Archive for July, 2025

Publicity, publishing business

Book Tour vs. Convention

The other day on Bluesky (where people went when Twitter went toxic), there was a discussion about book tours and which authors get them and why. Someone pondered whether there would be any benefit to an author creating their own book tour, and as I thought about it, it occurred to me that if you’re a relatively new author working in science fiction and fantasy and you have the time/money/energy to create a book tour, you’d do better to spend that time, money, and energy going to as many science fiction conventions as possible. You won’t be able to do it all in one neat trip since they happen throughout the year and only on weekends, and you won’t be able to time it to your book’s release, but you’ll get a lot more bang for your buck when it comes to building an audience. I decided to make a blog post about this since this is going to be way too long for comments in someone else’s thread.

I should add the caveat that this was what worked for me about 20 years ago. Publishing and conventions have changed since then. I haven’t been back to conventions since the pandemic, so I don’t know how things have changed because of that. There are also reader-oriented gatherings in romance and mystery, but I’m not as knowledgeable about how they work, and I don’t think they have the smaller local and regional events that you get in science fiction/fantasy. Most of the local/regional romance events I’m aware of are aimed at writers, not readers, and aren’t a good promotional venue. Most of the sf/f conventions will welcome related genres, like horror, paranormal romance and mystery with some sort of speculative element. I should also add that I have not been a bestseller and the series I promoted like this got dropped by the publisher (not entirely due to specifics about me/my books but an overall change in direction), but the series is still in print 20 years later and I’ve been able to successfully continue the series independently, so it seems to have worked.

First, let’s define what I mean by “conventions.” There are two main kinds, the media cons and the literary cons. The media cons are what you’re most likely to see depicted in popular culture (a lot of murders tended to happen at these on CSI). These events are focused on movies, TV, and comic books, and the guests tend to be celebrities. The panels are mostly about promoting TV shows, movies, etc. You can get autographs and pictures taken with the celebrities, for a fee. These take place at convention centers or at major hotels that have their own convention centers and are usually run by companies for a profit. They’ll often have “comic” (since many of these started as conventions about comic books, then branched into TV and movies when they started making adaptations of comic books, and from there to all TV and movies in related genres) or “fan” in the name.

Literary cons tend to be non-profit and volunteer-run. Most of the guests and speakers are writers of some sort. There may be panels about media properties and popular culture, but the panelists will be writers and fans sharing their perspectives, not people involved with these properties. There are a lot of panels about books and writing (though it’s not strictly a writing conference, and there may be a writing workshop held in conjunction with the con). The convention may have a big-name author as guest of honor, but otherwise the speakers will be authors from that area or who are willing to travel on their own dime.

Some of the big media cons have begun adding literary tracks and inviting area authors, and some of the literary cons have added more media programming and have even brought in guests (though not so much celebrities as people behind the scenes, like special effects artists, composers, writers, sometimes voice actors for animated shows). I’ve been an invited speaker at a few media cons and haven’t found much benefit, so I’m mostly going to address literary cons (which includes those that may include some media elements).

What can you expect if you attend one of these events as an author? Mostly you’ll have the opportunity to participate as a panelist for discussions on various topics. This usually will not involve directly discussing your book, other than in your introduction. The idea is to show yourself as a thoughtful, witty person, which may lead to people looking up your books. You may be able to get a reading session, at which you’ll read an excerpt from your work, and/or an autograph session. There are often parties in the evenings, and there’s usually a hospitality suite where you can hang out. Unless you’re the guest of honor, you will pay for your own travel and hotel. Many cons will give you a free weekend membership if you participate in a certain amount of programming, though some may require you to purchase a membership and then will refund you if the convention makes enough money, and some may require you to purchase a membership and maybe participate in some panels before they put you on the list to be an invited guest at future conventions. Once you participate as a panelist, you generally get on the list to be invited to future conventions (unless you behave badly or enough people say they don’t want to be on panels with you). There will likely be a dealers’ room full of vendors selling books, games, t-shirts, and related items.

