Fantasy Author's Handbook

FANTASY AUTHOR’S HANDBOOK

  • THE POETRY OF FANTASY NAMES

    This morning I finished reading A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver, and can heartly recommend it to anyone ready to journey into the world of writing poetry. But you know me… everything I read—well, almost everything—ends up being filtered through the fantasy, science fiction, and horror genres, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise that next to the section “The Alphabet—Families of Sound” I wrote: “Can you use this in a discussion of fantasy names?”

    So, yeah… let’s do that. Mary Oliver wrote: “What follows is from a textbook of grammar published in 1860 (Brown’s Grammar, Improved by Goold Brown). It divides the alphabet—our ‘raw material’— into various categories.”

    The letters are divided into two general classes, vowels and consonants.

    A vowel forms a perfect sound when uttered alone. A consonant cannot be perfectly uttered till joined to a vowel.

    The vowels are a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes w and y. All the other letters are consonants.

    (W or y is called a consonant when it precedes a vowel heard in the same syllable, as in wine, twine, whine. In all other cases these letters are vowels, as in newly, dewy, and eyebrow.)

    The consonants are divided into semivowels and mutes.

    A semivowel is a consonant that can be imperfectly sounded without a vowel so that at the end of a syllable its sound may be protracted, as l, n, z, in al, an, az.

    The semivowels are f, b, j, l, m, n, r, s, v, w, x, y, z, and c and g soft. But w or y at the end of a syllable is a vowel. And the sound of c, f, g, b, j, s, or x can be protracted only as an aspirate, or strong breath.

    Four of the semivowels—l, m, n, and r—are termed liquids, on account of the fluency of their sounds.

    Four others—v, w, y, and z—are likewise more vocal than the aspirates.

    A mute is a consonant that cannot be sounded at all without a vowel, and which at the end of a syllable suddenly stops the breath, as k, p, t, in ak, ap, at.

    The mutes are eight: b, d, k, p, q, t, and c and g hard. Three of these—k, g, and c hard—sound exactly alike. B, d, and g hard stop the voice less suddenly than the rest.

    Then Mary Oliver again: “Here we begin to understand that our working material—the alphabet—represents families of sounds rather than random sounds. Here are mutes, liquids, aspirates—vowels, semivowels, and consonants. Now we see that words have not only a definition and possibly a connotation, but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.”

    That said, what do you want the sound of your character and place names to sound like?

    Mutes: Nyarlathotep, Qu’vat, Drizzt

    Liquids: Aslan, Dhole, Rolery

    Aspirates: Knowhere, Severian, drow

    The question to ask, then, is the place—and the people who come from there—a mute, a liquid, or an aspirant? Of course, in our own world, even in smaller communities, we freely mix these up. But we’re creating worlds here, and worlds we want our readers to connect with, so the feel—the sound—of a place or a character or a monster, etc. might help you draw subtle lines between your cultures.

    Anyway, food for thought.

    —Philip Athans

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    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

  • BOOKS ARE JUST AS BAD AND AS GOOD AS THEY’VE ALWAYS BEEN

    Let’s spend this week blasting apart another unsupported notion flying in and around the book or book-adjacent corners of social media. This time it’s the notion that books are worse now than they used to be, often due to a belief or “acceptance” that no one has the attention span to read a book at all anymore, much less a book with the slightest bit of intellectual or literary complexity.

    Books are stupid now. They’re the next boilerplate romantasy for the edification of teenage girls (and their moms). They’re another in a series of thousands of identical self-help books that simplify Heidegger and Aristotle for wannabe busy executives. Throw in some nonfiction books about dumb subjects like love or hope or how to make a killing in cryptocurrency and the sad reality of AI slop and it’s obvious we’ve entered the literary End Times..

    You know what I mean. Just look at the best sellers list full of crap that no one will still be reading in forty years!

    What happened to authors like Franz Kafka or Seneca or Joan Didion or Richard Bach or Robert James Waller or Penelope Ash?

    What?

    You’ve never heard of the last three authors? You’ve never heard them listed alongside the great scribes of the Western Canon?

    Well, that’s because they wrote books everybody thought were terrible and designed for readers whose brain cells have been destroyed by exposure to corrosive mass media like network television.

    Richard Bach is the author of the runaway best-seller Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which both my parents and myself read and sort of ended up puzzled as to why. It was about a seagull sort of thinking about being a seagull… or something. I don’t remember. But in 1972 it was number one on both the New York Times and Publishers Weekly best sellers lists. And most people made fun of it all along.

