 Fantasy: April 20, 2011 Issue [#4354] |
  Fantasy
This week: Absorbing a Little Daily Mysticism... Edited by: Jay's debut novel is out now!  
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Hello everyone! I'm Jay's debut novel is out now! and this week I will be your guest editor for the Fantasy Newsletter.
When I was growing up, I lived in an old farmhouse in the woods up a dirt road that was only one lane wide. In the spring and summer it was easy to believe that we lived in some kind of isolated pocket of reality. The woods surrounded us and it was positively mystical at times. There were things out there; at one time someone had hauled antique, rotting appliances and construction leftovers out there; covered in moss and creeping vines, fetid with age, they became the barrows of dragons and ruins of some minor civilization. The hunting paths deep into the brambles led across streams and fields, acres of maple and hemlock. There was a footbridge constructed of old shipping pallets that my young imagination was convinced must date back centuries, it was so unstable looking. Unstable enough that my mother forbade my sister or I to cross it, which meant that surely it must lead to some kind of dark magic.
I feel almost as if the woods themselves were full of some kind of magic, the farther I would walk into them. It's easy enough to pretend when you get far enough that things are no longer what you expect in your day to day life, that something mysterious and foreign and strange lurks just behind those trees or over that hill. I never made it far enough to get to any mystical place, but I feel like the exercise did me some good. It certainly made me wonder about the impossible possibilities locked in the reality that was not governed by the safety of modern electricity and indoor plumbing. The darkness at the edge of the woods after the sun went down still holds power over me; the mystery of what could possibly be lurking in the shadows there plays in my imagination.
To paraphrase some things Ray Bradbury said in one of his many essays; that the mundane has the most potential for sinister and weird underpinnings-- I think that this is possibly the governing truth of some of my favorite fantasy writing. I love magical realism and many of my fantasy stories are in fact set in otherwise normal or contemporary settings, but with unusual narrators and magical happenings. Wild and wicked faeries, perhaps, living deeper in those woods. Maybe a talking bear or a quest for a mythic object lost in time immemorial, or, or, or....
I like to think that maybe had I been a little more brave back then and walked just a little farther into those woods, I might have found something really special. Those days are long gone and with them I wonder if the fey footsteps I could swear I heard just a few steps behind my own every time I ventured nearer to that dark bridge.
Look for inspiration in those mundane things. Another suggestion from Ray Bradbury-- his title ideas in his most prolific writing years all stemmed originally from things in reality that would then be twisted around later: "THE ATTIC," "THE WOODS," "THE CARNIVAL." While it's true that many of these stories are horror and suspense stories, they also draw upon a deep fantastic element also; the idea that something sinister is lurking behind something that we all take for granted-- that something, somehow, completely unreal, has invaded what we know and love, or that something magical once happened here, and could happen here again...
Until next month,
Take care and Write on!
~j |
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