The reason I say cons are a better use of your time and money for a new writer is that at a bookstore event for a new author, most of the people who come will be your friends. You might get a new person or two who happens to be in the store and is interested, and there’s always That Guy who’s writing a book and expects you to tell him how to get published, possibly even refer him to your editor or agent, and who has zero interest in your book. A convention will be full of hundreds of people who are interested in books in your genre. It’s a Target-Rich Environment for finding new readers, since they’re there to talk about things they love and find new books to read. These people are devoted fans, the sort of people who make fan websites for things they’re passionate about, who have podcasts, blogs, or whatever the thing of the day is. They make costumes to dress as their favorite characters. They make art about things they love. They’re the people who spread word of mouth. If you get these people hooked on your book, they will buy the rest of your series or other things you write when they’re released, they’ll leave reviews, and they’ll talk about your books with others. You probably won’t directly sell enough copies at a convention to pay your expenses, but you’ll have enough indirect benefits to make it worthwhile early in your career (though there may be diminishing returns as time goes on once you’re already known).

How to properly do a convention as a writer could be its own post, but here are some basics on how to get started. For one thing, you’ll need to approach a convention about participating in programming at least six months in advance. Look on their website to see what their requirements are. Some may have a form to submit. Others will have an address to e-mail. They may tell you when they want these requests submitted. You’ll share your writing credits and any other info that might be relevant, like any non-writing areas of expertise. Are you a scientist or historian? Are you an expert in some kind of craft? It’s fairly straightforward for traditionally published authors to get on programming, but it may be tougher for independent authors, since those who behave badly (and oh boy are there some) ruin it for everyone else and there are no gatekeepers like publishers to vet the work. You’ll need to show that you’re a professional. Having a professional-looking cover, website, and Amazon sales page will really help. Membership in SFWA will show that you’ve reached a certain level of sales. This is where that other area of expertise may help. Some cons might ask you to register as a regular attendee but give you the chance to take a “fan” slot on some panels, and then once they see how you are as a panelist, they may invite you as an author guest later. One really good way to get on programming is to volunteer to be on the con committee for your local con. Then they’ll know and trust you during the planning process, and they often turn to committee members to fill out panels. Once you get on programming at one convention, it’s easier to get other cons to accept you (and people who run conventions go to other cons, so you may meet them).

Once you get signed up to be on programming at a convention, get some kind of promo item, like postcards or bookmarks, made. This will be like a business card. You can give them to people you talk to about your books, and most cons have some kind of area where you can leave promo material. You can get postcards done pretty cheap through places like Vista Print with no real graphic design ability. Put your book cover on the front, then on the back you put the key info about your book, like title, your name, publisher and ISBN (if you’re traditionally published), your website (maybe a QR code too), and then a short hooky blurb about your book. This is all just text, so I’ve done it in Word and then saved it as a PDF to upload to the printer. It’s probably even easier using something like Canva. It’s important to have something to give people who ask you about your books so they’ll remember. Then the cover will jump out to them as familiar when they see it again in a bookstore or online.

If you’re traditionally published, you’ll want to visit any booksellers in the dealers’ room soon after you arrive. Introduce yourself and tell them a little about your book (if they’re not busy at the moment). If they’re stocking your book, point it out to them. If not, hand them one of your postcards. You can really increase the efficiency of your trip (if this is an out-of-town event) by mapping out any bookstores you pass along the way and in the city where the con is and stopping by to introduce yourself. Sign their stock if they’re carrying your book. Give them one of your promo items if they aren’t so they’ll have the info to order it. Either way, see if they want to take a few of your promo items to give out to customers.