    Robert James Waller wrote a hugely successful romance novel called The Bridges of Madison County that was so successful it was made into a movie starring Clint Eastwood and started a covered bridges of wherever they still have covered bridges craze that temporarily remapped tourist traffic in America. It was on the New York Times best sellers list for three years (1992-1995). I have yet to see it mentioned in a BookTube video. Oh, and all of those three years people made fun of the book and people who read the book because what smart person would read a book about people falling in love while (I think?) photographing old bridges? Surely those stupid people have been made stupid by too much exposure to covered bridges. Or romance.

    And how could you have possibly forgotten the towering literary figure Penelope Ash, best-selling author of Naked Came the Stranger? Just because there is no such person as Penelope Ashe and the book was actually written a by a group of snobby-ass journalists who were so convinced that mass market romance novels were so stupid they could write one that was intentionally “bad” and people would buy it? And so they did and so people did buy it. It was on the New York Times best sellers list for thirteen weeks in 1969. It was made into a movie in 1975.

    Oh, and I also ran across this quote from George Orwell in his 1936 essay “In Defense of the Novel”:

    It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment the prestige of the novel is extremely low, so low that the words ‘I never read novels’, which even a dozen years ago were generally uttered with a hint of apology, are now always uttered in a tone of conscious pride.

    So, yeah. I just recently railed against the evils of social media, but the dumbing down of books is not happening in any way that’s different from the way it’s been happening since at least when Orwell noticed it in 1936, and certainly longer than that. There are always silly, dumb entertaining books that come and go. Is anyone still reading The Da Vinci Code, Fifty Shades of Grey, or Twilight? Those were less than literary masterpieces that sold lots and lots and lots more than anything by Rabih Alameddine, Michel Houellebecq, Karen Russell, or whoever else we’re talking about now.

    The reason “classics” make it seem as though books used to be awesome back in the day—however long ago that day was—is because only a small percentage of books written in any given year one way or another find their way into “classic” status. We still read Orwell but we don’t know about the “bad” books published in 1936, or in 1915 (Kafka’s Metamorphosis) or 65 ce (the death of Seneca) or 1968 (Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem).

    Will anyone be reading Rebecca Yarros in forty years, much less nineteen hundred years? I have no idea.

    And it just doesn’t matter.

    —Philip Athans

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    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

    best of

  • YOUTUBE AND MY 100-BOOK CHALLENGE

    It’s been more than a month since I posted my most recent video at the Fantasy Author’s Handbook YouTube channel, the 41st episode showcasing books I’ve been reading as I progress on my 100-book challenge journey. Over the course of that month I’ve finished reading seven more books, but have not made videos for those. I’ll get to why in a bit, but for those just coming in, a little context…

    First of all, here’s the YouTube channel. Enjoy!

    And if you’re just coming in on the 100-Book Challenge that’s a self-imposed project to read one hundred books I already own before I buy any new books. I’m about thirteen months into this and currently sitting at book number forty-eight. I expect I will be done with this by the end of 2026. It’s been an eye-opening exercise for me, coming off a few years of what was, even for me (a compulsive buyer of books) a rather extreme period of buying large numbers of books—including eBay lots and massive library book sale and used book store “hauls” you can see on the YouTube channel…

    I’m actually finding enormous value in the 100-book challenge. And as for the YouTube channel…?

    It’s fun. I like making these videos, and feeling like I’m part of that community. But there are certain realities I’ve been confronted with along the way. First of all, I was not prepared for how long it takes to make these videos. Though shooting them might take less than an hour, editing and posting them…? Another three to six hours of concerted effort. Hours that I have to weigh against the actual paid work that keeps a roof over my head.

    The good news for me is I’ve been super busy the last year or so. The bad news is that block of six hours, what, twice a week? Even once a week, for the non-monetized YouTube channel I’ve let become a book review venue, just is not there. Fun as they may be.

    And then there’s the thing about these being book reviews, which I have addressed in some of the videos themselves. I’ve always been averse to writing reviews of anything—and especially books. I love to recommend books, though, so am I really saying that I only want to review books I loved? Yeah, okay. That’s fair—and positive. And on the channel I have tried to talk about the books in terms of what we can learn—or at least what I learned—from that book that can be applied to our own writing. I hope these will serve as examples of how much we can all learn, as authors, from the work of other authors.

    So, okay—I’m okay with the content, even of the “book review” videos. I’m happy working my way through the 100-book challenge. So, what’s up?

    I just do not have time to post videos as often as the almighty YouTube Algorithm apparently demands. I subscribe to channels that post almost every day. Once a week seems to be a sort of minimum…? I honestly don’t even know. But deadlines, and a desire to finally really start doing some writing of my own again… and home repairs and renovations… and… maybe some kind of non-working life…? That three to six hours a week just isn’t possible.

    Could I make one video a month? I’m toying with that idea. That should be do-able, no?

    I will think about that.

