People sense inner strength in people around them and in stories. That inner strength of right leads to fairness and stability. “Fair” means what is right, what is just. Readers tend to be attracted to good stories where the author defends the right and the characters are deeply invested in the outcome. Aren’t we all interested in being treated fairly?
Defending the right always appeals to us deeply, when it is our right in question. But what about when it is another’s right in question, and we are in the wrong? Then the measure of “fair” must be the same for both, or it is not just.
Acknowledging the truth of wrong and taking responsibility for where our actions lead is a major part of fairness and justice. It opens the door to mercy and enables change. It starts with telling the truth to ourselves.
“She. The witch. Did something to me.” I coughed as if there still might be a chance to purge myself of it, but even now, I could feel it settling into my heart, weakening me. If only I’d listened to God right away, rather than allowing myself to revel in my misery and anger.
In a culture that increasingly rewards split tongues, encourages the insanity of lying to yourself and others about gender and your very identity, approving evil in so many forms, “right” and “fair” are a breath of fresh air. Don’t let anyone redefine those words and make a good word mean something bad. Challenge what they say. Is it true? Is Social Justice really just? Is it right? Is it fair?
A good story cuts through the confusion, lasers through the vague screen of responsibility shifting, the darkness of untruth, and rebukes evil. It shows us what a just world could be, what it should be, and picks a rose for us from the garden of heaven to give us an inkling of what the future holds if we pursue true justice, fairness, and mercy.
A great story helps us understand our own confusions as we follow our heroines and heroes through their confusion, and see through it to the truth. An excellent story clarifies right and wrong, enacts fairness, justice, and mercy. It helps us see the truth of many things.
Jenelle Schmidt’s Steal the Morrow illustrates this well.
Olifur hung his head. “I didn’t take the shot,” he choked. “I couldn’t. I had my arrow ready, but…”
“Why didn’t you shoot?”
The gentle question startled him and Olifur looked up, confused. He considered the question. Why hadn’t he taken the shot? The moments of terror flooded back to him and he swallowed hard. “I couldn’t tell which one was Bet,” he said. “I didn’t want to hit her.”
“That doesn’t sound like fear taking over,” Fritjof said. “That sounds like wisdom.”
Olifur frowned, his emotions a tangle of shame and confusion. He couldn’t speak. Words failed to materialize.
Fritjof kept speaking. “You might have frozen for a moment,” he allowed. “But you didn’t let it take over. You acted. You drew your bow, but when you realized you might hurt a friend instead of your foe, you waited. Instead, you saw that you could help me, and you did. Lad, you didn’t run away, nor did you stand there frozen and unable to move. You did what you could with the tools you had. Probably saved my life and Bet’s with your actions.”
This snippet of a Fantasy Gaslamp adventure has the earmarks of inner strength, justice, fairness, mercy, and defending the right, all over it. How many earmarks can you find?
So while we search out fantasy adventures, and fight alongside the struggle for good in their pages, remember our true strength and ability and training, and the moral battle. And whether we are strong or weak in body, winning our battles first lies in the unseen realm. Then that war spills into the seen. We should be ready to fight as best we may in both worlds to defend the right.
For many of us, beauty has the strength of a Siren call, to put it in common terms. In other words beauty draws us like a lodestone, a powerful thirst, the call of the West, our true North.
This applies to the beauty of good things in the moral sense, the beauty of form in the physical sense, and the beauty of being in the spiritual sense. When one of these is present in a person, a flower, a creature it draws us. We sense by the beauty of its being that it is real. When all three capture our awareness we are a goner. In the best way.
Some things are a blessing to lose ourselves to. Beauty is one of them.
A friend of mine is releasing a book May 30th that shows us one aspect of beauty.
A purple flower swayed in the breeze within reach. I touched the smooth petal as if it might comfort me. I sensed its hearty energy within. So calm. At peace. Doing what it was made to do—use its beauty and invigorating scent to attract. It had no worries. How I envied the plant for that. I wanted what it had. The petal in my fingers stiffened and browned. I released the plant as if I’d killed it and been caught with the murder weapon in hand. –The King’s Curse, by J. F. Rogers
Do you see the context? The attraction of beauty and our ability to destroy it, even unintentionally. What is the cure for our curse? I think you may find some of the answers in my friend’s book.
I challenge the idea in the blanket statement that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Depending, again, on context, this may mean only that people have different beliefs about what constitutes the beauty of form, etc. In that context, of the beauty of form, it may be partially true in the sense of perceived beauty. Still, it is much more true that many things and people and forms are beautiful in their created selves, whether we ever see them or not and despite what we think of them.
This makes my heart sing, that beauty exists. That it exists and thrives outside of me, even despite me. Great stories show us beauties “that pierce like swords” as C. S. Lewis has said.
He says further of The Fellowship of the Ring, “Even now I have left out almost everything–the silvan leafiness, the passions, the high virtues, the remote horizons. Even if I had space I could hardly convey them. And after all the most obvious appeal of the book is perhaps also its deepest: ‘there was sorrow then too, and gathering dark, but great valor, and great deeds that were not wholly vain’. Not wholly vain–it is the cool middle point between illusion and disillusionment.” Isn’t that truth beautiful? About illusion, disillusionment, and our present fight against evil? Are we fighting?
All these beauties are worth fighting for, worth seeing and appreciating. Imaginary worlds are wide places of ideas, where the truths of the unseen can be painted in awestriking colors, such as in The King’s Curse by J F Rogers.
As I mention in Fantastic Journey,“Are we not seeking the beauty we have tasted somewhere, that strength that came to us at some time, that moment when a scent drifted past, as if it were a touch or a thought from another world? That time we were reading and a whole universe opened up, which had never existed for us before?” – pg. 10
Story impacts us by reflecting choices and results, thus helping us see the difference we can make in the world of the book, and in our own sphere.
Maybe that is another reason we love the adventure of voyaging in the fantasy realm. For the magic and mystery of discovery, where choices matter and we impact everything we touch. –Fantastic Journey pg. 74
How do you think stories reflect choices and consequences and the reality of life?
Well, some things are clear. We cheer when the bad choices of villains bring the consequences of justice to their door. Or, if there are mitigating circumstances that make us weigh justice and mercy, then our brains smoke a little, which is all to the good. Our brains are too flabby, and in need of exercise. Whether the villain gets his just deserts, or another chance with a helping of his deserts, or simply overwhelming mercy, choice always brings results.
The choice to pursue what is good and right brings fruit also, including the riches of goodness itself to ourselves and others. If good choices also brings pain at times because of the reaction of a villain, at least it is not pain brought because we chose badly. For our bad choices harm others, even if on so small a level that they simply care what happens to us.
Sometimes the reflection of story is about the choice of another on our behalf, after they see our choices. Such a story is E.G. Moore’s The Last Dragonfly. Etoiny chooses to follow in her mother’s footsteps. She chooses knowledge instead of the status quo. True knowledge, after weighing good and evil, not simply what she is told. She decides to allow the wide world in, instead of remain in comfortable insularity. Others around her make their choices. One will follow a heart of greed. Another will see the error of thinking Etoiny is a foolish child. One will love her to the end, and the last will discover what they missed. But there is hope for the future, in more opportunities, choices, and change. Though there is a point where choice may not be changed.
We cannot choose our circumstances, but we can, we must, we do always choose our reaction to our circumstances. Is it not almost always so in story, and life? The desire of our heart influences our will, our will determines our choice, and our choice always brings fruit. But thank God, He gives us the gift of mercy, and change. As it says in the movie, The Redemption of Henry Meyers, the greatest gift of God to man is change. I love that. The fact that we can change, we can do right, we can be kind when our hearts are changed. It comes down to choice.
I am thankful for mercy. I am thankful for justice. I am thankful for goodness. Today, how many times must I choose between good and evil? Stories bring us face to face with choice, result, and their impact. A glimpse into another life can rip away our excuses, and show us our own faces. It can also show us what we want to become, who we want to be like. Let’s make heroes and heroines, in both worlds. May choice change us.
One such hero that comes to mind immediately is Jonathan Renshaw’s Dawn of Wonder, The Wakening Bk 1. If you haven’t read the story of Aidan’s brave coming of age, you’re missing out. A curious, vulnerable, indefatigable hero, his tale is humorous, epic, and delves deep into choices. All at a good pace.
But what do you think gives strength to good choice, to bad choice? What chains a result to its choice? How are we bound by choice? How are we liberated by it?
As Alice Ivinya says in Crown of Glass, released yesterday, “I wonder if sometimes it is hard to know what is right and what is wrong until we’re forced to fight for it. And hard to appreciate something until we are forced to wait for it. Maybe sometimes, the darkness has to happen for us to understand the nature of light.”
In other words, often we don’t pay attention to right and wrong, or think deeply about it until forced to fight for the right, against wrong. And darkness shows light for what it is.
What choices do the heroes and heroines you read about make? How do they influence your thinking? And your choices?
Strength begins in the spiritual arena. Our Stormpoint for this month is how conflict in fiction spills into battle in the inner arena.
Inner strength draws evil, or pits us against it, as our authors’ books this month attest. C. J. Milacci’s Fugitive of Talionis has a heroine who is top of her class as a kidnapped trainee but who is just at the beginning of her inner journey that will strengthen her or break her. That’s the thing about hard circumstances. They make us more bitter and defeated, or wider of heart, stronger in both spirit and body. For each affects the other, as the inner arena touches, even directly feeds, the outer parts of us.
Paths of fantasy, under water or over wold, take us to interesting places and wondrous spaces, not to mention introducing us to fascinating people where every character is involved in the battle we all fight.
Fantastic Journey – The Soul of Speculative Fiction and Fantasy Adventure Pg. 8
Gaining the skills to survive, the will to conquer, the hope that makes us look up, the courage to fight, all drive us to become strong. And the simple yearning for justice, that evil will not always rule by force and fear, that also strengthens us.
But where are the roots of spiritual strength, and what are the results? The roots of every strength are in truth. The true truth of your circumstances. The truth of what you think. The truth of what you believe. The truth you act on. The truth of what is real, not what you wish were real.
“Call me crazy,” Nika says as we walk around some old rubble, “but I thought you were going to share a little more than that.”
I rub the back of my neck. “Remember Ava?”
“The girl who died in the river?”
I nod.
“Of course I remember her. Not something easily forgotten.”
She goes quiet, and I can tell she’s replaying the scene in her mind same as I am. I can still see Ava slipping from my grasp into the clutches of the river. Her lifeless body washing up on shore hours later.
“What about her?”
“Leddington is her hometown.” I let the words sink in.
“Oh.”