If you’re independently published, check the con’s policy for book sales. I’ve seen some cases where they require everyone selling anything to have a sales tax document for that state. Generally, you can sell books during your autograph session. Some cons offer a “rent a table” opportunity where you can pay a small fee to have a table in or near the dealers’ room for half an hour to an hour. I wouldn’t recommend that a new author get a booth in the dealers’ room and spend the whole event just selling books. You’ll get a lot more mileage out of interacting with people and participating in programming. Sometimes the booksellers will agree to sell your books on consignment. You won’t make as much money per copy, but it’s nice to have someone handle all the credit card processing and sales tax, and your books will be displayed alongside all the other books rather than just on your little table. I’ve even had booksellers keep copies at the end of one convention to sell at other conventions, then we’d settle up the next time I saw them.

There’s a lot more to conventions for authors than that, but the main point here is that for a new author, there’s more benefit to getting in front of hundreds of people who don’t know about you but who are primed to be interested in your books than to maybe be in front of a few people who already know you.

Some pros/cons:
Book tour:
Pros — You schedule it on your timing. Less expensive because you can take care of it in one continuous trip and only spend one night in each place. You choose your hotel or can stay with friends/family. It’s all about you. You aren’t sharing the spotlight with anyone else.
Cons — If you’re new, most people who come will be people you already know. You’re not really expanding your reader base, especially if the tour isn’t arranged by the publisher so that there’s good signage and the store hasn’t ordered in a big number of books to go on display.

Conventions:
Pros — A big audience of people who are looking for things to read and prone to liking your genre, so a great opportunity to get more name recognition and expand your audience. Extended amounts of time to spend building relationships.
Cons — can get expensive because you’ll need multiple hotel nights and will likely need to stay at the convention hotel. Can’t hit them all in one convenient road trip. The con schedule may not coincide with your book release schedule. You’re sharing a spotlight with lots of authors, so it’s possible to get lost in the shuffle, especially if you’re an introvert.

writing life

Book Brain Strikes Again

I’m a bit more than halfway through Rydding Village book 4, and I seem to have a bad case of Book Brain. For instance, I managed to forget that this was a blog day, in spite of writing it on my to-do list this morning. Anything that isn’t the book seems to fall by the wayside in my brain. Not that I’m spending all my time writing. In fact, there’s a fair amount of procrastination. But I’m thinking about writing, playing out the movie of the next scene in my mind, often while I should be doing something else. When I get like this, cooking and driving can be dangerous. I’ve missed freeway exits because I’ve come up with a good idea and lost track of where I was. I have to set timers when I’m cooking because I’ll get sidetracked and forget that something has been on the stove too long. This is where my air fryer oven comes in handy because it will automatically shut itself off when the timer goes off. There’s a lot of microwaving during a bout of Book Brain. I really should do a better job of preparing for when I get about halfway into a book and make sure I have food I can throw into the air fryer or microwave.

I’m also not really fit for social interaction when I get like this. There’s a lot of tuning out the surroundings and staring into space. I’ll lose track of what the person I’m talking to is saying or what I just said because I just had a thought about the book.

I find that I’m more tired in this phase of a book. I’ll finish writing for the day and just collapse. I might be able to watch TV — at least, I have the TV on and I might be able to follow the plot of a TV show, but I wouldn’t be able to summarize it for you later — but reading is a challenge because the page becomes a jumble of words that have no meaning since my brain takes off into la-la land. I tend to sleep harder and longer and have vivid, intense dreams that may or may not relate to the book.

Although it’s disruptive to my daily life, Book Brain is usually a good thing because it means that I’m immersed in the story. Sometimes it’s like I’m writing fan fiction for the story in my head. I’ll come up with scenes that will never make it into the book, imagining conversations the characters might have that aren’t about the main plot or backstory scenes for the characters that aren’t relevant to the present. I do often get good insights about the characters from these mental detours, and that makes the characters more real to me as I write. Book Brain also means I get a lot of writing done and hit my deadlines. I’d far rather spend a couple of weeks spaced out and not able to do much other than write and collapse and have the book get written quickly than stare at the screen and go blank because there’s so much going on in real life. A balance would be nice, but since Book Brain usually doesn’t last for more than a month, at most, I can get the balance at other times. I do try to make myself leave the house so I don’t become a weird hermit. I can brainstorm while taking a walk, and I’ve found that going to classical or jazz concerts is great. I’m supposed to be sitting still and staring into space, so I can let the music wash over me while I think about my book.