    Meanwhile, of course, I’ll still be here every Tuesday, continuing to use the books I read to spark posts here, which I have done already with 100-book challenge books number 42, Perry Rhodan: Invasion from Space, and number 43, Selected Poems of Po Chü-i.

    And finally, for those precious few of you following my 100-book challenge, here are the seven books I’ve finished since the last video and the date I finished them…

    42. Perry Rhodan 4: Invasion from Space (2/10/26)

    43. Selected Poems of Po Chü-i (2/11/26)

    44. Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal (3/5/26)

    45. Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany (4/1/26)

    46. The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon (4/3/26)

    47. A Swell-Looking Babe by Jim Thomson (4/9/26)

    48. Lost Words by Joe Gillard (4/10/26)

    And who knows… maybe I’ll get my work-life balance balanced enough for some YouTube content. I’m not taking the channel down, just… working through some higher priority projects instead.

    Stay tuned!

    —Philip Athans

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    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

    Speaking of writing of my own…

  • PERRY RHODAN’S “BENIGN” FASCISM

    Every novel ever written, from the most ancient epic poems to today’s new releases, is as much a historical document as it is a work of fiction. Because novels are written by humans, and humans—all humans—are in various ways products of their time and cultures, the culture of the time in which that novel is written will shine through. Or, depending on how you feel about that time and/or culture… ooze through. And because novelists are and always have been human (and no, an AI approximation of a novel is not a novel—period) sometimes what oozes through eventually feels old fashioned, and often enough “problematic.”

    I’ve talked here about my struggle with Ian Fleming, for instance, and continuously work through my love of the work of H.P. Lovecraft while I feel sorry for the man himself, very much a product of his time and specific (affluent white New England) culture.

    I read a lot of older books, especially old science fiction from the pulp era through the struggling-to-try-to-be-progressive 1970s, and have written a lot about the baseline sexism and racism that pervades 20th century genre fiction, precisely as it pervaded 20th century American culture. Sometimes, like Ray Bradbury’s sadly prophetic Fahrenheit 451, or Ron Goulart’s bizarrely relevant Hawkshaw, authors of those bygone eras might have actually seen into a future dystopia currently deploying across the social media and dying journalistic landscape of 2026.

    Litigating every instance of old fashioned ideas in vintage fiction would be a full time job for an entire law firm, so let’s not fall into that lest we decide all books before… well, we’re still waiting for the next Enlightenment, so… whenever that will be… are to be ignored. That’s a version of failing to learn from history and being doomed to repeat it.

    But that said, I want to talk about a series I’ve already used as an example of how not to write well, but look deeper into it to confront the subtext of at least the first four books in the series: the unsettling fascist leanings of the eponymous “hero” of the Perry Rhodan series—a subtext that’s only barely “sub.”

    The thread of “benign fascism” was easily detectable in the first book, and plays through at least the next three, but, as with my startlement at Hawkshaw, the “current moment” made that element of the fourth, book, Invasion from Space by Walter Ernsting & Kurt Mahr, push out of the subtext for me.

    For those of you just coming in, the capsule history of Perry Rhodan:

    Perry Rhodan is the hero of a long-running series of space opera novellas that began publication in then West Germany in 1961. They were released in sixty-six page weekly digest-sized magazines and sold like crazy. According to Wikipedia, the series’ “first billion of worldwide sales was celebrated in 1986,” which is crazy. That’s a lot.

    The series was picked up by Ace Books in the US in 1969 and translated by Wendayne Ackerman, edited and presented in an increasingly magazine-like mass market paperback form by her husband Forrest J. Ackerman and later editors including Frederick Pohl. It’s these Ace books, 126 in all, that I’m collecting and reading.

    Okay, so then yes, the culture: a divided post-war Germany stuck like no other country in the world literally between the massive superpowers of the day—the United States and the Soviet Union—rebuilding physically and psychologically from the devastation of the war and the immense evil of the Third Reich. That obvious context forms the basis of the (then) near-future world Perry Rhodan inhabits, a world divided into three power blocs that mimic the Cold War reality of the day: the Western Bloc (America/the West), the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union), and their separate but allied fellow Communists in the Asiatic Federation (Red China). We first enter this world, more or less as it was—or at least felt like—in 1961, ever hovering on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Not a good situation in any world, real or fictional.

    In the first book, astronaut Perry Rhodan is the commander of the first American mission to the Moon. There he finds a crashed alien starship, befriends one of the two surviving Arkonites (the other seems to be a slow-burn “enemies to lovers” character, but we’ll see) and brings their advanced technology back to Earth.