I lick my lips. “I need to tell her family what happened. Tell her sister that with her last words she wanted her to know that she loved her. You get that, right.”
She nods. “Yeah. I’ll back you up.” . . .
“I need to do it, Nika. But how can I face them when I’m the reason she’s dead?”
Nika stops and grabs my arm. “Bria. You’re not the reason Ava’s dead. She drowned because of Commander Ark, because of Colonel Valarius. Not because of you.”
“Maybe.” I shrug. “But I couldn’t save her.” I stare off into the distance.
Nika squeezes my arm that she’s still holding. “But you tried.” . . .
“I just wish I could have done more. Wish I could have held onto her. Kept her alive.”
“It’s not your fault. But I get it.” Nika ducks under a branch. “You’re not the only one with regrets. I have them too.”
I look over at her in time to see a flash of pain sweep over her face.
“But we can’t let those regrets rule our lives. God’s forgiven us both, and He has a path for us to walk in. If we allow ourselves to be hindered by everything we wish we could change or undo we’ll never really be able to walk in the freedom of God’s plan for our lives.”
I let her words sink in, not sure how to respond. Silence stretches between us, but somehow I think we both need it. As we hike the last miles of the forest, I can’t help but wonder what Nika regrets.
Fugitive of Talionis – ARC
Turning from the false and following what is true gives us strength and leads to more strength.
The impact of choice remains to be seen. Candace Kade’s Enhanced demonstrates this.
It’s a dangerous world, attempting to tread water in the ocean of words, let alone swim in these times where “cultural appropriation” and “cultural insensitivity” may blow up in our faces, after a mere brush against the drifting mine.
This is true for writers and readers alike.
One of those avid readers, squarely in the camp of enjoying new and fascinating stories wherever I find them, I have a few words in defense of us readers and writers trying to navigate the “cultural appropriation and insensitivity” minefield.
Take any movie set in the early Middle Ages, or any book. As far as cultural accuracy goes, most of them could be accused of insensitivity because they have not been historically accurate or true to the culture throughout their work. Yet it does not necessarily follow that they are culturally insensitive, or seizing the culture for their own.
The producers, story writers and authors are trying to communicate a time and place filled with people that stir our imaginations to fire.
The great stories call us to adventure, to love, to fight for good and conquer bravely. They are trying to help us understand a different culture, a different person, at the level of heart and soul. To do this to the best of their ability, they must at times use words or customs that did not even exist in those times they are creating a story about, or they must adapt them to our contemporary understanding. If they were true in every detail, we would completely miss some important character motivations and scene meanings because we had no idea that what we saw or read had a specific meaning, and we would possibly understand less than three words in ten because of old style language.
This is true whether we are English, American, or any other culture going back in our own history. If we are going back in time and crossing cultures, say from the American to Korean Middle Ages, there is an even larger cultural gap. But that does not mean our minds and hearts cannot meet despite the obstacles. Story is made to bridge the ocean gulf between us: whoever we are, wherever we are, whenever we are. The purpose of story is to communicate.
But what does it communicate? That is key to discover, so we can disarm the mines planted by those who love discord and do not respect peoples’ created differences with grace, who do not see that the very differences between us may be the source of every individual culture’s beauty, riches, and usefulness to the wide world. Admiration, respect, and appreciation bring every word and gesture in all forms of communication to life. Without that motivation, every word and gesture is dead, or worse, an explosion waiting to happen.
I use my own work as an example here, since I know my own motives better than those of any other communicator. Like any writer of past times and historical fantasy, in Path of the Warrior, the first companion story in Falcon Dagger, I am swimming between cultures. But it is dangerous.
This was kindly brought to my attention by my friend Jenn Rogers and her daughter, who are fans of Kdramas and all things Korean. I have never seen a Kdrama, though I plan to remedy that. My love for Medieval Korean culture started with my introduction to Tae Kwon Do years ago, and the martial history of the Land of the Morning Calm.
The martial focus was what I especially respected and explored on behalf of my main character in Path of the Warrior, an honorable exile from Korea, named in his native land Ryu Tae-shin, though his name was changed in my other stories, which did not detract from his honor but added to it, since he bore an insult with graceful nobility, because of necessity. That necessity was bearing up under slavery, and not confusing those who he knew would read of him later. He kept his name Tae Chisun, because he made the name – the name did not make him.
Despite any inaccuracies, of which I am sure there are at least a few, since I am seeing across cultures and time to Ryu Tae-shin’s story, I am attempting to bring to life a noble man, one I admire, who cares about his people, his family, and others. I am trying to share, across cultures, my appreciation of one who defends the right. Any mistakes in the work are mine, of course.
But do inaccuracies of naming, (which I have attempted to fix to the best of my ability), or historical settings or mannerisms (sometimes subject to poetic license), or outright ignorance, mean that this story of a man who sacrificed everything for the lives of his people appropriates the Choson culture or is insensitive to it?
Does it communicate that Koreans are bad in some way, more than other cultures? Does it claim they think exactly like I do?
No.
It is a story born of admiration for a strong people in a time of conflict.
That is my opinion, supported I think, by Hwarang Ryu Tae-shin himself. But you will have to discover for yourself if you can stand in Ryu Tae-shin’s boots and wrestle with the fierce conflicting loyalties between his sworn oath to his Kuksun overlord and his oath to save the love of his life and his people.
Would we put our lives on the line for right?
Some things, like our desire for justice, our love or hatred of truth, our depth of love tested by fire, our willingness to sacrifice for others, is the same in every culture. Mind you, I do not say we think down the same wave, or row the identical path to those values. The customs, mannerisms, and circumstances may, rather they will, differ. Completely leaving aside what we believe about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going, or our religion.
But we are all human, and our hearts are fashioned from cuts of the same sail, each loosed on the sea of life from our individual islands and continents. We can sail together, all the brighter and more formidable in array for our different flags, painted sails, or pennons.
If we detonate the mines between us with well-aimed ordnance, disarm them with the truth of the story, or on the occasion when there is truth in the accusations of appropriation or insensitivity, if instead of cursing the dark we light a candle of communication, we can retain and grow mutual respect and admiration for the greatness of every people. We can swim without harm through the minefield, and our hearts and hands meet in understanding.
We can enjoy our intriguing idiosyncrasies, our various culture strengths, and help each other overcome our different weaknesses, for everyone has them.
Each person is made in the image of our Creator, the master of the waves, of every land, every heart. He made equality. Meeting another heart and mind in the sea of thought, across the waves of life, is an invaluable gift.
May we overcome every wave and mine between us. For the sake of us readers, who love brave adventure and goodness, and also to encourage those who communicate these human truths to lighten our darkness.
Or, as my Tae Kwon Do Grandmaster, Tae Hong Choi, and Grandmaster Vince Church, would say, Pil Sung! Certain victory through courage, strength, and indomitable spirit.
Below is a sneak peek at Kingdom’s Fall rough draft that I have been working on a little this week in the midst of attempting to record Fantastic Journey, a book giveaway or two, and a wise word for February.
With a dark scowl, Brother Rolf hunted bright fall leaves blown in from the road off the church stoop. He swept fiercely. The wooden broom handle nestled in his grip, heavy as his old spear shaft. The wide entry-stone under his feet stretched two chill lengths into the walled court under the warmth of a new sun that peered over the walls of Bolton Abbey and streamed past the open gate. His breath shot in a thin cloud above the lowest step of the north transept tower.
A shiver raised his freckled skin where his thick wool sleeves did not protect him. The chill of the stone beneath the edge of his black habit pierced his bare toes. He moved faster, chasing an errant leaf, red as his hair, vibrant as the dew spangled dawn.
If a leader did not soon rise from the Northumbrian mists, stones sister-kin to the icy, glistering dark granite beneath his feet would mark the last resting places of his people. The kingdom was weakening.
Brigands harried the strongholds north of the Humber River as he did the leaves. With few to stay them while the king lay ill, such raiders grew ever bolder. Even Lord Dain Cieri of Cierheld, leading the north lords from his stronghold walls of uncommon stone, did not have enough armsmen to guard every hold between the ancient Roman Eagles’ great North Wall and the Humber. The brigands melted like frost when chased, yet seemed always to know where to strike. And with talk growing in the north against the south lords, the unrest in Britannia might mean more than brigands. It might mean war.
Turning, Rolf swept the last crimson beech leaf from the side door with a vicious stroke. Though the brigands had not yet struck near Bolton Abbey, it was their nature to hunt the vulnerable. Even though, unlike some church holdings, his brothers of the abbey had little in the way of riches. Even their dedicated church utensils were not of gold, but bronze. Abbot Alton would not keep gold when their people were hungry. Rolf smiled a little, then his scowl crept back. He was slipping indeed, not to have suggested to Abbot Alton the looming possibility of attack.
A thudding of small hooves and a soft, heavy step against the dirt of the courtyard rang loud at his back. Rolf swung around, continuing the swift motion of his broom in a level stroke.
A man leading a donkey ducked the twiggy end coming for his head and swung in return, the blur of a long weapon coming at Rolf from the left. His heart in his throat, Rolf sprang to the edge of the step to soften the full blow, bringing his broom across his body in both hands. Blade struck wood with a dull thud. Rolf blinked. The weapon did not bite, for it was sheathed in leather. And the face beyond it . . .
His breath of relief became a growl. Knocking the blade to the side, he dove down the steps and thrust the broom handle at his attacker. The donkey reared and backed. Its giant owner quelled it with ease, wrapping a long arm about the donkey’s gray neck and twisting his body to let Rolf’s attack slide past.
“Cease, little brother!” Dark eyes twinkled above a bristling black beard and a large, misshapen nose. That pot of a dented helm and the big feet in leather boots caressing the earth—Rolf knew them both.
A merry laugh rolled from the man’s wide chest beneath a mat of curly dark hair between a thick neck and gaping tunic. “Ye’ve not lost all yer’ skill.”
Rolf glared at the black-haired giant, who again whisked the sheathed blade about to rest at Rolf’s throat. Rolf squinted. The plain hilt marked his own blade—or the blade that had once been his.
-Kingdom’s Fall rough draft excerpt (this book will be part of Falcon Dagger – cover in the sidebar)
And if you missed the newsletter, here is an encouraging word of wisdom for February:
Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He will do it. And He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your judgement as the noonday.
Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him; Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, because of the man who carries out wicked schemes.
Cease from anger and forsake wrath; Do not fret, it leads only to evildoing.
-Psalms 37:5-8
This is so encouraging to me. That God would have me do what is right and fight injustice where I can, first in myself and then in my world. And that I can then rely on Him for the final outcome, that He will bring justice to all.