If I keep on at the current pace, I may finish the first draft next week, and then I can emerge from my cave, blinking into the sunlight, and try to remember what I was doing before I fell into my book.

Life

Cemetery Walks

I’m gradually getting into a sense of what my “normal” is going to be in this house and what my daily routines will be, now that I’m mostly settled (I still need to organize the basement where a lot of stuff got stashed). This week, I’ve tried to get back into taking morning walks, and I’m figuring out what a good walking route may be.

One good place to go walking appears to be the big Victorian cemetery across the way (it’s across the street from the next street over — I have a good view of it from my front windows). A cemetery may seem like an odd place to go walking, but this one is a lot like a park. In fact, it reminds me a lot of Central Park in New York. It has a similar kind of landscaping, and some of the buildings are a lot like the ones in Central Park. There’s even a stone bridge over one of the paths that looks a lot like the bridges in Central Park. Think of a really hilly Central Park and fill it with tombstones, and you get the idea. The cemetery apparently dates to the 1840s, when the graveyard at the church downtown filled up, and this was on the edge of town at the time. It’s still in use now, but a lot of the graves are the ornate Victorian style, and there are a few mausoleums and monuments. There’s a whole Civil War section I haven’t walked around because it’s at the top of the very steep hill and I’m working up to that.

An old cemetery full of weathered stones, seen on a misty morning.
This is an especially fun place to walk on a foggy or misty morning. I feel like I should wear a floaty white dress and let my hair down.

So, why walk in a cemetery? In this park-like space, there are walking paths winding throughout, and there’s no traffic, so you don’t have to dodge cars. No dogs are allowed on the grounds, so you don’t have to worry about the “it’s okay, he doesn’t bite” idiots letting their dogs run loose while they carry the leash. It’s very peaceful. There are a lot of trees around the paths. And it’s interesting. I like trying to read the stones (some of the older ones are too weathered to read well). I’ve recognized names that are now attached to streets around town. The people who used to own the land where my house is are buried there, but I haven’t found them yet. You definitely see the impact of modern medicine and vaccinations in the huge number of infant and child graves from the 1800s. There are stories in every one of those stones. I’ll avoid the place if I see a setup for a funeral, but early on weekday mornings, it’s a nice, quiet, safe place to walk and think.

When it’s not as hot or when the sun’s at a different angle, I’ll probably walk downtown sometimes, too. I love walking around a downtown area early in the morning when the shops and businesses aren’t open yet. There’s also a park nearby that has good hiking paths, but that may be best to drive to. It’s in walking distance, but if I’m going to do a serious hike, I don’t want to use up my energy walking through the neighborhood to get to it.

I’ve also had to rethink the way I do things around the house, like where I put my shoes. In my old house, I had one of those shoe caddies you hang from the closet rod. Here, I have very little hanging space in the closet, so there’s no room for that. Then it occurred to me that I don’t wear my shoes inside the house, so why do I need to store them in my bedroom? The “basement” of this house is the back half of the first floor (the house is built into a hill, so that part of the house is underground). It’s just through a door in the kitchen, and the closest part to the door is the part used as the laundry room. I put a garment rack there so I can hang things up to air dry, and I also have a few coats hanging there. I hung my shoe caddie there. I can put on my shoes just before I leave the house and take them off before I go upstairs when I get home. That was a big mindset shift, going from the way I’ve always done things to the way it makes sense to do things now. In my old house, my bedroom was right off the entry way, so having the shoes in my closet was the easiest way to put them on just before I left. Here, that’s the basement.

So, morning walks in the cemetery and shoes in the basement. Just a couple of ways my life has changed.