    Then Perry decides all on his own that the Western Bloc isn’t smart enough to handle that tech without destabilizing the world, and neither of the Commies can trusted with it, so he lands his rocketship in Mongolia and unilaterally declares himself an independent nation—with the super-advanced alien tech to back that up. The first two books detail the world governments’ attempts to reign him in before finally giving in to Perry’s “simple” demands… which is where even a story that on the surface is about a smart guy with the resources to stop World War Three from happening stopping it from happening somehow… goes bad?

    Here’s Perry himself, from Invasion from Space, addressing the three world leaders on the pressing issue of an invasion attempt by the Mind Snatchers: insectoid aliens taking control of the minds of strategically placed personnel:

    “Unless we proceed to act at once we are lost. Fortunately for mankind a union of our world has been accomplished, and thus Earth can finally be called Terra. All frontiers have practically been removed. You, gentlemen, are ruling the world, apart from myself, representing the Third Power and the might of the Arkonides. Also, in the field of economics, our efforts are being coordinated.

    “I request that my agents and all authorized personnel may move unhindered in your countries. They must have free access to all government offices and especially to those of your defense systems. My people have been ordered to place all important personalities of the world under strict surveillance in order to become aware at once if any of them have been invaded by the M.S. For this purpose I need unrestricted power of attorney. I must request you to give me complete authority.”

    Okay, the Mind Snatchers are a real problem, and all this goes to a common Cold War era SF theme: the only thing that will unite the world is a common threat from space. Fearful of both the M.S. and Rhodan’s own superior technology, the leaders of the world governments have no choice but to immediately acquiesce.

    I don’t know, man…

    I really don’t want to be that guy, but what if we replace Mind Snatchers (M.S.) with, say… Jews?

    Now I start to wonder about what a hero looks like.

    Perry is also stealth-building a fleet of FTL warships in different factories, each of which are only making incomprehensible parts not knowing what they’ll eventually do when assembled. This has Perry crowing:

    You see what undreamed of potential can be put into reality by mankind once they forget their differences. Of course, the world does not have any idea about all this, and it might be wise to keep this information to yourself for the time being.

    Because, I, Perry Rhodan, and only I, Perry Rhodan, knows what’s best for every single person on the planet Earth, and thank God for me, y’all can rest easy.

    I don’t know…

    Is this Perry Rhodan guy a hero or a villain? He has prevented World War Three, which is good, but then, do the ends justify the means?

    And what does this say about the culture of West Germany a scant sixteen years after the fall of the Third Reich? Is that what they—what we—were imagining as a solution to the existential threat of nuclear war? That some smart, dedicated, serious-minded military officer would take charge of wildly advanced weapons of mass destruction and unify us all against a common enemy that’s infiltrating our institutions and perverting them from within… pretty much exactly the way Perry Rhodan is also doing at the same time and now tells everyone he’s going to keep doing except now right out in the open?

    I don’t know…

    —Philip Athans

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    Or contact me for editing, coaching, ghostwriting, and more at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting or Reedsy?

    As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

    best of

    Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.

  • YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

    I promise you I will improve; I will no longer, as has ever been my habit, continue to ruminate on every petty vexation which fortune may dispense; I will enjoy the present, and the past shall be for me the past.

    —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

    You don’t have to be on social media of any kind, ever. It simply is not a requirement—not even for authors (believe it or not).

    All over… well, social media I’ve been seeing videos and reading essays about how people are doing twenty-four hour or weekend-long “digital detoxes” in which they turn off their phone (except for the video camera they use to record their digital detox video, apparently) and all other screens and spend the weekend reading (which I applaud) or “touching grass” (which is the dumbest possible way of saying “go outside”) or maybe doing hobbies, work around the house… all the things I need to spend more time doing myself. Some of them get some writing done—at least journalling. That’s great! And almost universally the reports come back overwhelmingly positive, infused with dumbfounded surprise at feeling marginally better not being barraged by news feeds and social media notifications.

    What a shocker!

    Do you really need me—or anyone—to tell you that social media in all its pernicious and sometimes camouflaged forms is the root of all evil in the contemporary hellscape of a country we’ve descended into? If so, here it is:

    Everything bad happening right now is happening because of social media.

    Weird that it turned out crowdsourcing journalism, science, and medicine made everything measurably worse, isn’t it?

    No, it isn’t.

    Of course it made everything measurably worse.

    Of course getting “the news” from an unknown source that could be anyone with any unknowable agenda “who” is almost definitely a bot is going to pollute the minds of innocent people trained by generations of actual journalism to believe what they see or read if it’s put forward as “news.”

    Of course idiots with no conception of how anything works but who suddenly have a “theory” are not worth listening to about anything—especially when those amateur theoreticians are, again, bots.