Many of these authors are part of my upcoming book Fantastic Journey – The Soul of Speculative Fiction and Fantasy Adventure. I highly admire their gifts of great books to the world.
Links are live though they appear dim or different colors. I can’t get the color to show brighter. Sorry! But they are alive and kicking. LOL
Want to join our adventure with Fantastic Journey and support these authors?
If you would like to be part of the fun and discover great fantasy adventure and speculative fiction books, here is how you can become a member of our Fantasy Adventure Team:
B. Your review of Fantastic Journey – The Soul of Speculative Fiction and Fantasy Adventure, releasing January 2021 will support me and, by extension, many of these wonderful Fantasy and Speculative fiction authors below. Please leave your honest review here – it’s a treasure worth more than gold!
Or you can email me a few of your thoughts about the book to fantasticjourney.dynamospress@gmail.com. I’d so love to hear what you think!
Now for the Q and A with Imaginative, Speculative, and Fantasy Fiction Adventure Authors!!!
Authors are listed in alphabetical order by first name.
1) Alyssa Radda
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A:
Fantasy has impacted my experience of the world mainly through the way I view possibilities.
When writing fantasy, anything is possible within the rules of the fantasy world. In my daily life, I often find myself searching for the more “magical” side of mundane situations or pondering, “What would happen at this moment if I were living in a fantasy world?”
This often changes my perception of my experiences and gives each day a unique twist.
Even a chore such as washing dishes can become exciting when I imagine what else could happen if I were to wash dishes in a land where alternate laws control the actions of water, soap, etc. Of course, I’m also always keeping an eye out for secluded places in our world that might actually be magical portals to a fantasy realm.
Q: How is clean fantasy or speculative adventure important to us as human readers?
A.
I think clean fantasy adventure is important to human readers because it allows our imaginations to develop without being influenced or negatively impacted by elements that make certain readers uncomfortable.
When reading clean fantasy adventures, the mind is given a safe space in which to delve into new ideas without having to be wary of unwanted scenarios.
I think this is a spectacular benefit for the imagination because the reader can then continue to daydream and enjoy the ideas presented in the story without feeling “contaminated” by thoughts connected to unwanted content.
Q: Why is great fantasy and speculative fiction vital to our future?
A.
In my opinion great fantasy and speculative fiction is vital to our future because it sparks and fuels the human imagination.
Even though this is said often, I believe it is said so much because it is an imperative truth: if we as humans lose our imaginations and sense of wonder, we risk losing the greatest moments and achievements that humanity can make.
Life without imagination becomes a life without dreams, and humans who have nothing to dream about have nothing to strive toward. They cease to live, and simply exist.
BIO: A.A. Radda is a fantasy author currently living in Ashland, OR. Between intense bouts of writing, Radda enjoys playing the harp, taking long walks through autumn leaves, and trying to bake without setting off the smoke alarm. Radda was inspired by classics such as Sense and Sensibility and high fantasy like The Hobbit to write a humorous high fantasy Young Adult series with touches of classic literature.
2) Anna Thayer
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
Fantasy has been the lens through which I have come to explore, cherish, and stand in awe of much of the world around me.
As a child and far into adulthood, it made up the majority of my reading, and presented me with keys to understanding the depth and breadth of what it is to be human.
I now adore revisiting it with my own children. I think it is important to note that fantasy should not be restrained in definition to tales of swords and sorcery; the Greek roots of the word are about imagination and appearance, or making something visible.
Fantasy gives us a means by which to make visible aspects of the world, and ourselves, which might otherwise remain hidden.
Q: How is fantasy or speculative adventure important to us as human readers?
A.
The world is saturated with an easy and glossy love affair with profanity.
Just as some might go out on a Friday night with the express purpose of getting drunk to have a ‘good time’, it seems that storytelling ‘must’ now be mired in profanity to be deemed valuable – in both cases, no alternative seems anything but risible.
I would argue, however, that far from making something gritty and realistic – and, by implication, applicable to our lives – writing filled with gratuitous violence, language and graphic events only feeds these tendencies in society at large.
Clean fantasy ultimately uplifts and encourages, rather than oppressing and titillating us with horror.
One of Tolkien’s characters remarks that ‘if more of us valued good food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world’.
I feel that the same applies to the choices writers make; if we valued the cheer and song of our artistry more than the lure (and sales) of its profane avenues, we would do much more good in the world.
Q: Why is great fantasy and speculative fiction vital to our future?
A.
Imaginative fiction gives us a vehicle by which to explore, renegotiate and encounter ourselves – as we are, and as we would like to be.
I passionately believe that telling stories – tales that bolster our spirits and refine our souls – is a crucial component of the human experience. To borrow, once again, from Tolkien: ‘we make still by the law in which we’re made’.
BIO: Anna Thayer is a writer, critic, teacher of English and lecturer on the works of Tolkien and Lewis. She is the author of ‘The Knight of Eldaran’ trilogy, author of ‘On Eagles’ Wings: An Exploration of Eucatastrophe in Tolkien’s Works’, co-author of ‘Out of the Darkest Place’ and editor of ‘Doors in the Air: C. S. Lewis and the Imaginative World’. A graduate of the University of Cambridge, she now lives in Canada with her husband and four children.
3) Ashley Maker
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
Fantasy, whether in books, movies, or other modes of storytelling, has impacted my experience of the world by providing an escape when reality is less than satisfying.
It also teaches lessons about people and life that I may have never thought about otherwise. And it feeds my imagination, inspiring my own creativity.
I never would have become a writer if it weren’t for the amazing fantasy stories I read growing up.
Q: Why do you think fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
We all need an outlet in life.
My own life might sometimes be stressful, but it’s not often adventurous, at least not like in the stories I read. Reading clean fantasy adventure allows me to live vicariously through the characters, which provides that creative outlet.
I always feel better after reading a good book—more balanced and less stressed. For me, reading is part of self-care, which is so important.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
It takes very little effort to find sad stories or bad news these days.
Even as I write this, the whole world is in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Great fantasy and imaginative fiction is a welcome escape for so many people.
We’re living in perilous times, and it’s vital we all find hope, comfort, or even just a clean escape where we can. Fantasy and imaginative fiction allow us to escape into worlds very different from our own, worlds that have different troubles, different rules, but at the end of the day worlds that feature characters we can relate to, learn from, and find hope in.
We need that hope. Our future needs it, and reading fantasy and imaginative fiction helps remind us to always forge on and never let go of hope.
BIO: Ashley Maker is the author of SEER and UNDER THE TREES. As both a writer and former English teacher, Ashley spends much of her time thinking about fictional worlds, grammar rules, and how to effectively share those things with others. She loves hanging out with her husband, two young daughters, and their zoo of family pets in Oklahoma.
4) Azalea Dabill
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
It would be easier to say how it hasn’t influenced me.
Great fantasy adventure has been a lifeline, an inspiration, a joy, a teacher, an expander of my world.
During illness it has been a comfort and enjoyment when I couldn’t get out. Imaginative stories give me the gift of adventure, even today.
Both good and bad speculative fiction inspire me, in the sense that the good shows me moral possibilities of the heart and mind and body, while the bad has shown me how far off track we can get, and identified evils that need fought in the spiritual arena, the wide world of ideas, and the sphere we breathe in.
Fantasy shows me heart-thrilling new realms, including the inner world of minds I have never known, places I have not gone, and kingdoms yet to be won.
Q: Why do you think fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
Moral adventure shows us a vital picture of admirable action, with a sense of the mystery, beauty, and courage we all need to live well.
It gives us a picture of goodness – not alone, or always unstained – but goodness as it opposes evil. It helps us sort out ourselves, and where we fit in life and in the universe. We learn by inner experience what it means to be inhuman and human.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
The moment we cease to imagine, an exercise in possibility, a kind of creation, we begin to die, in spirit if nothing else.
And it is vital to create good, to think of virtue, to be a witness of its thriving existence.
If we imagine evil things and live in them, we misuse our gift of sub-creation. We are not here to make the world worse, but to encourage, help, and inspire every person in the great race of life.
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
I used to turn to fantasy purely for escapism and entertainment. It excels in that.
However, as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that stories find a spot in our minds and hearts and linger through our days like the scent of a long-cold campfire.
That residue of old stories offers warm and comfortable memories when I need them. It’s the perfect dash of humor to share with a fellow fan. From the characters I’ve walked with in my imagination, I have examples both to follow and avoid, and their examples inspire my own choices as I walk through my life.
The stories give me more life experience than I can attain on my own and enrich my experience of the days I have yet to live.
Q: Why do you think clean fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
As I mentioned above, stories linger.
What we allow into our hearts and minds impacts our outlook on the world. So, as with everything, we have a choice:
Dwell on dark stories that emphasize death, destruction, chaos, and evil. OR…
Fuel our imaginations with stories that grow our appreciation for truth, honor, justice, purity, and courage.
I believe you can write and enjoy reading stories that lean heavily on the latter without sugar coating the evil in the world. Having experienced the conscience searing consequences of very dark stories in my own life, I don’t think you have to know the graphic details of an evil act to know how evil it is. Shock factor rarely makes for great art.
What we regain from clean fantasy adventures is some of the innocence we’ve lost in the West. And that is not a little thing.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
The stories we feed our souls can direct us toward the adventure of being the heroes we desire to be.
Or they can push us toward a dark and desperate perspective from which we want to escape.
For instance, one of the negative effects of the popularity of dystopian future stories is that it grabs onto a cynicism in our culture about the future and pushes into the worst fears. Even if the cynicism or skepticism was warranted, the flood of dystopian stories has led more people to see the future as inevitably bleak.
Often, the stories have little to no hope in their resolution, either.
The small band of survivors still face unimaginable difficulties in the tiny sanctuary they eventually find. It’s still them stuck in a scary world with little hope. And because of the extreme circumstances of those stories, they blur the distinctions between good and evil as easily as smudging a chalk drawing.
I still enjoy some of those stories, but I have to consider them carefully.
On the other hand, stories that envision an optimistic future can balance out our fears with hope.
There will still be danger and adventure, and yes, evil. But if the heroes battle through the tough choices and face their own weaknesses, our little seed of hope grows.
Maybe I can do the same, we think.
And that changes our future.
BIO: Brandon M. Wilborn is a man with too many interests, several of which led him to author The Treasure of Capric, the first book in The King of the Caves series, and a follow-up novella, Siren Silence. His love of science fiction and fantasy, along with an education in English and Theological Studies, inspired him to create stories that are full of epic adventure while grappling with deeper questions of life, faith, and our role in the drama of good and evil. After a wandering youth in a Navy family, he now lives happily with his wife and two kids in Idaho. Get a free story from The King of The Caves world at BrandonWilborn.com
6) Chris Walley
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
An interesting question!