Life

Shower Singing

I had a big realization last week: I can sing in the shower now.

My whole life so far, I’ve either lived with other people or lived with walls that connected to other people’s homes. My house in Texas was a townhouse, and because builders like to put all the plumbing together, the bathroom walls always seem to be where units intersect. I could hear when my neighbors flushed or had the shower on, so I was hesitant to sing in the shower.

At least in that house the living room didn’t connect to anyone else’s home, and I was my own upstairs neighbor, so I didn’t have to worry much about TV volume, and I could generally sing in my living room or the upstairs loft without worrying about bothering neighbors.

Then I moved here and spent a year in an apartment where I could hear every sound my upstairs neighbors made, so I was hesitant to make any sounds at all. I didn’t dare sing (unless the neighbors were being particularly noisy and obnoxious), and I didn’t even say anything when talking on the phone that I wouldn’t want them to hear.

But in this house, my walls don’t touch anyone else’s walls. There’s a good 20 feet between my house and the neighbors’ homes on either side, with trees in between. I can’t even see the house behind mine because it’s up such a steep hill that their floor is about even with my roof, and there are a lot of trees in the way. While I was in the shower, I realized that I could sing and no one could hear me. It was so liberating to just let myself cut loose and enjoy the acoustics from a small space with all that tile, plus the warm, moist air that’s good for the vocal cords. Now I try to remember to sing when I’m in the shower.

I’ve started singing in choir again recently, so this is good for helping me get my voice back in shape. I’d started drifting away from choir even before the pandemic. I’d missed choir for a month or so after a bad cold that left me with a lingering cough, and the director didn’t seem to notice, so I wasn’t exactly feeling the love, and I wasn’t enjoying a lot of the music we were doing. Then the pandemic hit, and I hadn’t felt motivated to go back before I ended up moving. I’ve had to switch denominations because there’s really only one church in town that has a big music program and a lot of activities, but it’s an Episcopal church and I’m Methodist. The Methodists are actually an offshoot of the Anglican/Episcopal church and the services aren’t that different from what I’m used to. It’s a historic church. The congregation pre-dates the American Revolution (and there are graves that old in the churchyard), but the current “new” building dates from around 1850. It’s a local tourist attraction, largely because of the architecture and the fact that the stained glass windows are from the Tiffany workshop, with one even signed by Tiffany himself. The choir loft is in the rear of the church, in the loft with the pipe organ, and it’s like sitting inside the organ when it plays. The acoustics are amazing, and the church is often used as a performing arts venue for classical concerts. Buildings designed before there were microphones tend to work that way.

For the summer, they have a “just show up Sunday morning” choir, and I’ve been going to that, and I think I’ll ease into choir when it starts up in the fall. I’ve had to switch parts because they have too many sopranos and need altos, and I’m the kind of soprano who can sing alto (both having a good low range and the ability to read music and find notes).

So, I’ve started singing again, whether singing around the house or in the shower, and I’m getting back some of the joy I used to find in it that I’d lost.

One other fun thing I’ve realized about this house: It’s the first time in my adult life that my address has been just a street number without a unit number attached to it. I’m having to be careful when filling out online forms to change my address to be sure to erase what’s in the “unit number” field because the autofill doesn’t necessarily do that, even as it changes the street address.

This is also the first time I’ve been responsible for yard work, which is its own story. We’ve been having daily afternoon storms, so the grass is growing like crazy, but the grass is also never dry, making it harder to trim it. As soon as the sun dries it enough, it starts raining again. I call it the Daily Deluge. I’m planning to spend the fall and winter getting rid of weeds, then plant something to replace the grass in the spring, but I still have to get through this summer with the patches of grass I have among all the weeds.

movies

Snow White Live

I finally put up the light-blocking drapes over the sliding glass door in my den, so now I can watch an entire movie in a somewhat theater-like environment in spite of the fact that it doesn’t get dark at this time of year until after 9 p.m. So, last weekend I watched the new, live-action Snow White.

