  Fantasy
This week: Edited by: shaara
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As one of your Fantasy editors, my goal is to challenge you to think outside the KNOWN and to help you inject your tales with fascinating facts while jagging left and right through troublesome frolics and teethe-writhing dilemmas.
Perhaps we can help each other to safely jog through these twisty turns of radical thought, alternate viewpoint, and dynamic detail. Come! Let’s head down the Path of Dimensions, untextured by any earthly array.
In other words,
let’s drop out of reality for awhile.
Shall we?
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Passage Ways
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How will you get into your magical kingdom?
What is the answer that summons your characters off and whisks the reader away to a place where unicorns, elves or talking lions exist?
A bit of magic helps. In fact, it is often the rule. How else could we suddenly get some place else in a wink of an eye?
In Alice in Wonderland, the magic transport device was no more than a rabbit hole. In Harry Potter, a train takes us to the wizard’s school. In Peter Pan, fairy dust sends us flying. In the Wizard of Oz, a tornado is the magic key for entrance.
Each story has its own tool, its own passageway into NeverNeverLand. What stroke of imagination will you use to power your character’s entrance? Will it be a carpet that flies, a magical beast, a Jules Verne-like submarine, a giant phoenix, a dream or nightmare, or just a simple, ordinary closet?
The laundry pile has scarcely been sorted. Perhaps grass clippings sprinkled over naked toes will fly a heroine into Unicorn World.
Maybe a tissue, dyed orange, and tied three times securely, around a bologna sandwich is the entry into Dragon Kingdom.
Or does it take four dried leaves from a sycamore tree, three twigs of a Lincoln rosebush and seven empty snail shells buried under the full moon in August to whirl up the dust cloud that blows your heroes off into a Wild West Hoedown on Planet Pliskop?
Actually science fiction doesn’t even require such magical spells, disappearing phone booths, or flying horses powered by genies or wizards.
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It simplifies magic with merely a belief in the future. Spaceships HAVE the ability to travel people to far off worlds. Everyone knows that.
Right. Don’t I wish that space and time allowed us to journey far enough to find someone else with speech and thought! I wish, I wish, I wish. But for now, that is actually no more possible than riding a magic carpet.
I guess that puts science fiction on the same plane as magic.-- the magic of the wormhole, or the black hole which sucks us in without stretching, compressing, or tearing us apart molecule by molecule.
We sci/fi authors may not put a lot of faith in talking mushrooms or broomsticks, but we sure make use of the kind of magic that allows us to cross light years instantly. (That’s because our wizard-acting engineering geniuses all neatly fold the universe around their convenience.)
Of course, I’m not complaining. I second the motion (pun intended,) even though if it came to preferences, mine would be horse back riding space travel rather than machine-induced flying.
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[Watching the latest PBS show on Mars really depressed me. It’s not enough that I doubt I’ll ever see mankind on even our nearest planet, but the obstacles don’t have to be so impossibly impossible do they? It makes it so difficult for even an optimist like me to still believe. (But yes, I do believe in fairies, I do Peter Pan.)]
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But back to passages. What if our passage to somewhere else was merely a missing piece of knowledge? What if words transported us? What if Dorothy’s route was the exact one we should take? Maybe we don’t really need special witch’s shoes or even words: “There’s no place like home.”
Perhaps, as the physicists tell us now, the other worlds are already beside us, and we just have not noticed them. Ten dimensions, according to string theorists – a whole variety pack, they think we might live beside.
So no more magical transports needed. It’s only ideas we have to utilize for our passage to Fantasy Worlds -- ideas will move us through space and time and allow us to meet friendly/unfriendly aliens or beasts that look like cartoon characters with elephant noses, stripes like zebras, or fins that wiggle back and forth as they swim through dimensions, like the ones in our minds and in the insides of all the books we’re just about to write.
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February Featured
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This exciting story about two kids having a very reckless adventure in space is exactly what I’m talking about. It’s what space travel SHOULD be like, if designed the way we wished it were. Sigh.
“A terrible rending of metal seemed to cut through her soul as a piece of the outer casing peeled off the shuttle and grotesquely pirouetted away into the black hole. Seconds later, a minute crack appeared in the view screen and crawled upwards like a tiny worm leaving its silvery trail. Calla stared at it in horror. New crazing appeared, splaying off at acute and unexpected angles, resembling an untidy plate of vermicelli. Finally the pressures grew too much and a shrill crack heralded the giving way of the screen.”
I could tell you about this story, but I won’t. Just know that it’s a laugh and a half. I’ll entice you into it, however, with the following words from the author:
“Through the smoke three new fairies emerged. “Again Lard?” said the tall skinny one. “Again with the cake?” She brushed some angel food crumbs from her tulle skirt.