To write fantasy is to free yourself of the boundaries and limitations of the present.
It is to continually ask ‘what if?’ questions: what if your neighbour was 400 years old? What if a giant alien lizard knocked on your door? Most people think along mental train tracks; to be involved in fantasy is to learn to drive an off-road vehicle of the mind.
Of course you may not appreciate what you end up thinking about but it is fundamentally a liberating way of looking at the world.
Q: Why do you think clean fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
In the best fantasy the writer puts the reader onto some unexpected and novel viewpoint.
From this place they may be able to look at their own world and see it in a very different perspective.
The best fantasy challenges people to see things afresh. We could spend a lot of time arguing about what exactly we mean by ‘clean’ but it is important that fantasy has limits.
Some of the things we can imagine we don’t want people to discover.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
As someone who is very much involved with the environment I am increasingly aware that the future does not look positive.
Fantasy can comfort us by suggesting that there are ways in which good can come out of evil but more importantly it can also challenge us by suggesting things that can be done to make the world a less terrible place.
You could also argue that fantasy loosens up the mind and gives mental flexibility. With a complex and constantly changing world, mental flexibility is an important asset.
BIO: I was born in North Wales in the 1950s but my formative years were in north-west England in what was then a rural part of Lancashire but has now become sadly rather built up. I was torn between sciences and arts but in the end decided to go to university to do geology probably because it ‘told the best stories.’ I ended up doing a doctorate with fieldwork in North Africa and on the basis of that took up a lecturing job in Beirut in 1980. I met my wife there, we had two children and with a new eruption of the Lebanese Civil War were evacuated in 1984. I then spent 10 years as an oil company consultant and in between contracts wrote a couple of thrillers that were very well received. I then returned to Beirut in 1994, chaired the geology department, wrote a couple of key papers on the geology of Lebanon and founded an important environmental project. For various reasons we left in 1998 and I then had a number of years as Christian editor in which time I also did my own writing including the first two volumes of the Lamb among the Stars. From 2004 to 2014 I did 10 years college lecturing in geology and environmental science and somehow managed to finish the last volume of the trilogy. In 2014 my wife and I relocated to the south of France where I have been involved in environmental work and also editing. Throughout all this time I have maintained a continuous involvement in leading and preaching in various churches and am currently involved in two English-language Anglican churches in the south of France. There’s never a dull moment!
7) Chuck Black
Q: How has fantasy & imaginative fiction impacted your experience of the world?
A.
I grew up dreaming of worlds unseen and adventures not yet lived.
Imaginative fiction fueled that flame within me as I devoured stacks of books that stretched my imagination and kindled my adventurous appetite.
As a youth, I quickly came to understand that some of the fiction I read did not honor the Lord or even the quest for humanity to better itself.
In my teen years I chose to not just be entertained by the story I was reading, but to discern and analyze the message of the author, whether good or bad.
I think this helped form the hidden gift of writing within me that I would only discover much later in my life.
Q: Why do you think clean imaginative fiction is important to us as human readers?
A.
Speculative fiction and fantasy tap into the incredible creativity and imagination that God pre-wired within us.
The problem is that without the careful boundaries established by our Creator, our sinful human nature can take us to places that can be destructive to our minds and souls.
I’ve tried to write fantastical stories that expand and push the reader’s imagination without compromising on the healthy boundaries of truth and healthy precepts.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
I don’t believe in pure entertainment…everything we read or watch is crafting our future self.
Therefore to read clean speculative fiction and fantasy propels us forward toward an adventurous but healthy future self.
Additionally, today’s imaginative fiction, and especially science fiction, has an enormous impact on steering the future of humanity.
How very careful we should be as writers in taking part of that great influence. Let us steer well!
Chuck Black, a former F-16 fighter pilot and tactical combat communications officer, is the author of seventeen novels, including the popular Kingdom Series, The Knights of Arrethtrae series, the Wars of the Realm series, The Starlore Legacy, and Call to Arms: the Guts and Glory of Courageous Fatherhood. Kingdom’s Dawn of The Kingdom Series received Homeschool.com’s “Voted #1” award and was on CBA’s top ten best sellers list twice in 2008 for all Christian Youth Literature. His heart is to equip and encourage families in their pursuit of Christ, and he seeks to do so through his allegorical and Scripture-based novels, his seminars, and his published articles.
In addition to speaking at homeschool and Christian conferences all across the United States and Canada, Chuck has written columns for the Teach Them Diligently Convention and the North Dakota State Homeschool Association. Chuck has also been published in LifeWay’s Home Life Magazine, The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, Walk Thru the Bible’s Stand Strong Magazine, and on various websites and e-newsletters.
Chuck is a believer in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and in the Holy-Spirit-inspired, infallible Word of God. He is devoted to his wife, Andrea, and their six children and multiple grandchildren. Chuck and Andrea homeschooled their six children for twenty-four years; all six are have now graduated from college. Chuck’s passion is to inspire people of all ages to follow the Lord with zeal and to equip parents, pastors, and youth leaders to accomplish the same.
8) CJ Brightley
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
Fantasy is a lens through which to see the world that embraces swashbuckling adventure, big stakes, and profound emotion.
When children face bullying at school, they can remember the courage of a beloved character who faced dragons. When we’re tempted to take the easy way out on a thorny moral issue, we can remember the characters who stood up for what was right, regardless of the cost.
As a Christian, I find the reason to do good in Jesus’s example and in God’s call upon my life. As a reader and a storyteller, I find that courage takes practice… it doesn’t always come naturally.
So when we immerse ourselves in the stories of characters who exemplify the morals we hold, we practice standing for them too.
Q: Why do you think fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
Clean fantasy adventure is one way to practice courage, integrity, kindness, forgiveness, generosity, and other morals through the living the examples of the characters.
When we read their stories, we see how those virtues change the world, and what they might cost. We fill our minds with stories not only of the characters who succeeded on the first try, but the characters who failed, who struggled, who persevered, who suffered, and who triumphed.
We read stories of those who could have given up but didn’t, who made the wrong choice but then admitted their mistake, who betrayed their friends and then repented of it.
Fantasy isn’t just about the perfect characters, but all the human flaws that make the characters real. Noblebright fantasy is about how those characters strive to be better than they are, how they hold ideals worth believing in, and how those ideals help define them as people.
What we fill our minds with changes us. As a reader, I want to fill my mind with what is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy, that will endure when the world falls apart around me.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
When we read books that strengthen our hearts with truth, nobility, and beauty, we strengthen ourselves for living in a broken world.
We better equip ourselves to stand for truth, to recognize and fight injustice, and to treat others with compassion and generosity.
Imagination gives us something to reason about, and so great fantasy gives our minds stories with which to understand our beliefs.
We give shape to abstract ideas about good, evil, truth, justice, love, and mercy, and engage our emotions in a way that makes those abstract ideas more compelling and real.
BIO: C. J. Brightley grew up in Georgia. After a career in national security, she turned her attention to writing. She lives with her husband and young children in Northern Virginia. She blogs at CJBrightley.com, where you can find sneak peeks of upcoming books, deleted scenes, background material, thoughts on writing, and books she enjoys. She also runs the Noblebright.org website dedicated to highlighting the best of noblebright fantasy. Noblebright fantasy characters have the courage to risk kindness, honesty, integrity, and love; to fight against their own flaws and the darkness of the world around them; and to find hope in a grim world.
9) DM Cornish
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
Foremost, it has always afforded me somewhere to dwell that is not banal or wracked with depravity, where even ordinary things in the pretend world are extraordinary to us.
As – I would argue – a commercial outworking of myths, fantasy has furnished my real world with greater significance, graced my waking life with unknown streets leading to impossible romance, or to park-side shrubberies containing buzzing elfin things eager for mischief and ready to unfurl adventures.
It could be argued that such a thing blunts me to the vitality of everyday stuff, but I find it imputes mundane little things with an extra, fizzing… something.
Q: Why do you think fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
It has been my experience that the best fantasy – the most thoroughly fathomed and artfully written – grants a certain measure of transcendence, by which I mean, that there is something more than just this ordinary – at times awful – world, that there is beauty of a higher order and with this some measure of the renewal of hope; that one day we will be home.
Moreover, even the most thinly veiled pulp pastiche can provide at least a momentary escape and surely without these inward ‘holidays’ the world would be worse.
Whether conceiving Holden Caulfield in all his brooding, or conjuring hobbits, elves, dwarves and men poised at the threshold of a deep and vaunted mine – all fiction requires leaps of belief and the eagerness to inhabit the author’s world of words.
Indeed, even a bland, thoroughly researched biography (I get frustrated when people cite the reading of biographies as somehow superior because – you know – it’s about “real” things…) requires mental invention and willingness to go wherever the author leads.
So, be it tales of wizards or the ‘facts’ on some historied politician, the result can be much the same: our inner life reinforced with the conjured imagery of people, places and deeds we ourselves have not likely met, been, or beheld.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
It seems to me that most folks reflexively attach portentous significance to things – which I reckon to be as much a theistic itch as it is mystical – and the mythic plays strong to this.
Yet, I fear we are misusing our imaginations – and being very much coached to do the same from those grim grey boxes in our lounge rooms or pocket-sized in our hands – to fill the world with conspiracies and threatening, jeering Others.
So it is important – vital – that our mental furniture has a goodly share of beautiful things and imagined lands and imagined people can be very beautiful things indeed.
And of course – as with all goodly fiction – the building of empathy is a happy reward for a reader’s labours and what the world needs now – has surely always needed – is empathy… sweet empathy.
BIO: Born 1972, David (D.M.) Cornish is old enough to have been astounded by the very first Star Wars. The discovery of Lord of the Rings when he was 12, then Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake while at university inspired almost habitual word conjuring and the inventing of secondary worlds. An illustrator by training, working with Omnibus Books brought him an opportunity to develop these ideas further. A thousand words at a time lead to the writing (and illustrating) of the awarded Monster-Blood Tattoo series. He is now working on a goodly number of illustration projects, teaches drawing at a tertiary level, and continues to explore the Half-Continent whilst spawning the beginnings of other settings in other genres.
10) EJ Fisch
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
Above all else, I’d say fantasy and sci-fi have taught me to look at the world and ask, “What if?”
We may not have unique magic systems or super advanced technology in the world today (or at least not to the extent that we see in many genre stories), but I still tend to compare what I’m reading to what I see in real life.
