexual man, so I'm pretty much EVERYONE'S villain right now (If I were a WASP, I'd definitely be EVERYONE'S villain!) and I have to word everything carefully right now because I don't want to appear sexist, misogynistic or anything like that. But as much as you don't want to hear it, the modern female protagonist has become something of a trope. It's hard to differentiate between Katniss and Katsa sometimes and I'm not just talking about their names. The basic framework is there with some tweaking based on the setting but other than that it's becoming the same character in every book. And being a trope is not necessarily a bad thing, either.

But what's wrong with a male protagonist? What's wrong with the idea of a "boy book?" But that's not the Pandora's Box I want to open right now. That's another entry.

Cry Havoc and Let Slip The Dogs Of War

I love Shakespeare. I mean in every way possible. I don't care that he might have been and was probably a thief. The man knew how to write! So I stole today's blog title from Big Willy.

It's November. It's hard to believe is over a year old already (and I didn't celebrate at all last month). And so much has changed...and stayed the same. Anyway, I've decided to wade into NANOWRIMO...again. I'm mildly suicidal sometimes, but I decided I needed something new to write since I've sort of been in this JAIMAN/SEASONS cycle for the last year or so. I needed to get away from those projects for a little while to look at them with fresh eyes. Sort of.

I'm about 3/4 of the way through a pretty good rewrite of THE SISTERS OF KHODA. I think I've added some required depth and scope to the story that I was asked to do so. The only problem is that I think the end was something of a mess, which means I'm setting very large charges and blowing up huge chunks of it. Almost a whole new rewrite. I'm thinking that last quarter or so is going to be in the 25-35k range, mostly of all new words. I rushed that part of the novel and I need to work on it. I'd like to spread that out over November and December and have it off to Mr. Agent man by January. That's the plan. I'd love to get it done earlier and then work on something else in December (I'm going to talk about December in a minute...it's very exciting).

As for the NANO project....I don't have a title yet, but it's YA contemporary SF. I was strongly considering a very contemporary YA/ Tobias Wolff-esque fictional memoir kind of thing but changed my mind (for now, though writing this out that is suddenly much more appealing to me). Instead I'm thinking something like a Kyle XY/teenaged supersoldier/football kind of book. And the scary part of me is that I'm pantsing it. I have no plan. No outline. I'm just going to write. I've been reading the brilliant Shadow Children series by Margaret Peterson Haddix and thinking it could be very, very similar to those books in length and structure. I'm aiming somewhere in the 60-70k range. Keeping it simple, one POV with some "interludes" of official documents, emails, etc related to the MC being a supersoldier. It's very nebulous, we'll see how it plays out. (I'm on the NANO website as Ebenstone, my old handle.) I'm going to try and cap my daily writing at around 2k a day and try and finish the whole thing in November. We'll see how that goes.

As for December, I'm finally getting my bum hip fixed. Surgery is slated for December 6th and I cannot be more excited. I can't wait for this pain to stop and I'll be able to do things again. The super exciting part of it is that I will be home for the entire month of December. A whole month of reading, writing, playing video games and catching up on TV shows. It's like I'm going to be one of the 47% that just mooches of the rest of you SUCKERS!!!!

I'd like to dive into one other project during this time period: my epic fantasy Santa Claus story. The Elevator pitch for that one? The Santa Clause meets Game of Thrones. I'll tell you more later about that project.