“Sorry, Ulcera,” Lard said. He was squat with rolls of fat squeezed into a too-small tux. Even his fairy wings looked out of shape.
The third one was furry and sniffing through the kitchen. He settled to gnawing at the leg of a kitchen chair. “Rusty, come!” Ulcera commanded and he slunk back to her side, his ears, antennae, and wings all hanging lower.”
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I’ve got to tell you that this piece sucks you into the fullness of its horror. Oh, my. Not my cup of tea at all. I was so glad to be home! But what an imaginative read!
“Odan watched his wife Jesmin crouch on the concrete yard gnawing a synthetic chew bone. Saliva glistened off the toy which squeaked each time she chomped into the plastic. Her fingers tore at the piece, and when that didn’t work she clutched it between her teeth and swiped her head from side to side. Spit flung in every direction.”
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Warning! This piece is horror and addictive. You absolutely can’t stop reading! Welcome to the world of the werewolves!
”The pain was instant. It was like thousands of nails driving into my body. There was heat and cold of unbearable extremes all at once. I saw Duggan pulling another wolf skin from his duffle bag just before I blacked out.”
I think you’ll get a kick out of this one. I sure did. I understand just what the wolves were talking about!
“It smelled so bad and was so filthy that we all pitched in and gave it a bath, which revealed it to be a "he." He squirmed and wriggled and whimpered and tried to escape, but we were able to corral him. He calmed down and seemed to enjoy the attention, because he kept squealing noises of pleasure. When he was cleaned up he was, unbelievably, even more hideous, but in a cute kind of way.”
I want a fire lizard, too! This author took one of my favorite animals and creatively set it to work.
“When the first layer was completed, Fiammetta spit flame over it. Her whitish scales became pink, then red with her effort to sear the sand into glass. Portia ate an apple while she waited for that layer to cool. She built more, not as many as the actual castle had, but enough to show the inspiration. After each completed level, Fiammetta, her little fire-baby, made it permanent with a layer of glass on the outside.”
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This poem is not science fiction, and I don’t believe it’s fantasy, but I felt the need today to add it to reassure folks that my viewpoint is NOT that science is magical wishes. I do believe in fairies and in SCIENCE. I have to, for if we don’t put faith into the future, then we are doomed.
“So many people lay seige to
Our science dollars.
They speak of the waste...”
That’s all for this month . . .
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February Comments (from January)
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LJPC - the tortoise 
Comment:
Hi Shaara! That's an idea I never thought about before - transferring characters that you find in the works of others; borrowing them, shall we say. I actually have a lot of trouble with characterizations. They're either dull or caricatures (in my opinion). What I need to do is analyze what I like about my favorite characters or what makes certain famous characters memorable. Also, I remember the James Herriot books, too. I LOVED them!! -- Laura
I like to give each character something unique. This guy has a twitch just under his eyes, and every time he lies, it wiggles up and down. The blonde woman over there constantly scratches her eyebrow. Sometimes she does it leisurely as if the feel of the fuzz against her fingers relaxes her. When she’s angry she yanks at the hairs. When she’s laughing the eyebrows jerks up and down spasmodically. Etc. (I happen to like eyebrows, by the way. I suppose it was Spock who got me hooked.)
As to characterization -- for me, the only way I can really get inside a character is to become him/her. Of course having multiple personalities as I do . . . (Just joking. I’m not schizophrenic; I can barely spell the word!)
Tornado Dodger 
Comment:
Hi Shaara
I read your Fantasy NL even though I don't write Fantasy. Your editorials are always truthful and interesting plus you always include wonderful stories to highlight. Keep up the awesome work on these. I truly enjoy them. ~ Brooke
Thank you so much. Your comments alone made me eager to write today’s newsletter. I keep thinking that no one is reading the newsletters because the comments are so sparse, but you said YOU read them. That makes all the difference. Thank you.
Please everyone else, please let me know if you’re reading my newsletters. Without encouragement to continue, I keep thinking of all I could be doing – like writing that best-selling novel!!!! Sigh.
Smiling Jack
Comment:
Thank you so much, Shaara, for including me among so many talented writers.
Jack
You’re welcome. It was an outstanding tale!
AliceNgoreland
Comment:
I love how you set-up this newsletter: the use of different color fonts, quotes from the stories and then your comment.
I love James Harriet as well.
Alice
Thank you, thank you. I am so happy you like what I’ve been doing. Thank you for letting me know and for your sweet comments! It is so important to the newsletter authors that readers send us their thoughts.
Not to nag or anything, but PLEASE, PLEASE comment!
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Fantasy: February 24, 2010 Issue [#3569]
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