"The Orphan Fleet" comes out in T-minus 5 days
So how did you get it in your head to write a fantasy story, Brendan?
“The Orphan Fleet” was originally meant to be a short story. My short story ideas usually come from a bunch of different things colliding from different directions, and so it was here.
First up, I’d never done an alternate-world fantasy story before. At least not since the fourth grade. I’d written a couple of longer Alice-through-the-lookingglass type stories in high school, but none of those are ever going to see the light of day, and they ended up being more surreal than anything else. So this was new territory for me, which was a good enough reason to do it all by itself. More specifically, I thought it would be fun to write something that might be appropriate for my friend John O’Neill’s magazine Black Gate, which I’ve always enjoyed, and I’ve always been a fan of a certain strain of action/adventure fantasy as written by folks like Roger Zelazny and Robert E. Howard. Stories that were intelligent, but also lean-and-mean and short on inspirational speeches or “destiny”. The kind of stuff I used to read from old seventies paperbacks from the bookshelves in my parents basement (as opposed to the more respectable bookshelves upstairs).
So I wanted to try something new, but it wasn’t just a matter of picking something at random. At the time that I started putting the ideas for TOF together, I was still teaching on the lovely south side, burning through my inner resources faster than I could replenish them, and my big writing project for the past couple of years had been a novel about the maximum security prison for teenage girls were I’d taught previously. It was a big I’m still proud of (it’s called Millersville, it’s been released and you should go read it), but producing it had turned out to be a bit of a busman’s holiday. I was really tired. I was in the mood for an escapist fantasy. Roger Ebert wrote a review for the old Robin Hood movie starring Errol Flynn, where he talked about how Flynn always seemed completely fearless and alive and childlike in his action scenes, unlike modern actors who would feel obligated to act more realistically. That was a place I wanted to visit.
At the same time, I didn’t want to turn my brain off either, and I had some ideas that I wanted to explore. Gene Wolfe probably doesn’t belong in quite the same category as the other authors I mentioned, but he was on the same bookshelf and I discovered him at the same time and in the same way. In his story “The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories” there’s a part where the hero and the villian of the story the main character has been reading talk about how they are actually friends just acting out their conflict for the sake of the audience. Because this is Gene Wolfe we’re talking about the situation is actually more complicated than that, but the basic idea always tickled my imagination. So as long as I was getting my fantasy-paperback on anyway, I thought this would be a good chance to finally play around with that concept. I figured all that would be enough fuel for a longer-than-usual short story. 23,000 words later…
More to come tomorrow. If any of this sounds interesting to you, I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering “The Orphan Fleet” e-book while it’s still 99 cents cheap. Pre-orders do a lot to tell the Amazon brain-in-a-jar that it should go to the trouble to show people my story, so I appreciate them very much. That’s it for now. Next time I’ll talk about my main character a little bit.
“The Orphan Fleet” was originally meant to be a short story. My short story ideas usually come from a bunch of different things colliding from different directions, and so it was here.
First up, I’d never done an alternate-world fantasy story before. At least not since the fourth grade. I’d written a couple of longer Alice-through-the-lookingglass type stories in high school, but none of those are ever going to see the light of day, and they ended up being more surreal than anything else. So this was new territory for me, which was a good enough reason to do it all by itself. More specifically, I thought it would be fun to write something that might be appropriate for my friend John O’Neill’s magazine Black Gate, which I’ve always enjoyed, and I’ve always been a fan of a certain strain of action/adventure fantasy as written by folks like Roger Zelazny and Robert E. Howard. Stories that were intelligent, but also lean-and-mean and short on inspirational speeches or “destiny”. The kind of stuff I used to read from old seventies paperbacks from the bookshelves in my parents basement (as opposed to the more respectable bookshelves upstairs).
So I wanted to try something new, but it wasn’t just a matter of picking something at random. At the time that I started putting the ideas for TOF together, I was still teaching on the lovely south side, burning through my inner resources faster than I could replenish them, and my big writing project for the past couple of years had been a novel about the maximum security prison for teenage girls were I’d taught previously. It was a big I’m still proud of (it’s called Millersville, it’s been released and you should go read it), but producing it had turned out to be a bit of a busman’s holiday. I was really tired. I was in the mood for an escapist fantasy. Roger Ebert wrote a review for the old Robin Hood movie starring Errol Flynn, where he talked about how Flynn always seemed completely fearless and alive and childlike in his action scenes, unlike modern actors who would feel obligated to act more realistically. That was a place I wanted to visit.
At the same time, I didn’t want to turn my brain off either, and I had some ideas that I wanted to explore. Gene Wolfe probably doesn’t belong in quite the same category as the other authors I mentioned, but he was on the same bookshelf and I discovered him at the same time and in the same way. In his story “The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories” there’s a part where the hero and the villian of the story the main character has been reading talk about how they are actually friends just acting out their conflict for the sake of the audience. Because this is Gene Wolfe we’re talking about the situation is actually more complicated than that, but the basic idea always tickled my imagination. So as long as I was getting my fantasy-paperback on anyway, I thought this would be a good chance to finally play around with that concept. I figured all that would be enough fuel for a longer-than-usual short story. 23,000 words later…
More to come tomorrow. If any of this sounds interesting to you, I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering “The Orphan Fleet” e-book while it’s still 99 cents cheap. Pre-orders do a lot to tell the Amazon brain-in-a-jar that it should go to the trouble to show people my story, so I appreciate them very much. That’s it for now. Next time I’ll talk about my main character a little bit.