There was a lot of controversy around this film. It was hated and panned by people who were determined to hate it (and probably never ended up seeing it) even before it was released. There were people who were mad because of the casting, people mad that they were doing live-action remakes of classic animated films, and people mad that they changed things from the animated version.

It wasn’t a bad movie. It has some seriously weird stuff in it that almost ruins it, but for the most part I liked it. I’m not actually a huge fan of the animated version. I watched it a couple of years ago when my summer movie night project was watching as many of the Disney animated films as possible, and while I can recognize that it was a major achievement for its time and the animation is gorgeous, it’s not a great movie. The pacing is strange, the main plot gets very little screen time (they actually cut stuff out of a fairy tale that was already too short for a full-length movie) and there’s way too much time devoted to silly dwarf antics. The middle third of the movie is devoted to the dwarfs washing up for dinner. And that’s not even getting into how Snow White was depicted as a pre-teen but she still rides off to marry a prince and seems to have no thoughts other than to cook and clean for men and hope for a prince to rescue her. This was a story that needed rewriting.

And rewrite it they did. I’d say this one comes closer to what happened with the live-action Cinderella, where it’s not so much a remake of the animated version as it is a new telling of the same fairy tale. The main plot does keep the major beats of the story, but it puts it in a different context and adds a lot of new stuff. Unlike the live-action Cinderella, it is a musical, but most of the songs are new. They only keep a few of the songs from the original and weave some of the musical themes into the score. I like the new stuff. It makes for a more interesting movie and fixes some of the issues I’ve always had with the story.

The problem is that it isn’t new enough. The things that don’t work well are the things brought over from the animated version. One of these things is Snow White’s look. They tried to make her look like the animated version, and that just doesn’t look great on a live human. That hairstyle was a major anachronism in the animated version, something from the 1930s rather than from the vaguely Renaissance-like era some of the costumes suggest. There’s a line in the movie about how the evil queen cut Snow White’s hair on purpose so she’d be less competition, but it really doesn’t work. Even worse is the main costume that somewhat copies the outfit the animated character wears. Again, it doesn’t do well in live action. It also stands out as drastically different from the costumes worn by all the other characters. It’s not even a good version of the animated dress. It looks like the “totally not copyright-infringing the Disney version, but you can still tell it’s supposed to be Snow White” costume you’d buy at Spirit Halloween.

And then there are the dwarfs. The people who were determined to hate the movie ahead of time were sharing a picture of Snow White with a variety of roughly dressed people and claimed that these were the “woke” version of the dwarfs. They were not actually the dwarfs. They were different characters entirely. The movie would have been so much better if these characters had served the plot function of the dwarfs. No, the dwarfs are still there — and they’re live actors made to look exactly like the animated versions with the use of prosthetics and CGI. It’s so uncanny valley that it’s horrifying. There were these cartoons with human faces in the middle. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were small children who became so distressed that they had to be carried out of the theater. If I’d seen it on the big screen, I might have fled the theater. I did yelp out loud when they first appeared.

But aside from that, I liked a lot of it. Snow White is an adult instead of a child, so it’s less creepy, and she isn’t moping about, waiting for a prince to rescue her. Instead of her “I want” song being “I’m Wishing,” which is about wanting a boyfriend, she sings about wanting to set her kingdom right again to carry out the plans her parents used to have. Instead of a prince, we get a Robin Hood-like bandit who’s part of a group driven out of their homes and living in the forest, stealing food from the castle (they’re the people in the picture the haters said were woke dwarfs). Snow White coaches the dwarfs into cleaning their own house instead of doing it for them. Snow White actually gets to know the guy and they’ve fallen in love before the true love’s kiss. He’s not just kissing some dead chick he finds in the woods (after spying on her at the palace). The new music is really good, aside from one song. That song isn’t a bad song. It just doesn’t fit the situation. I even bought one of the songs. Rachel Zegler gets a lot of hate, which I don’t understand, but she has a gorgeous voice and I thought she was good in the role. I liked the guy, too.