    Of course someone who hasn’t spent one actual second studying actual medicine will tell you that the COVID vaccine contained tracking devices and is absolutely going to make us all autistic, or that if you drink apple cider vinegar you’ll live forever, immune to all diseases including homosexuality and other things that aren’t actually diseases. Saying something doesn’t make it right, and having something to sell doesn’t make it worth buying. And also, fake medical advice can fucking kill you. Oh, and these alternative medicine influencers are also mostly bots.

    And what are “bots”? Bots are fake social media accounts created and operated en masse by some unknown someone or someones out there with some unknown political, financial, and/or cult agenda.

    And unknown people with unknown agendas are never good guys.

    A long time ago, for my own mental health, I stopped watching or reading the news—from any source. When I get a new phone the first thing I do is delete the News app.

    Did you even know that was possible?

    Seriously, do you know it’s possible to not have have your phone beep every time another idiot does something idiotic?

    It is.

    I walked away from “the news” because of my pathological impulse to attempt to solve any problem presented to me. You can’t tell me something terrible happened at some far remove, a situation over which I have no control or ability to fix, without me descending into some kind of impotent rage cycle.

    That’s me, of course. You might be able to shrug shit off, understand that there are some things that are out of your control except to offer your thoughts and prayers. Good for you…?

    I don’t know. I’m actually asking.

    That said, I still have a Bluesky, LinkedIn, and Substack account.

    Why?

    I’m seriously questioning that.

    One thing I have done recently is delete those three apps from my phone, so in order to access those accounts I actually have to go to the websites. I have to be intentional about my exposure to social media. I have also placed the links to those sites on my browser in a folder called “Monthly,” so I have to walk through a warning sign of my own creation that is me asking myself “Do you really need to go here today?” And sometimes I answer myself, “No, Phil, thanks for that. Never mind.”

    That has been helping.

    Bluesky is still better than X. Substack is… actually something I barely ever look at. LinkedIn…? I recently tried to reach out to contacts to help my daughter get a job, but beyond that, I’m not looking for a job, and besides my two dogs Athans & Associates Creative Consulting has no employees so I’m never going to hire anyone either, so really, that account just needs to go.

    There are some smart people writing smart stuff on Substack. That feels like a place that, used carefully, will continue to yield ideas of value. Of course, the majority of Substack is articles about how to make a living writing articles about how to make a living writing articles on Substack.

    Bluesky?

    Is “it’s not a steaming cesspool of reactionary AI-generated propaganda with the explicit goal of destroying the global economy like X and Facebook” enough to keep me there?

    I honestly don’t know.

    But I can tell you with perfect certainty that I don’t need it.

    And the ridiculous nonsense generators like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest…?

    Watching videos of teenage girls trying on new clothes is creepy no matter how you slice it, but if, like me, you’re a sixty-one year old man, that just has to be a no.

    So then that leaves me maybe flipping through Substack once a month to see if maybe Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oats dropped something interesting.

    I’m fine with that, and encourage literally every single other human being on the planet to be okay with that to.

    Social media was an “if you build it, they will come,” proposition for the end-stage internet, and it worked.

    What people (and corporations and political action committees and cults) actually did with it when they got there was a wildly successful proof of the concept that power corrupts by attracting corruption, and no one needs absolute power to fuck up entire nations.

    They built it, we came, it’s terrible, time to go.

    —Philip Athans

    P.S. Wait… does GoodReads count as social media? I’m kinda all over that.

    And now please note the wildly hypocritical moment to follow…

    Join our group on GoodReads!

    Fantasy Author’s Handbook is also on YouTube!

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    Or contact me for editing, coaching, ghostwriting, and more at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting or Reedsy?

    As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

    If you’re doing a digital detox this weekend, buy a paperback copy of this and read it, then write a monster story—maybe about an evil  internet app that destroys the world.

  • WRITING THROUGH TIME

    One is frequently asked whether the [writing] process becomes easier with the passage of time, and the reply is obvious—Nothing gets easier with the passage of time, not even the passing of time.

    —Joyce Carol Oates

    True… at least to a certain extent.

    It’s long been held as a truism that our creativity declines with age, and as Ms. Oates would seem to indicate, it declines alongside everything else. I wear reading glasses to read, and did not when I was in my twenties. I have aches and pains caused not by some challenging outdoor adventure but because I “slept wrong,” carried the hamper downstairs to do the wash, or for no apparent reason at all. I have always had weird sleeping patterns—at least according to what I still hold to be the abject myth of the eight-hour nightly sleep cycle—but for me “a night’s sleep” is more like three to six periods of sleep spread over maybe seven hours. I think I’m actually asleep on average three hours in every twenty-four. When I’m terribly exhausted after carrying the hamper around that can go up to five hours.

    This is what we mean when we say nothing gets easier with the passage of time.

    As for the creative decline, I’ll point you in the direction of Dean Keith Simonton’s Scientific American article “Does Creativity Decline with Age?” for a more considered and expert opinion on the subject.