I start to come up with hypotheticals and I wonder how x-y-z technology or cultural issue will change and/or affect society 10, 50, even 100 years from now. Asking questions and thinking critically are some of the most important skills humans can learn, and I think fantasy and sci-fi can help with that.
Q: Why do you think fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
In addition to helping us think critically about the world we live in, good fantasy/sci-fi adventure is also a great escape from that world.
That’s not to say we should hide behind it and just ignore our problems, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to immerse yourself in a completely different world when things aren’t going so well in ours.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
I could go on and on about this, so I’ll try to keep it short, ha!
The bottom line is that, frankly, there are too many people these days who have no imagination whatsoever. And the problem starts with kids.
I think back on the pretend games my friends and I played when we were young—we had a blast, and some of those games have actually been the basis behind my writing.
Many young people today haven’t grown up playing like that, or reading imaginative stories, so they turn into adults who can’t think critically, and the cycle continues.
Genre stories can spark the imagination at a very young age, and I think it’s incredibly important that we ensure that happens.
BIO: EJ Fisch is a long-time fan of the science fiction genre. She’ll readily admit that she has a vivid imagination, which can be both a blessing and a curse. She has been writing as a hobby since junior high and began publishing in the spring of 2014. When she’s not busy writing, she enjoys listening to music, working on concept art, gaming, and spending time with her animals. She currently resides in southern Oregon with her family. Visit www.ejfisch.com or subscribe to the Updates From EJ newsletter to stay up to date on the progress of her work. Catch the occasional writing excerpt, view concept art, and more! Have questions? Comments? Thoughts about characters or plot points? Drop a note on her website, finder her on social media, or email at ej@ejfisch.com!
11) JF Rogers
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
Oh my word – fantasy saved my life.
Not to get into too much of the nitty gritty of my childhood, but I was abandoned by my mother as a baby, raised by a single dad, and put in the hands of an abusive so-called caregiver.
Needless to say, it was an unhappy childhood wrought with horrible memories. My imagination was an escape from a harsh reality.
Granted, it didn’t help me in school where my teachers consistently reported that I spent too much time daydreaming. But had I not had that incredible, God-given ability to transport myself to another time and place, I don’t think I would’ve survived growing up.
I devoured fantasy books and movies. Delving into the minds of another person’s imagination, enriched my imagination like nothing else.
Q: Why do you think clean fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
I hope not everyone had the traumatic childhood I did. But no matter what readers are facing, they’re human, dealing with their own human condition and the human condition of others.
That said, their life has difficulty.
Fantasy is a great escape. And, although escaping the world through fantasy saved my life, I don’t want people to miss out on living.
Rather, I hope they take breaks from their difficulties by delving into another world. Better yet, I hope they meet Christ, or deepen their relationship with Him through fantasy adventures.
Sadly, there is a lot of valuable time spent on books that worsen our human condition…that is…they feed our sin nature, convincing us that things our flesh enjoys are good for us, whispering in our ears that we should pursue such things.
They deepen our depravity by desensitizing us to sinful acts, normalizing them, or worse…inciting us to engage in them.
I’m a firm believer that we can and should enjoy so much this world has to offer.
Books, movies, music…everything we use to entertain ourselves can be used for good or evil. Clean fantasy adventures are necessary so readers can choose to use their leisure time for good and avoid polluting their soul.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
The more we visit the creations of other imaginations, the stronger our own becomes.
If we want to survive in this world, a great imagination is key. Not only as an escape, but, once we’re stronger, as a means for problem solving.
As a child, my imagination protected me from the world. As I matured, my imagination helped me solve difficulties that came my way. As I matured in Christ, my imagination assisted me in helping others by writing works that illustrate the need for a relationship with our Creator, and in problem solving in better, more Christ-centered ways.
Fantasy and imaginative fiction are vital to helping us develop our own imaginations and, with it, our own problem solving abilities. But Christ-centered fantasy and imaginative fiction are vital to doing the same…but in doing it right.
Bonus Question: On a more personal note, I’ve been curious about how you see shape-shifting in general in fiction, and in your series about shape-shifters in particular. Could you tell us a little about the good aspects of shape-shifting in your stories vs some of the negative aspects and ramifications as they have been used in a lot of fiction, as a bonus for our readers?
In regards to shape-shifting in fiction – honestly, it’s just fun.
At its core, all fiction is fantasy. It’s all make believe.
But what we typically think of as fantasy, whether it be an alternate world or unusual creatures, is really just a fun platform to demonstrate the problems in society and, for me, to illustrate Biblical truth.
We have the freedom to create a completely different world with its own people groups and problems. In my world, I have the gachen and the selkie.
The selkie transform into seals. The gachen transform into any number of different animals. Truthfully, they’re all gachen. But the selkie are elitists, they’ve separated themselves and ensured they remain pure by banishing those who fail to turn into seals when they reach their bian, typically around age 15.
Then there’s the Treasach. Again, they’re gachen. They’ve bred themselves to be larger, leaving babies who don’t meet their height and weight criteria to die to ensure only the largest and strongest survive.
Through these groups that don’t exist and can’t be offended, I can share personal feelings about such elitist behaviors and illustrate Biblical truths. Like in our real world with all the history, pain, fears, etc. of certain people groups – we’re really one race.
The human race. We all go back to Adam and Eve.
In Ariboslia, the shape-shifters are all gachen. God’s creation. But their own personal histories, pains, and fears have separated them…just like in our world.
But at the end of the day, each one of us as individuals, on earth and in Ariboslia, have to decide where we’re going to put our faith.
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
I was an adult when I realized, for the first time ever, that I loved fantasy and science fiction.
I had been reading it my whole life without identifying it, and when I did finally realize it a whole new world was opened to me.
I finally understood how to seek out specific types of stories—the stories that freed my imagination to dream and slay the dragons in my own life.
Q: Why do you think fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
This quote sums it up perfectly, in my mind…
“Fairy tales do not tell children [that] the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
― G.K. Chesterton
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
We live in such uncertain times. Life can be frightening if we give in to the fear.
Fantasy allows us to see worlds in which even extreme villains can be defeated.
This isn’t necessarily true of other genres, and those of us living today can gain courage, strength, and faith through fantasy fiction as we navigate these troubled waters.
BIO: KATIE CLARK started reading fantastical stories in grade school and her love for books never died. Today she reads in all genres; her only requirement is an awesome story! She writes young adult speculative fiction, including her romantic fantasy novel, The Rejected Princess, her Beguiled Series, and her dystopian Enslaved Series. You can connect with her at her website, or on social media @KatieClarkBooks.
13) KM Weiland
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
There’s no other genre I find as consistently thrilling as well-done fantasy.
It “speaks my language”—symbolically and intuitively—and has given me such a vibrant well of visuals upon which to draw, both in my writing and in my own personal life.
Q: Why do you think fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
Fantasy provides clear access to life’s symbolism.
Perhaps more than any other genre, fantasy is the one closest to life’s archetypal foundation, and as such, it allows us, as readers and writers, to cut through the clutter and the chatter of “real life” to get to the heart of things.
The best fantasy inherently combines total escape with absolute meaning, and because fantasy itself is metaphor, it is able to share deep thematic experiences without being moralistic.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
Psychologically, fantasy is incredibly powerful.
The unconscious mind doesn’t speak in words so much as symbols, and fantasy is the ultimate in metaphoric storytelling. If told with a strong understanding of symbolic truth and psychological arcs, fantasy is and can be, I believe, one of the more enduringly powerful forms of fiction.
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
As a child, I loved fantasy stories: the Arthurian legends, fairytales, and, of course, dragons, wands, magic swords… As my reading expanded, I began to see that, in some respects, all fiction is fantasy.
Think about it.
In most good stories, even ‘realistic’ ones, you’ll find an element of the fantastic, some marvelous point of change, or some incredibly courageous act, or that extraordinary moment in the story where everything shifts miraculously. Do you feel that way?
As time passed, I realized there is a kind of real ‘magic’ in the world around us.
You and I are living in a tangible fantasy adventure. This crazy mixed-up world is a Hogwarts of sorts, and each of us wields gifts that will either make things better or worse.
That’s why I call the magic in my books plausible magic, or realistic magic. The fantasy in my books is all possible. I write fiction that could really happen.
Q: Why do you think clean fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
I consider the hearts and minds of my readers a sacred responsibility.
I would rather hang up my pen than allow one of my books or stories to jeopardize my readers’ morality.
If a fifteen-year-old picks up one of my books, I want it to be the kind of story she can share with her sixty-year-old grandmother, and they’ll both love it. That’s my goal. I haven’t always achieved it.
And here’s a sad note, while I have some male fans, my books tend to appeal more to girls and women.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
Great fantasy is a dream of things that someday might be true, a hope for what could be, an exploration of possibilities.
Fantasy is a wish.
It is a lesson that teaches us that we can walk through dark worlds and come out on the other side—victorious! As we did in Le Guin’s Wizards of Earthsea. Through imaginative fiction, we learn to face dragons and death with courage.
Or, like Harry in McKinley’s Blue Sword, we explode evil by tapping into the source of all good. Therein lies the more profound secret, fantasy is a spiritual journey.
BIO: Kathleen Baldwin writes award-winning bestselling novels for teens and adults, but she loves real-life adventure: hiking the High Sierras and river-rafting. She taught rock-climbing in the Rockies, skied incessantly, was stalked by a mountain lion, survival camped in both the desert and snow, and finally married her very own hero and best friend. Together, they raised a houseful of courageous free-spirited kids. Scholastic licensed Kathleen’s books for book fairs. They were Junior Library Guild selections, translated into several languages, made into Japanese manga, and optioned for film.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Meg Cabot calls Kathleen’s Stranje House series, “completely original and totally engrossing.”
16) Lindsay Franklin
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
Fantasy was very important to me as a child.
My childhood was not always easy, and I was drawn to fantasy as a bit of an escape. Imaginary worlds allowed me to see beauty, truth, danger, hope, tragedy, and triumph through a lens that felt removed from everyday life and yet somehow every bit as real.
I wouldn’t say I escape in the same way today as an adult with (hopefully) healthier coping strategies, but I think little-me was onto something. The fantastical allows us to amplify aspects of the wildly creative, wonderfully fantastical world we actually live in.
Q: Why do you think fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
I firmly believe that our human creativity is a reflection of God’s creativity – creativity so vast, the most wildly speculative fantasy novel will never surpass it. These tales that allow us to stretch our imaginations, whether as creators or consumers, are soul-nourishing.
They allow us to examine the biggest and most spiritually relevant of all themes: good versus evil, self-sacrifice, ultimate truth, and so many more.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
Our world, particularly at this moment, is hungry for some light – some goodness, hope, truth, and love.