I’m not sure I’m going to rewatch the whole movie very often because those dwarfs are unsettling and I hate her costume, but if she had a better outfit and they let the bandits play the same role as the dwarfs without trying to copy the dwarfs from the animated version, it would have been a better movie. I definitely like it better than the animated version. It’s worth a watch, but you might want to distract any easily frightened children when the dwarfs show up.

Books

Adorkable Wizard Romance

I seem to have overcome my reading slump. I’ve read several books since I started doing more pleasure reading a couple of weeks ago. Some weren’t the best, but were easy, fun reads. I did bail on a couple because I could tell I wasn’t going to enjoy them, for reasons related more to me than to the books themselves. One I really enjoyed sits right at the intersection of fantasy and romance, being both a good fantasy and a good romance. This book is Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis.

It’s the story of a young archduke who’s been under the control of his “advisors” since he took the throne as a child. Even as an adult, he’s essentially a prisoner and a puppet ruler with things done in his name that he would actually oppose. His only hope is to escape and throw himself on the mercy of the queen of a neighboring kingdom, a powerful witch. But there’s a bit of a mix-up when he arrives at her castle because she’s expecting a new librarian to come organize her library for her. He can do that, so he settles in. She really likes the new librarian, who’s sweet and a bit geeky, but good at what he does, and he finds that a lot of the stories about the dreaded witch queen are exaggerated, other than the extent of her power. There’s just the problem that she’s sworn to kill the archduke she believes is a threat to her kingdom, and then there are internal threats she’s battling, as well, as she tries to secure her throne after taking it back from a usurper. And his “advisors” who really run his land are gearing up for a terrible war.

This is more of an intimate fantasy than an epic fantasy, as it focuses mostly on a few characters and one location, but it digs deep into those characters. I loved the hero of this book. He’s exactly my “adorkable wizard” type. It’s so nice to read a romantic hero who’s kind, smart, and gentle, not a blustering jerk. The relationship developed not just based on physical attraction but also because these two people had common goals and values at heart, and they both had overcome trauma in their pasts.

There are fun little touches of humor, especially in the interactions with the sidekicks. It’s not quite a romantic comedy, but there are elements of that, and it’s not too dark. This really is the perfect book for a relaxing weekend when you want to escape to a magical world.

Books

The Rightful Heir

A few weeks ago, one of the things going around social media was discussion on the terrible novel you wrote when you were fourteen.

I didn’t really write a novel at fourteen. I scribbled a lot in spiral notebooks, but it was more story ideas and character development, with very little actual writing. Most of what I worked on during my teens was an epic fantasy novel a long-distance friend and I were “writing” together. Again, there was little actual writing. We made and mailed each other cassette tapes (talking into a tape recorder like we were talking to each other) brainstorming characters, situations, and scenarios, but I don’t think we actually wrote very much. I guess you could say it was kind of like a roleplaying game, but without the rules and dice. The main characters were two princesses forced to flee the palace for some reason (I’m now fuzzy on the details). She had her character and I had mine, and they split up to have separate adventures, so it ended up being basically two books that might weave in and out with each other. I came up with ideas for my character’s adventures and she came up with her character’s adventures.

The only thing I really remember about my part of the story was that my fugitive princess ended up in the woods (I guess I’ve always had a thing for forests) where she ran into a mysterious young man who took her home to where he lived with his mother, who was a kind of sorceress who lived in a cottage in the forest. Somewhere along the way we learned that he was actually the twin brother of the enemy king. The mother had been worried what her husband would do with a twin who might complicate the succession, so she had one of her advisors, a sorceress, smuggle him out of the palace and raise him in hiding. He was basically a male Briar Rose (from Sleeping Beauty), only there was still a prince at the palace. I think part of the resolution of the plot involved this princess marrying him, and it ended the war when he took his place as king (maybe they got rid of the other king and he pretended to be his brother?). I don’t know that we ever got as far as figuring out the actual ending because I didn’t learn how to plot a book until years later. I’d come up with characters, situations, and maybe an inciting incident and some scenes, but then it all fell apart.