    Though there is an underlying thread in that article that backs up Joyce Carol Oates’s and my own experience, there is indeed considerable hope for continued creative output into our Golden Years.

    Really this depends on the sort of creative work you’re doing, when you first begin that particular creative endeavor, what age you are when you do your “best work,” and the pace of your output along the way.

    It is indeed true that young artists—pretty much every rock star inhabits this category—fall into the early peak group. How many rock stars in their 60s and 70s are out there on the tribal casino circuit playing forty year old hits? I took my wife to see Rick Springfield and his opening act Lou Graham of Foreigner at a casino down… I think it was around Olympia… I don’t even remember the name of it. Rick Springfield was smart enough to run through his hits, and the audience of predominantly women in their fifties loved every second of it. Because, seriously, all the rest is just jivin’, honey. Lou Graham of Foreigner (I think that’s his legal name now) apologized for performing one song from his new CD, which was available to purchase from a folding table near the bar.

    So then when did you achieve your “best work”? Your “Jessie’s Girl” or “I Want to Know What Love Is”? In your twenties? Thirties? Forties? Fifties? Later? Even rock stars may not have been as young as all that. Rick Springfield was thirty-two when “Jessie’s Girl” hit number one, and Lou Graham was thirty-three when Foreigner recorded “I Want to Know What Love Is.”

    A lot of this seems to depend on how much you keep working. Authors like Isaac Asimov, Jack Williams, and certainly Joyce Carol Oates, just keep (or kept) writing, regardless of their age. Mick Jagger was only nineteen years old when the Rolling Stones first started playing together. They kept recording through at least 2023’s Hackney Diamonds, and toured for sixty-four years, with their farewell tour planned for this year. Mick Jagger is currently eighty-two years old. His “best work” might have been when he was thirty-five…? I’m a fan of Some Girls, anyway.

    At least according to Simonton, there’s something to be said about continuing to do the work…

    A person’s single best work tends to appear at roughly the same age as their output peaks. But their expected creative productivity at 80 will still be about half of what it was at that high point. Whether you view that as a significant drop or not depends on whether you see the glass as half empty or half full.

    Writing doesn’t require youth the way pop stardom does, or… I don’t know… super modeldom. Joyce Carol Oates (87) herself is proof of that—as is Stephen King (78), and other authors who kept writing well into their seventies, eighties or, like Jack Williamson, who died in 2006 at the age of 98, well into their nineties. Unlike, well, at least pop stardom, writing doesn’t require youth. Same as any successful musician, succeeding at writing requires talent and a respect for the craft, but talent and a respect for the craft is all a writer needs—the blush of youth is of no consequence for us.

    Want your creativity to still be active, want to still have your “best work” (in quotation marks because what even is the definition of that…?) ahead of you?

    Keep writing.

    —Philip Athans

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    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

    So far, this is my “best work,” begun in my early thirties and published in final form when I was sixty years old.

  • READING AS AN AUTHOR

    In Every Man for Himself and God Against All, filmmaker Werner Herzog wrote:

    Then in one of the Dr. Fu Manchu films, I noticed something the others hadn’t seen. In an exchange between goodies and baddies, one egregious villain on Dr. Fu Manchu’s side was picked off on a rock. He tumbled down into the depths, turning over and over. Twenty minutes later, something peculiar happened: in another fight, we saw all kinds—good and bad—meeting their ends. A few had taken refuge in a gulch between rocks, and I saw the same villain plummeting to his doom. It was maybe done a little quicker and took only a couple of seconds this time, but the man took off into the air in exactly the same way, with one foot out. No one else saw it, but I was convinced it was the same shot. For me, that was the moment I understood there were shots and cuts in a film. From that time on, I watched differently. How was story told, how was suspense created, how was a film constructed? To this day, I can learn only from bad films. The good ones I watch in the same spirit in which I watched when I was a kid. The great ones, even when I see them many times, are just an enigma.

    I’ve said before and will say it again that the most important continuing education for any author in any category and genre is to read the work of other authors. Anything and everything about the art and craft of creative writing can be learned in that manner. Just as Herzog learned about the language of cinema from simply paying closer attention to movies—including “bad movies—we can learn the language of prose fiction simply by paying closer attention to novels and short stories—including “bad” novels and short stories.

    This week’s exercise is to tell yourself:

    From this time on, I read differently.

    Then follow through with that in everything you read from now on.