Stories of all varieties can sate this hunger, but the fantasy genre is especially able to speak to the supernatural – that which transcends the material world – and so imaginative fiction is uniquely poised to meet the soul-deep need for hope.
BIO: Lindsay A. Franklin is a Carol Award–winning author, freelance editor, and homeschooling mom of three. She would wear pajama pants all the time if it were socially acceptable. Lindsay lives in her native San Diego with her scruffy-looking nerf-herder husband, their precious geeklings, and three demanding thunder pillows (a.k.a. cats).
17) Patrick Carr
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
It’s deepened my appreciation for the power of story.
Who can read the tales of Arthur and his knights or The Lord of the Rings or, especially, The Chronicles of Narnia and not be changed?
What we now call fantasy novels were once called fairy tales. They were repeated from generation to generation to give our children the truth that there are monsters in the world, yes, but that there are also heroes who fight them. More, we can be those heroes, and though we may not win every battle we, and the world, are ennobled by our efforts.
Fantasy is essential. It gives us a means to sharpen and channel our imagination.
Q: Why do you think fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
I think fantasy is important because it gives us a framework to experience victory even if it is vicariously.
In our modern technological world filled with spin and obfuscation, it is difficult to slay the evil dragon because there’s seldom agreement on who it is.
This leads us to a frustrating existence where evil becomes this intangible miasma that we wade through every day, but can’t quite take hold of. As for “clean” I’m not sure what the definition of that is. There are things I choose to write and things that I don’t.
The Bible is filled with episodes in history that certainly wouldn’t be clean, but if we don’t face them or name them, how can we defeat them? I think we need a better definition.
My stories have plot points that I don’t consider clean. They’re ugly, evil, and should rightly be condemned and fought. What I have no use for is literature that glorifies such things.
That’s a type of gratuitous glorification that doesn’t belong, but the label ‘clean’ doesn’t rightly rest with either example.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
As the pace of our world continues to increase, an escape from its continual pressures will become ever more important.
There’s such a need to unplug from the technology and reclaim our imaginations.
Sadly, many people choose not to and so they miss out on the opportunity to recharge. And it’s getting worse. The statistics on the percentage of people who read a book, any book, after high school or college is depressing.
In a world where first-person shooter games desensitize the players, we desperately need new generations of readers to develop their empathy and compassion. It’s a frightening future where so few people read.
I’m hopeful that books and reading will experience a renaissance.
Heaven knows we need it.
BIO and Link: Patrick Carr starts his day at an absurdly early hour, swilling coffee in an oversized mug and eating dark chocolate as he crafts character-driven fantasy stories in the dark. He was born in what used to be West Germany at the height of the cold war to an Air Force fighter pilot and a very patient woman. He turned his predilection for daydreaming into a writing habit, which explains why he will often stop in midsentence to stare, observing scenes no one else can see. His first novel, A Cast of Stones, won the Clive Staples Award, the ACFW Carol Award and was a finalist for the Christy Award in two different categories. Since then his works have won the Realm Makers award for epic fantasy and the Inspy Award.
He spends his days teaching high school math (yes, really) in Nashville, TN and his nights enjoying laughter and music with his beautiful wife, Mary, and their four sons. There’s also a dog in the picture that he seldom discusses in public because he’s twelve pounds of white fluff. He is the author of two acclaimed series, The Staff and the Sword, and The Darkwater Saga and a Biblical-historical novel, The End of the Magi. You can find out more about him and his books at www.patrickwcarr.com, the place where character-driven fantasy lives.
18) Rachel Neumeier
Q: How does fantasy impact the reader’s experience of the world?
A.
It’s normal, I think, for people to be drawn toward beauty, to want to see small miracles in the commonplace, to want to perceive the inexplicable in the unexplained.
We want to be amazed. We want to be stopped dead in our tracks by a sense of wonder. These are the features of fantasy literature that I think draw some readers toward the genre, or toward subgenres that emphasize those qualities.
But it seems to me that this works in both directions: readers of fantasy also begin to look for – and find – the beautiful and the miraculous and the numinous in our own world.
At least . . . I hope so!
Q: Why do you think fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
Fantasy is one of the best genres for showing the reader people who are not like us or who live in worlds that are not like ours.
This is important in allowing readers to experience different ways of thinking and develop empathy – crucial for today’s complicated world. As for adventure – adventure stories in particular showcase qualities too often ignored or even denigrated by modern society, such as courage, kindness, and most of all taking responsibility.
How many adventure stories are about ordinary people who save the world – or at least a corner of the world, at least for a while? Too many to count.
Fantasy adventure isn’t alone in modeling the qualities we most ought to admire, but it’s a subgenre that does so all the time, consistently, regardless of what the specific quest might involve.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
Becoming aware of and experimenting with, and for that matter understanding and empathizing with, different ways of thinking is crucial as society changes and evolves.
A tolerance for and appreciation of diverse viewpoints and ways of seeing the world is vital today and is only going to become more so tomorrow.
Fantasy novels – and many other genres – encourage a mindset that appreciates and enjoys this kind of diversity in experience and viewpoint.
BIO: Rachel Neumeier started writing in graduate school as a break from research, but gradually allowed her hobbies to take over her life. Her writing emphasizes a lyrical style and themes of honor, loyalty, and trust. She currently has around twenty novels and collections on the shelf, many of which have earned starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, or the Junior Library Guild. Along with writing adult and young adult fantasy, she gardens, collects cookbooks, shows her Cavalier King Charles Spaniels in conformation and obedience, and occasionally finds time to read.
19) RJ Anderson
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Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
As a child, fantasy was hugely important to me as an escape from loneliness and the bullying I experienced at school.
But for me the best fantasy stories were not just the ones that transported me to another world, but the ones that reminded me in some way of the Great Story found in the Bible. It meant a lot to me that the best fantasy books depicted the heroes’ sufferings and struggles not as senseless cruelty but as part of a greater Purpose, and affirmed that no matter how terrifying and even unconquerable the darkness might seem, light and truth would triumph in the end.
As an adult I no longer feel the need to retreat into fantasy worlds, but I still love to visit and explore them.
Fantasy is one of the few genres left that celebrates the triumph of goodness over evil and insists that there is a real division between them – even if, as Solzhenitzyn reminded us, that line cuts through the heart of every human being and it’s important to remember that as well.
A fantasy that pits sinless saints against irredeemable sinners can be just as false as a fantasy that pretends there’s no difference.
Q: Why do you think clean fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
Good fantasy inspires us to dream of and seek after better things, and also to see our own everyday world with new eyes.
I often think of C.S. Lewis’s quote about how he wrote the Narnia books to steal past the “watchful dragons” of people’s false and jaded notions about Christianity, and I think fantasy has tremendous potential to show us truth from unexpected angles and help us to understand ideas that we may struggle with or even outright resist in real life.
So I try to find ways to bring that into my own storytelling.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
Our present world has a desperate hunger for love, happiness and purpose, and people are searching wildly in every direction to find it.
But the shabby idols propped up by the entertainment industry and the muddy cisterns of modern “realistic” storytelling inevitably leave them feeling cheated. Many people these days are embarrassed to want happy endings, let alone believe in them, and I’ve heard a lot of snide remarks about the “toxicity” of stories that claim villains can be redeemed and not just beaten.
But that just shows how far we’ve wandered from the truth of the gospel, which offers hope to every human heart.
I really believe that telling great imaginative stories that acknowledge we are fallen creatures who can’t save ourselves, but which also point us to One who is worthy and who can offer us the redemption we long for, will resonate with people in ways that no other stories can.
But we have to learn how to tell those stories well enough that people who don’t already agree with us will listen, and that’s not a skill that can be learned overnight.
If we want to see great fantasy stories being written in the next few decades, we don’t just need to support young authors and praise their efforts, we need to encourage them to seek out thoughtful criticism and use it to make their stories truer and richer and better.
No discipline seems pleasant at the time, as Hebrews 12:11 reminds us, but the harvest it yields can’t be produced any other way.
Bonus Question: On a more personal note, I’ve been curious about the idea of fairies changing size in your books, which changed Knife’s horizons in a momentous way. Could you tell us a little about that?
The size-changing aspect of the book was actually inspired by Steven Spielberg’s 1991 movie HOOK, in which Julia Roberts’ Tinker Bell makes a magical wish to become big so she can be with Robin Williams’s Peter.
That doesn’t work out in the movie because Peter’s married (and thank goodness the script respects that!) but it did give me the idea of how a 7” tall faery might get a taste of what it’s like to be human size.
In Knife’s case it doesn’t come by conscious wishing so much as desperate necessity, and she doesn’t have any control over when it happens. But I enjoyed the challenge of trying to describe how extraordinary the world we take for granted might appear to someone who’s only ever seen it from a much smaller and more vulnerable perspective.
The idea that the human realm and its people might appear every bit as wonderful and glorious to a supernatural creature as the idea of “fairyland” seems to us is a major theme of Knife’s story, and it came from the verse in 1 Peter that “Even angels long to look into these things” that God has revealed to us.
BIO: Born in Uganda to missionary parents, R.J. (Rebecca Joan) Anderson is a women’s Bible teacher, a wife and mother of three, and a bestselling fantasy author for older children and teens. Her debut novel Knife has sold more than 120,000 copies worldwide, while her other books have been shortlisted for the Nebula Award, the Christy Award, and the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Science Fiction. Rebecca lives with her family in Stratford, Ontario, Canada.
20) Serena Chase
Note: This author’s section is longer because I didn’t make the requested word length clear, and after her answers were received, I thought it worth posting without editing for length.
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
My first experience with fantasy was through classic fairy tales: namely, a beautifully-illustrated, antique copy of Cinderella—a book that resided in my grandmother’s home before it was mine—and the Fairytales and Rhymes collection from The Little Golden Book Library series—a now-battered pink tome from my earliest childhood.
Before I was old enough to read The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis for myself, I watched the early animated version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on television (back in the days when we had four channels and an antenna on the roof). From my first watching of that life-changing adventure, I was convinced I would be able to find Narnia one day.
Although I did not, alas, discover a way into Narnia from my world, I discovered more of myself through those books than perhaps any others, save my own. With every re-read, I find the stories have grown bigger, somehow; much as Lucy found Aslan to be bigger on her subsequent visits to Narnia.
Fantasy fiction impacts my everyday life not only because I write it, but because my love for the intricacies of other worlds makes me more attuned to the whimsy and wonder of the world in which I live.