But thinking about this long-abandoned story during the week in which we in America celebrate our break from being ruled by a king made me think about how royalist the old-school fantasy that influenced and inspired this story idea was. Fantasy authors seemed to take the concept of the divine right of kings and the belief that there was actually something different and special about royalty to extremes, making kings somehow magically ordained for their position so that having the rightful king would fix everything. That’s where we got all those farmboy who turns out to be the rightful heir stories, and it was better for a farmboy who had no experience in running a kingdom to be on the throne if he had the right bloodline than for someone without the bloodline but who was experienced in administration. The villains were often the viziers or royal advisors who seized power, then everything fell apart because they weren’t the rightful heirs, but the kingdom could be healed if the guy with the right bloodline showed up, even if he had no clue what he was doing.

Some of that might come down to the idea that anyone who actually wants power isn’t suited to have it, so the power-grabbing vizier is bad but the innocent farmboy who’d have been content herding pigs is good, but it still has to be the right farmboy who has the magical bloodline. They can’t just grab a clerk who knows how the kingdom is run but who doesn’t want to be in charge and make him king.

I suspect some of this comes from fairy tales, where there’s often something magical that sets royalty apart, like The Princess and the Pea, where only a true princess would be so delicate that she’d feel the pea under piles of mattresses. There’s also the Authurian mythology, where only the rightful king can pull the sword out of the stone. The British class system probably also plays a role. There seemed to really be a belief that the upper class was actually physically different from the lower classes. Even writers who were progressive for their time have hints of that showing up. In a couple of her books, Charlotte Bronte has her teacher heroine be surprised that the coarse peasant girls she teaches are actually capable of learning (instead of realizing that peasants were only ignorant because they were denied the kind of education the upper classes got and had to spend their days working in order to survive, so didn’t have time to sit around reading poetry and history and translating things from French and Latin).

Tolkien gets into the rightful king story with Aragorn, and how things are going to be better now that he’s shown up and the right bloodline is on the throne, and I suspect that was a huge influence on the fantasy of the 70s and 80s that influenced my teenaged self. In the very early 80s there was also the big royal wedding and Princess Di, so royalty was on the brain. Americans may have broken away from having a king but a lot of Americans are still fascinated with royalty and bloodlines, so it found its way into even American-written fantasy. Maybe there’s some fantasy to the idea that instead of having messy elections, there would be a way to know for certain that someone was the proper leader who could make everything better.

I think more recent fantasy has veered away from the idea of the rightful king who makes everything better because he’s meant to be on the throne. If there is a ruler who makes things better, it’s because he’s a good person who makes good policy (like The Goblin Emperor). Terry Pratchett had fun with the trope by having the rightful king who has all the usual signs not want to be king, and the people who could put him in power don’t want a king. He just steps up when there’s a crisis and provides leadership, then goes back to being a member of the guards. Still more recent fantasy focuses on people away from the throne. It’s ordinary people or people who have trained for a role having adventures, and the goal isn’t about putting the right king on the throne. Writers are also exploring forms of government other than monarchies in fantasy worlds.

I have to admit that there’s still something fun about the idea that the person nobody would notice is actually the person destined for greatness. That’s where a lot of the story my friend and I worked on as teenagers came from. In fact, it started as a portal fantasy in which her character was whisked away from her high school to a fantasy world where it turned out she was a princess, and only as we worked more on the story did we remove that part of it. When you’re feeling overlooked and outcast in high school, it’s fun to pretend that you’re royalty and no one knows about it.

This realization has made me think about my own fantasy worlds. The more history I read, the more it seems like European royalty was actually genetically inferior rather than superior. There was way too much inbreeding going on.