    Notice what other authors are doing: how they construct a scene, how and where they are using em-dashes or ellipsis, where the commas are and how that sentence would read without them or with one more or with one moved from here to there; how a chapter ends and how the next chapter begins; how scene breaks indicate a shift in time and/or place and/or point of view; how and why I’m using semicolons in this sentence…

    And anything and everything else that might catch your eye like the same stuntman falling off the same rock. This will be a long list, so don’t be afraid to write stuff down, like, for instance, I did with that paragraph from Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which I pasted into my “commonplace book” file along with things like: “of all your crystalline totalities,” a line from Pablo Neruda’s “The Great Ocean”; “There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity,” from The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe; or this, from “The Resurgence of Miss Ankle-Strap Wedgie” by Harlan Ellison:

    He had to ask her to repeat her answer, she had spoken so softly. But the answer was nothing, and she said good night, and was about to hang up when she called him.

    To Crewes it was a sound from farther away than the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was a sound that came by way of a Country of Mildew. From a land where oily things moved out of darkness. From a place where the only position was hunched safely into oneself with hands about knees, chin tucked down, hands wrapped tightly so that if the eyes with their just-born-bird membranes should open, through the film could be seen the relaxed fingers. It was a sound from a country where there was no hiding place.

    When a book is open in front of you, class is in session!

    —Philip Athans

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    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

  • CALM DOWN

    In The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin wrote:

    Patience is required for the nuanced development of your craft.

    Patience is required for taking in information in the most faithful way possible.

    Patience is required for crafting a work that resonates and contains all that we have to offer.

    This is a message the community of authors—certainly genre authors—are not hearing in the current moment. More and more I work with authors who have set deadlines for self-published books to be on the market, for how long they’ll try to find an agent… and I try my best to work with them on those things.

    If, that is, I fail to talk them out of it.

    As an author, if you want to produce something quickly and get immediate feedback from the publishing world, write a poem. Or flash fiction. You can finish quickly, submit them online without an agent, and often get a yes or no in a few weeks, maybe a few months.

    But if you’re writing a novel and expect it will be finished in the next few weeks and published in the next few months, if you’ve heard and believe the terrible advice that the almighty algorithm demands you publish multiple books in a year in order to be “noticed” so your writing becomes a product you need to just get through and get out into the marketplace, well…

    Best outcome is you do manage to get that rushed “product” out there—and maybe you make more money than you thought you might. And then maybe everybody hates it and it follows you around for the next quarter century and counting like it’s some kind of criminal record.

    Or hell, maybe you crack it right out of the gate and write a classic that stands the test of time.

    Statistically speaking, of course, either of those outcomes are wildly unlikely to occur.

    I don’t have control of the global economy, the publishing and bookselling business, trends, influencers, critics, librarians, AI slop, or book-banning domestic terrorist organizations.

    And neither do you.

    But what we do have control over—if we don’t intentionally cede that to the algorithm or the self-imposed production schedule—is the quality of our own work. And quality takes time. Time spent writing, spent honing our craft, learning how to write better, spent gathering lived experience, reading, rewriting and revising and maybe tossing it in the garbage, to killing then resurrecting our darlings, to getting two-thirds of the way through a 100,000 word novel and realizing you have nowhere to go and no idea who these characters are and what the hell was I thinking with this—oh, wait, no… I know, they need to have a friend who can pick locks. Okay… note to self: go back and add a thief…

    That’ll take some time, and might just mean this book doesn’t meet its self-imposed algorithm-driven deadline. So now you’ve painted yourself into a corner: blow that deadline, or make the book better?

    Please, always choose the latter.

    Always.

    “Impatience,” Rick Rubin tells us, “is an argument with reality.”

    It’s how you, even with the best of intentions, destroy your career before it even starts.

    Both the act of writing and the business of publishing move slowly—or, we could say, at their own pace. You can force that—sometimes. I have and lived to regret it, but the money really helped when my kids were little, so…

    It’s your life, your novel, your career, but let me leave one more quote from Rick Rubin to wrap this up:

    If there is a rule to creativity that’s less breakable than the others, it’s that the need for patience is ever-present.

    Yeah, calm down and focus on the writing.

    —Philip Athans

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    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

    Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.

  • BE DIFFERENT

    Hey, y’all…

    There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on earth. Individuals all different, all wanting different things, all knowing different things, all loving different things, all looking different.

    Everything that has been on earth has been different from any other thing.

    That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life… I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.

    —DIANE ARBUS NOVEMBER 28, 1939, PAPER ON PLATO, SENIOR ENGLISH SEMINAR, FIELDSTON SCHOOL

    from Diane Arbus Revelations (2003)

    There are books like Save the Cat that will tell you there’s no such thing as an original idea then force you into a baseless formula to “guarantee” your success as an author of fiction. There are LLMs that will do the writing for you by plagiarizing pirated books by authors who actually sat down and wrote something, which is what you should be doing. There’s advice and hacks and cheats all over the internet to help you gain a huge audience for your indie book, none of which actually do that or there would be a million indie publishing millionaires out there—and there aren’t. You can force yourself to write to some kind of algorithm, which, alas, you’re never actually going to have any visibility to, so that’s another lie—or, best case: a wild guess. Why would you think such a thing exists when even the biggest and oldest and best established publishing companies in the world lose money on 90% of the books they publish? You don’t think they aren’t paying people six-figure salaries to crack the Amazon algorithm? And yet they have not cracked it yet.

