Fountain of Knowledge

Fantasy - to me, defined as "what makes it fantastic is magic and not technology/science".

High fantasy - maybe it's the same as sword and sorcery; I would say it's fantasy which definitely doesn't happen in our world. I know, no fantasy does, really, but you can imagine a paranormal or urban fantasy or whatever set in a not-very-different Detroit, but high fantasy? That probably needs to be in the Land of Thalaria or something like that. And people tend to have names along the lines of O'Na'ke, although frankly when I write high fantasy they have names like Liam and Simon because I don't like spelling the weirder ones.

Paranormal I think is even stricter with sticking to "our world" than urban fantasy. I.e., in urban fantasy you might have witches living in Manhattan; in paranormal you can have people saying things like, "that's ridiculous, there's no such things as werewolves" but seriously concerned with the demon infestation in the sewers of Queens.

What I want to know is the term for some of the stuff I write--like a witch fighting a canyon-spirit in 1860s New Mexico. Not urban. Not precisely paranormal. But...hm. Rural fantasy? Western fantasy? Gets difficult enough to categorize that I scamper back to my high fantasy novel with sort of the same feeling you get when you give in and just go through the McDonald's drive-thru, even though you did see Supersize Me.

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