It's not a real fantasy novel without...

I don't know who first suggested that you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, but I think they were wrong. Obviously as a metaphor for life, not judging based purely on appearance is a laudable thing. However, taking it more literally, I quite often find myself drawn in by creative cover work. I cannot be the only one - there is even a prize for it at the British Book Industry Awards. A couple of years ago it was won by one of my favourite books, The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas.

Fantasty novels (or at least the ones I always stroke fondly in secondhand bookshops) have the best covers - the dramatic watercolour.

Here are some of my favourites:

Merlin by Stephen Lawhead. All his books are well worth reading, especially if you're going on a long beach holiday!

Song of the Lioness quarter - children's books but still great fun and very easy to read all in a row without stopping for meals.

I have never read these, but the cover makes me think I would enjoy them...

The guy on this cover is clearly on a super important mission. That he would rather not be on, from the looks of things.

This is a really old edition of this book, but it's a good'un.

There are so, so many more, but I should proabably stop now and get back to my real work. However, it's good to have something to aspire towards, and these covers pretty much say it all.

P.S. Whilst looking through top-selling fantasy on Amazon (curse you, Stephanie Myers), I noticed that 1984 by George Orwell is in there. I'm not sure I'd class that as fantasty anymore...

I have written 41 836 words.

I go through phases of being slightly obsessed with word count. I think this is some sort of pavlovian response hammered into me at university. Although my undergraduate essays had no word limit (or, indeed, often a title or reading list), my MA was strict on writing what needed to be said in the RIGHT number of words. Succinctness or bouts of over-creativity were not encouraged.

But, now, I am writing my own work. I can write as much or as little as I like! I can make up words! (Not too many though - see here for a dire warning.) So why the focus on word count? I blame three factors:

1. Windows Vista, in which Word automatically shows word count in the bottom right of the screen, meaning you can go backwards and forwards typing and deleting the word 'the' just to see it flip from 39999 to 40000. Not that I did that.
2. Pan-MacMillan, whose submission guidelines for new authors say that they count anything under 60000 words as a 'novella', not a real book at all. Since one of the biggest arguments in English Literature - the date of the first novel in English - revolves to some extent around whether Aphra Behn's Oroonoko can be counted as a novel or a novella, I don't want to fall down this gap. Caution must be exercised.
3. My own irritating spirit of over-achieving. Really, it's amazing I have any friends at all.

All that said, I could not possibly have written the story I had in my head in any less words than it is in. Or at least, not in many less - there is always room for improvement and I have already noticed my own tendency to always reach for that extra adjective. I reckon the finished product will be about 70 000 words. Whether they'll be like the ones I already have remains to be seen. My brother, who has read the first few chapters, tells me I tend to slip into 'tell, not show'. I am not certain what this means, but I shall probe him further and see what may be done.

Still, more than 40 000 words! That must count for something, right? I shall reward myself with ice cream.

We love it because it's not true

For me, one of the main attractions of fantasy writing has always been the simplicity. This is not to say that complex plots and well-developed characters are absent, quite the opposite. But the situations they find themselves in are always so wonderfully clear-cut.

"A shadow has appeared in the west!"
"Well, it is almost time for sunset."
"No, it is a harbringer of dark things and other bad stuff!"
"Oh. Really? You're sure?"
"Forsooth, it can only be so. It hides behind spiky mountains!"
"Spiky mountains?! Not on my watch. Gather the good-looking troops!"

I for one love situations where the enemy is clear and obvious and the good guys and gals can meet them in righteous battle. I think part of the attraction is that this almost never happens in the real world. You might suspect that the bank you have your money with is investing in dodgy arms trading, or have some inkling that those 5-pairs-for-a-pound socks aren't quite on the right side of the ethical line, but there is little opportunity to go out and raise arms to smite the evil.

It would be so much easier if, in the real world, the bad guys always wore black. And lived in towers behind spiky mountains.

The fantasy begins

For years, I have had a dream. A strange dream. I wanted to sit among those giants of the literary world, those authors with long series of books, all with dramatic watercolour pictures adorning the covers, who could make up their own words with merry abandon, who could create names from sounds their cat made while it was asleep and call it a new race of people: I wanted to be a fantasy writer.

Earlier this year I woke up one day with an idea - this was what I had been waiting for! After a lifetime where the most creative thing I ever did was add pear to chocolate cake (works very well, by the way), I was finally able to put fingertips to keyboard and start my own contribution to the world of wonderful, weird world of rubbish fantasy writing.

As I write I am about halfway through writing the first novel, and I am loving it. I have no illusions: I have read too much of the good stuff (and the bad) for my ideas not to feature some derivation from my favourites. But I am told that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and I hope it will be clear in the final text that any inadvertent similarities to characters living or imagined is purely done in love. Will that stand up in a court of law?

Here I will take a look at where my own writing attempts take me and also cast a wider look at the world of fantasy writing.