Through the act of reading, I have adventured, feasted, mourned, fought, laughed, and prevailed alongside a host of amazing characters. Having vicariously lived through harrowing adventures with those characters, I am better equipped to find meaning and hope in desperate and confusing times.
On a spiritual level, I believe fantasy stories have expanded my view of who God is.
They help me understand free will and its consequences; why the choices I make matter in both big-picture-eternal and this-moment ways. Truths gleaned through the power of story—fantasy stories in particular—have enabled me to more clearly own the truth that God is personally invested in my life and its adventures, whether tragic or victorious, big or small.
Q: Why do you think fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
Since I’m not personally offended by a smattering of profanity (especially when that profanity is newly author-created as a world-building element), and violence is something I simply expect to encounter in a fantasy adventure, I’ll address what I consider to be the most potentially damaging elephant in the “this might offend some readers” room: gratuitous and/or graphic sex.
YA fantasy is probably my favorite genre to read, but I’ve seen a troubling shift toward the acceptability of graphic sexual content in YA fantasy, as well as in adult fantasy written by bestselling YA authors (which is, by default, marketed to—and then read by—their existing YA audience.)
I will die on the hill of Free Speech, and I proudly stand on the belief that BANNING BOOKS IS WRONG, but if we are to produce healthy, well-read children we want to grow into healthy, well-read, and well-adjusted adults, I think we must need more “clean” reading options, written appropriate to age and maturity levels . . . to offer alongside the books of questionable content that will surely come their way.
I’m not saying we cannot write about hard or delicate subjects, only that we need to consider our target audience’s wellbeing in how we present those subjects.
Providing well-crafted adventure stories that truly entertain tween and teen readers—but protectively so within their capacity for emotional, physical, and sexual safety—should be the goal of every responsible YA and middle grade author.
But adults deserve those options too.
A well-crafted story doesn’t need gratuitous or lewd content to fully engage a reader.
When I consider the fantasy books that have truly imprinted on my heart and mind—The Chronicles of Narnia, Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, etc.—not one of those favorites has crossed an offensive or gratuitous content line. Not one of them has needed to cross that line to “help” increase the tension or stakes of the story.
They’re not just clean fantasy adventures, they’re awesome fantasy adventures.
I am an incurable romantic, and I adore discovering—and creating—romance subplots within fantasy adventures, but I believe intimate moments between characters should be exactly that: intimate, between those two characters, alone.
Metaphorically shut the bedroom door, fade to black, aaand . . . scene.
Even apart from my beliefs that, A: a well-crafted adventure does not need on-the-page sex to be amazing, and B: I shouldn’t have to skip through pages of sexual content to get back to the actual forward motion of a story, I don’t think I’m alone as a romance-loving adult who does not want to read graphic sexual content.
I want to read romantic fantasy adventures that are so well-crafted that they don’t need to lean on content crutches to build counterfeit tension (or book sales.) I want to read books that enforce my belief that a hero might still live within me.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
Immersive fantasy adventures are often about the concept of “becoming.”
They contain moral elements that fuel the plot while growing characters into the heroes they were always meant to be—the heroes the world needs in that pivotal moment.
In our society, too many children, young adults, and even adults are without dependable real-life heroes and mentors. Through imagination, within the “theatre of the mind” experienced while reading a great fantasy tale, a kind of mentorship can take place between the protagonist and the reader, filling the hero gap in a reader’s life while imparting subtle—and sometimes subliminal—life lessons they may not otherwise receive.
Imaginative fiction is not only an escape from a present reality, but a window into “all that could be” if we apply the heart-meanings of those adventures to our own life stories.
In Coraline, Neil Gaiman paraphrased a wordier sentiment from G.K. Chesterton’s essay, “The Red Angel,” writing, “Fairy tales are more than true—not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” I think that is a beautiful way to express the ongoing, vital need for fantastic and imaginative fiction.
Our world is full of destructive forces, but when we read of and identify with characters facing similar or more dire straits—real-to-us people, who must choose to become the hero their moment needs—we are given hope that we too might become heroic when our moment presents itself.
BIO: SERENA CHASE is the author of the critically-acclaimed Eyes of E’veria series—epic fantasy adventures, realized within reimagined fairy tales—and the contemporary young adult musical theatre romance, Intermission. Originally intending to pursue a career as a singer/songwriter, Serena studied at and received her bachelor’s degree from Belmont University’s Mike Curb School of Entertainment & Music Business in Nashville, Tennessee. “I still write songs,” she is fond of saying, “they’re just really long songs now . . . and the music is all in your head.” Serena believes readers seek an immersive and connective entertainment experience each time they open a book, and she seeks to provide that through her stories. A graduate of the Jerry B. Jenkins Christian Writers Guild Apprentice Course, Serena writes from her home in rural Iowa, where she also runs a business as a freelance editor, marketing copy creator, story coach, and workshop presenter. Connect with Serena on Patreon, Facebook, Instagram, and by signing up for her newsletter on her website, serenachase.com.
21) Sharon Hinck
This author took the offered option of changing the Questions.
Q: Why do you write in the fantasy genre?
A.
A theme to all my work in the arts over the years has been, “God is so awesome and multifaceted that we need a variety of means to communicate with Him and about Him.”
Fantastical stories are a particularly powerful way to examine questions of good and evil, courage and faith, sacrifice and redemption.
We can explore our own world and its challenges when we journey through an alternate world. It gives us a fresh perspective.
And it’s just plain fun: imaginative lands and creatures, noble heroines, new worlds to explore!
Q: What themes do you explore in your latest novel, Hidden Current?
A.
Have you ever felt that nothing you do is ever enough?
Not good enough? Meaningful enough?
Do you ever think that if you could be more perfect, all your problems would be solved?
In my new novel, I explore a character whose entire culture tells her that she must achieve perfection – and that answers to her world’s problems rest solely on human effort. I hope her journey will ring true for readers in our world.
Q: What inspired this new series?
A.
Years before I wrote my first novel, I worked as a dance teacher, choreographer, and artistic director of a Christian dance company. So, when my agent and I were discussing ideas for my next book, he said, “In all your other novels, you’ve never drawn from your experience in dance. I’d love to see you create a brand-new fantasy world and utilize dance in some way.”
I began mulling the idea, and within days, a character had come to life.
In Hidden Current, the dancers of the Order direct their floating world with their movements but are steering it toward destruction.
One lone dancer fights to overcome opposition from rim villages and treachery from the all-powerful Order and bring a forgotten truth to her people.
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
In the bigger picture, I think it’s safe to say that story is wired into human DNA.
To tell stories is what makes us human, and to be human means we tell stories.
It’s how we make sense of the world, it’s how we learn, it’s how we connect.
Fantasy, I believe, lets us learn truths that we might not otherwise experience in our daily realities, because it broadens our world and our experiences. More importantly, it shows us that the truths of our daily worlds are truths that apply in a universal way, and underscores what really matters.
Q: Why do you think clean fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
With a clean fantasy adventure, we are not distracted by anything else except the core of the characters, what the characters desire, and how their decisions impact their lives. When a theme emerges, it has impact then.
It’s also delightful to get so lost in a story that you forget everything else, including how immersed you are in a story. Again, removing distractions makes that so much more possible and enjoyable.
Q: Do you think a fantasy can be told in any other way?
A.
My novel Clan has just been released, and I’m delighted with the reviews that talk about universal human experience and truths. “This is a story of relationships, intrigue, loyalty, betrayal, overcoming obstacles, and surviving against all odds.”
Although in the strictest sense, it is historical fiction, it truly is a fantasy, set some 14,000 years ago during the Ice Age era in North America. It’s a survival story about a boy who yearns for the respect of his father. More than that, it’s a Cain and Abel story, told from the perspective of the sons — who of course are cousins — and how the hatred between their fathers — the brothers – is so destructive to everyone in their lives.
Readers might also note ’The Great Flood’ and draw their own conclusions about the significance of it to the story.
Because we know so little about the structure of the lives of that era, it was just as much speculative fiction as historical fiction, and I did write it the way I would write a fantasy. As well, I hope it transports the readers into a new and unexpected world, the same as with my other fantasy novels.
BIO: As the bestselling author of dozens of titles, with over 4 million books in print in multiple languages, Sigmund Brouwer writes for both children and adults. He has won the American Christy Book of the Year and the Arthur Ellis Award for best young-adult mystery in Canada, as well as being a finalist twice in the prestigious TD Children’s Literature Awards. Over the last two decades, he has presented his Rock and Roll Literacy Show to more than a million students across North America.
Q: How has fantasy impacted your experience of the world?
A.
Fantasy has inspired me to appreciate the fantastical things all around us.
The world we live in is amazingly beautiful, and many places feel like they are right out of a story book. I’ve seen the Grand Tetons capped in snow, looking like mountains from a fantasy. I’ve hiked old forests that feel like they could contain the talking trees and animals of Narnia.
Fantasy also inspires me to “take the adventure” that is before me, as Reepicheep from the Chronicles of Narnia would counsel.
Life is filled with adventures. Sometimes the adventures aren’t that pleasant.
2020 has been one wild adventure that none of us would have chosen if given a chance. But life is still good. Challenges help us grow and change.
I don’t think the characters in books enjoy their adventures either, but they always come out better for them, as will we.
Q: Why do you think clean fantasy adventure is important to us as human readers?
A.
The fictional fantasy adventures inspire us to face our own adventures in life.
Clean fantasy adventure gives stories that the whole family can read together and be inspired by together. They can bond families around stories.
My family has always been the type to read the same stories and discuss them while doing activities together. In this year, our entire families need the escape that clean fantasy gives us.
Clean fantasy gives us a respite from the real world. A rest from the stress of life. When I’m wound tightly with stress, few things relax me as much as re-reading a favorite book.
My books might not be every reader’s favorite book, but if I can provide even one reader with a favorite book that provides comfort and inspiration in difficult times, then it is worth it.
Q: In what ways are great fantasy and imaginative fiction vital to our future?
A.
This year especially has taught us that we need to cling to hope.
Hope is the only way we are going to survive the constant barrage of bad news, challenges, and changes that life has thrown at us this year. Great fantasy and imaginative fiction provides us first with a much needed escape from the grind and difficulties of daily life.
Yet, in that escape, we vicariously live adventures where the good guys suffer challenges and eventually succeed, where good triumphs over evil, and where the bad times do not last forever and happy endings do happen.
We need those reminders more than ever nowadays so that, after our escape into fiction, we can tackle the adventure of our real lives with hope and perseverance.
BIO: Tricia Mingerink is a twenty-something, book-loving, horse-riding country girl. She lives in Michigan with her family and their pack of pets. When she isn’t writing, she can be found pursuing backwoods adventures across the country.
