16/10/10

When I was young and first started reading proper books, I was immersed in the fantasy genre.  As with most people, it started with Lord of the Rings, and to a lesser extent the Chronicles of Narnia.  For the years I spent reading various fantasy paperbacks I never really understood until I was done with them as a whole that nothing could ever be as good as the Lord of the Rings.  Lord of the Rings also occupied a realm which seems almost void of any other texts that I have, with the exception of the Chronicles of Amber, where fantasy and serious fiction collide.

Setting that point aside, my own writing began really early in my life and up until about midway through high school/secondary school mostly consisted of mimicry rather than creation.  In 7th grade I even started my own 'epic fantasy' which abruptly ended as I lost interest.  In my small high school, I was always the best at creative writing no matter what I tried, but when I started university, many people were much better writers than I was, and I stopped writing when the praise stopped coming.  Eventually, and this is a very quick version of the self-transformation, I realised why I had stopped writing and began to just write for my own enjoyment.  Which brings me back to the first paragaph.  Despite many of those fantasy fiction novels lacking an outstanding literary merit, for what they are, I quite enjoyed them.  And so, without dwelling to much on my thought process, I began to write a sort of fantasy story, but I sought to make it one that could easily be transposed onto a real world setting, striving to make only the world and the details foreign, but the characters, and for the most part the plot, a recongnisable possibility for the real world.


Literary criticism is welcome, but it is not with an air of modesty when I say that despite me disregarding pulp fantasy, this will be worse than most of those books and writing this is not for literary recognition, but enjoyment.