    All of this is about capturing the magic formula for “success.”

    Let me tell you something I learned the hard way:

    You can fail as a sellout just as easily as you can fail as an artist.

    But you have to trust me when I tell you it’s better to fail as an artist.

    So, fuck formulas and algorithms, and LLMs, and marketing tags disguised as “subgenres,” and instead dig into yourself and write something only you could ever possibly write. Be different, because being the same comes with no advantages.

    Yes, learn your craft. Adopt techniques that help your readers understand what you’re trying to say. Follow at least the three rules of genre writing.

    But then launch yourself fully into the unknown.

    It’s not as scary out there as you might have been led to believe.

    —Philip Athans

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    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

    I wrote Completely Broken with no sense of story- or character-arcs or sub-genre or algorithms or anything but just… writing it. And I’m more proud of this book than anything I wrote for the money.

  • THEY’RE NEW, AND I’M SCARED TO DEATH

    Let’s start with this passage from the science fiction novel Babel-17  by Samuel R. Delany…

    She said something unprintable. When she finished there were tears starting on her lower lids. “What I want to say, what I want to express, I just…” Again she shook her head. “I can’t say it.”

    “If you want to keep growing as a poet, you’ll have to.”

    She nodded. “Mocky, up till a year ago, I didn’t even realize I was just saying other people’s ideas. I thought they were my own.”

    “Every young writer who’s worth anything goes through that. That’s when you learn your craft.”

    “And now I have things to say that are all my own. They’re not what other people have said before, put in an original way. And they’re not just violent contradictions of what other people have said, which amounts to the same thing. They’re new, and I’m scared to death.”

    “Every young writer who becomes a mature writer has to go through that.”

    I think this is almost entirely true.

    The “almost” comes in the form of young writers who do indeed have new ideas, something new to say. I feel like that happens more often than Mr. Delany seems to assume here, but still, yes…

    Writing is something we get better at, and not because we age, or as we age, but as Delany said, as we mature—if, that is, we allow ourselves to mature. Unfortunately not everyone does. That makes the idea of “a mature writer” a tricky one.

    Is it as simple as an accumulation of wisdom—whatever that word even means anymore? Or is it simpler than that? In her essay “The Power of Detail” in Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg wrote:

    Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived.

    Might a more mature author simply have a bigger set of lived experiences to draw from? A larger group of friends, acquaintances, coworkers, brief encounters… children and grandchildren… from which to draw upon for characters, for offhand remarks, for slang, for jokes, anecdotes, and tragedies? Hirose Tonso seemed to say as much in the 19th century…

    People nowadays love writing up the smallest, most vulgar details, thinking these are what “real” is all about. What I take to be “real” though is something else: the actual situations and real emotions of people narrated with no ornament. Young writers today will sketch out the hazards of infirmity and old age, or concentrate on representing mountain landscapes even while they toil daily as public officials.

    What results is something they have neither seen with their own eyes nor felt within their hearts: nothing more than rote imitation of words by the ancients. In such cases, even if they’ve represented a scene precisely as if one had seen it, the effect is no different from an actor dressed up in costumes. How can you say this is what’s “real”?

    If we can call all the accumulation of real life experiences, books read and written, tragedies endured, as so on “wisdom,” is that actually a good thing? Is there such a thing as too much wisdom? In “Poetry has lost its violence,” Justin E. H. Smith wrote:

    Life grows less eventful as we age, and the gap between our quotidian experience and the heroic register into which we spent our youth projecting ourselves only seems to widen.

    I can relate to that. My life is definitely “less eventful” now than it was in, say, my twenties—and you couldn’t pay me to go back. I’d hate to have to gather all that wisdom all over again.

    But hey, younger writers, never fear—you will gather wisdom whether you damn well like it or not. If you keep your eyes and ears and mind open and keep reading, living, and writing, you might just hit that terrifying place where you realize you’ve got something original to say. How old will you be when that happens?

    I haven’t the slightest idea. But didn’t Fran Lebowitz say it best?

    Think before you speak. Read before you think. This will give you something to think about that you didn’t make up yourself—a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when you are in the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions.

    And yeah, I will turn sixty-two this year so I think about shit like this now.

    —Philip Athans

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    Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

    Oh, and remember to do whatever you possibly can to stop the Republican party from burning books. At the very least…

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