I hope you’ve enjoyed your journey with our authors. Aren’t they great? One thing that amazed me about their answers to these important questions about imaginative fiction is how similar many of them were, yet each unique. Beautiful!
If you missed the links at the beginning of this massive post and still want to join our Fantastic Journey, please fill out the Fantastic Journey review application here.
Thanks again, and have a wonderful day!
Azalea Dabill ~ Crossover – Find the Eternal, the Adventure
P. S.
No venture of this scope is ever accomplished alone. Here are a few additional people who are very good at what they do. They made all the difference for Fantastic Journey.
Derek Murphy of CreativIndie: Book Covers Extraordinaire. He is also a fiction author and has a lot of writer craft how-to on CreativIndie. He has a generous wealth of information.
Derek Doepker is also great for Audiobook Creation and Podcast Know-how.
CJ andShelley Hitz of Christian Book Academy have an encouraging step-by-step author publishing program. (This is an affiliate link.)
Nina Amir’s How to Blog a Book was a vast help in the creation and formation of Fantastic Journey – The Soul of Speculative Fiction and Fantasy Adventure. If you want to know more about blogging or blog to book projects, you can find her here, where she is known as the Inspiration to Creation Coach.
Dive 1.0 ~ The Soul of Imaginative Fiction and Clean Fantasy continued …
This is a joint venture. The seventy-seven authors and their inspiring adventures we explore are beacons of extraordinary story. Most of them are lights by contrast, guiding us to enchanting lands of danger in the ocean of fantasy. With them, we learn how to identify true gems and sell them not. How to know enemies, friends, and endless possibilities with our inner eye: to touch and to taste the truths of life in realms near and far.
Never
underestimate the power of anything we invite inside our mind and heart, in our
world or elsewhere. False or true, foolish or wise, corrupt or clean, it
transforms our inner world and our ideas and colors all that we become. We must
take heed, for our journey, though fantastic, is full of danger.
From
birth we carry a journal of knowledge, waiting for us to fill its pages. But
knowledge can cut both ways. It can protect or destroy. For our book of
knowledge to be a blade of truth that rightly divides, we must temper it with
understanding gained from experience, experience written in our hearts with the
living, willing ink of our blood. The experience, the wisdom, our blood and
book—all begins in our Creator.
Before
we embark upon the perilous realm, read what the wise who have gone before us scribed
in our book in bold, glimmering hue of opalescent green, pink, and blue.
The
Hidden Gems:
A Treasure to sail for:
We
will open many books of fantasy to find the elusive gems. The journey is
dangerous, hunting by land and sea, but such jewels leave us with a greater
grasp of truth, hopeful of life, with deep empathy and a sense of wonder over
treasures heaped on endless shores.
A Diamond to steer by:
The
best fantasies are about change by conflict, where powerful truth transforms
the familiar. As we walk among jewels of clean fantasy we find ourselves
beckoned “higher up and further in” as C.S. Lewis so aptly says, to another
world. A liberating world of transcendent beauty, mysterious wonder, and
adventure beyond compare.
A Zircon to know:
The
secret of purely great—not utterly boring fantasy—is contrast. How evil is
portrayed and for what purpose creates soul-destroying or soul-inspiring
adventure.
An Emerald to watch for:
Our
definition of “clean fantasy” is that evil is not glorified, is not subtly
admired by the story as a whole, is not wallowed in for shock value. Good and
evil, beauty and ugliness are drawn into battle in great fantasy, and there
they show their differences in a way that make us want to stand up and cheer or
knuckle down and fight with all we are.
A Topaz to see by:
Morally
base fantasies that glorify deception, ugliness, and futility leave us wanting
to cry. The beauty of truth, the conflict of good versus evil, and the sword of
justice weave through the best imaginative fiction, calling us to leave
desolation behind. Though these bright threads may wind through strongholds of
deepest evil, it is never a journey of deception, muddling through injustice to
exalt despairing fate. Rather, they call us to fight it in the light of a sure
hope. Great fantasy on a spiritual level helps remove the cloud of hopelessness
from one lens we see life through—our imagination. Goodness shines the clearer
as it beats back darkness.
A Thought of Gold:
Fantasy
is a weaving of power that transforms a tapestry into a tale, a mirror into a
portal, a string of runes on a page into a living, breathing world. Where do we
gather great fantasies so we don’t waste time on fool’s gold and fatally flawed
stories? How do we sort adventurous, inspiring fantasy from the insipid, the
bad, and the destructive? We dive into the waves of the sea and explore the
mountains of fantasy, but read a page or few of our prospective wealth before
we bring it home or on deck.
Silver to seek:
Every
clean fantasy holds vast secrets for brave hearts. Listen to those who sail the
waves, to experienced salts who search the epic depths and chart the islands. They
will be the first to tell there are undiscovered ocean vaults beneath the
surface. Entire islands of mystery and danger await every adventurer seeking riches,
who yearns for jewels of strong and precious story. When the dive is done and
the fight is fought, what precious things will we bring to light?
A Pearl to hold:
The
alluring glamour of the forbidden, which promises life-giving water but offers a
goblet of hemlock, will not draw seekers to their deaths on this Fantastic Journey. The fantasies we
depict do not paint scenes of immorality, where the sweetness of stolen water
conceals death. There are battles,
perils, and conflicts of every description, but true intimacy stops at the
chamber door, where we leave it with a nod, a knowing smile, and respect for a
precious thing.
A Ruby to remember:
Epic
fantasy adventure benefits us on three levels: the spiritual arena, the wide
world of ideas, and the sphere we breathe in. The realm of fantasy touches all
three. It conveys life deeper than sand and sea, breathes into being lands
nearer than we know, shows us the adventure of love in all its facets, and transfers
truth from thought and experience to our heart’s grasp.
The ocean of fantasy adventure broadens our horizons and enthralls our hearts with crystal joys and enchanting beauties on a voyage across a perilous realm. Each subchapter dives for jewels of its own. Will we discover that which is the wealth of souls?
Note: This Blog 2 Book title is coming 2020 – Fantastic Journey – The Soul of Imaginative Fiction and Clean Fantasy Adventure
And we explore fantasy adventure with all of them: Sight, scent, taste, hearing, touch. (Inside our minds, of course.) And of course intuition, the 6th sense, is never far from reach in a great fantasy story.
But I think there is one more sense.
Fantasy brings together the six senses into a whole and creates a 7th. The seventh sense is one you can discover often if you dive deep into fantasy realms and keep your eyes open.
The greatest fantasies create at moments a unique experience, a kind of sense not to be found anywhere else in the universe we can see. Except in bits and pieces; a kind of joy-filled truth caught in goodness or day dreams or dreams of the night, where odd things that strangely fit are often found.
This 7th sense grasps gleaming facets of truth that we could not see before. It touches them, tastes them. Not first examined by our reason, but felt deep in the actions and reactions you experience while captured within fantasy characters. Inside the kind, the evil, the young and the old, the weak and strong men and women and creatures of fantasy. It happens without your noticing it, while you are enthralled by the hero or heroine you find in many hearts, sometimes growing from a single weak seed. It makes you revolt against evil, also often growing unseen, battling within.
We are so often blinded by our familiar world it usually takes a moving deed, a circumstance, or a state of being in an unfamiliar setting or against a stark backdrop for us to see truth clearly. Such clearness can be startling.
Such was the case for me. Not long ago, I was moaning that there were not very many good fantasy fiction books from the faith sector of our world. Not that I dislike general fantasy, far from it, I admire their authors’ skill very much. I only wish more of us imitated the high bar of storytelling without deserting high moral quality.
I was shown how wrong I was to moan. Patrick Carr’s Shock of Night, Anna Thayer’s Knight of Eldaran Trilogy, Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga, C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters (a novel delightfully re-read) all kept me up late into the night. Sure, there is definitely room for more faith-based fantasy where adventure is never sacrificed, but I’ve discovered treasures everywhere over the long years—from epic fantasy to dieselpunk and beyond. If your heart is hungry . . .
I want to share my otherworldly discoveries on my lifelong venture into best fantasy novels with you.
Join the quest, and find your next adventure! There will be at least 70 posts in this series, and who knows what we may find?
If you don’t want to miss a single grand adventure, sign up in the side bar, where special treasures are reserved for those who seek them.
We’ll venture into worlds unseen where your heart will beat fast at necessary sacrifice, thrill with the triumph of downtrodden hearts against overwhelming odds, and draw lines of right and wrong in blood. You will laugh in side-splitting humor, cry with loss, fight against evil and rage against its seeming victory. But in the end you will come back to peace, hugging gems to your breast. And for those who can see, there is a light going before you.
Follow it.
Let no wall of ignorance, busyness, or other unworthy reason bar you from your next journey to unearth . . . what, I cannot tell. Prepare to use your seven senses.
Crossover: find the Eternal, the Adventure.
Here’s a minute taste of one journey waiting for us on my best books shelf, seeking its place in future posts like The Romance – Exploring Treachery and Trust.
From Victoria Hanley’s The Seer and the Sword:
Torina looked at the boy, at his heavy curling hair and remote, wild eyes.
“If he is my slave,” she asked, “does that make him my own?”
“All your own.”
“I can do whatever I want with him?”
The king nodded.
The princess shivered. “What is your name, son of a king?” she asked.
“Landen.” The boy’s manner, still that of a prince, contrasted oddly with his dusty rags and bruises.
“Vesputo,” Torina said.
“Princess?”
“Cut his ropes, please.”
The commander looked to his king, who inclined his head. A blade was drawn. Vesputo severed the ropes carelessly, trailing fresh blood. Landen rubbed his wrists as Torina stepped closer to him.
“My father fought your father.” She said it very softly, speaking as if no king or soldiers looked on. For her, they must have been forgotten.
Landen looked at the ground. A pulse in his neck beat, like the heart of a newly hatched bird.
“Landen,” she whispered. “I never had a slave.”
The boy stood quietly.
“And I never will,” she continued, lifting her chin. “Papa,” her voice rose. “You gave him to me. I set him free.” . . .
Shelley Hitzof Author Audience Academy suggested in a FB session that I post this question about my blog-to-book plan for 2017-2018 and ask your opinion. I decided to include the whole layout, so you can get a general idea what I’m planning to share with you. And you can tell me if it’s something you’d love.
So thank you for your opinion, if you’d give it at the end!
I decided to come up with some serial blog posts/stories with lasting meaning for readers, not for writers. Not because I have anything against writers, (I’m one) only because most of you are YA, fantasy, and speculative fiction buffs. And so am I, and this is something I treasure. I’d love to make a book with you!
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