Kit, I apologize for this reference. I hope you weren’t too upset by it. It’s just that I started your series on The Bristling Wood because that was the Deverry book that was on the shelf at the time I was pillaging my local bookstore and it looked awfully interesting. But! I did go back and start from the beginning as soon as I was done with The Bristling Wood.

Does anyone else feel that perhaps genre fiction could benefit from a bit less heroism and a bit more… err… protagonism?

I certainly do. And to me that is indeed one of the marks of “deep genre”.

Actually, please don’t start anywhere with Deverry. I planned it to be started at the beginning with DAGGERSPELL. There is a definite structure to the overall plan — it’s merely a Celtic one and rambles a bit.

Fantasy, in particular, is so often about the Saving of the World or the Will of the Gods or some such lofty goal that the characters’ humanity tends to get steamrolled by the plot. Maybe that’s why I liked Jonathan Strange so much… the characters came alive; I couldn’t stop thinking about them; they were the literary equivalent of earworms. Bookworms?

But if you are going to try our books–and Erin is right, you can start anywhere with Deverry–please do try Kate Elliott’s splendid Crown of Stars story arc.

As well as all the works mentioned by the habitues of this salon.

Anyone who likes my stuff will really lke Sherwood’s. I consider her the superior wordsmith.

That whole Beat writers thing was hugely appealing to me and I just wanted to dress in black and take off across America with a typewriter, writing stream of consciousness stuff and seeing the world.

The professor who taught my Irish Lit class also organized a trip to Ireland (she does this with a different lit course every spring semester), which included visiting sites important to Yates, Synge, Heaney, O’Brien, Wilde, Joyce, etc. However, doing the truncated Ulysses Walk was the best! A close second was our Irish bus driver who quoted Yeats and others from memory while we drove around the countryside. The only problem is that now I want to go back to Ireland and pen my way through a novel while living along the Connemara coastline.

I haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading Sherwood’s work although I’ve got a copy of Inda on order from Amazon. I think I am Amazon’s biggest client!

I’ve been reading Katharine’s Deverry series for years and I’ve loved every book. Personally, I think her way of using the timeline is genius because it allows a reader to enter at any point in the story and not feel lost. Plus, it exemplifies the importance of the connection between the past, present, and future events. (If you do start in the middle, you should definitely go back to the first book. Otherwise you’ll miss some of the great story moments.) Over the years, I’ve been gifting the first few books of Kit’s series to my friends and nearly all of them continued reading the entire series. I have a feeling that you will really enjoy them too.

I would also like to tell all of the DeepGenre authors that they are truly doing a wonderful service for new and struggling writers with this blog. I’ve learned more about writing here than I have learned in a long time. The shared experience and information that is posted by the DG authors and the DG community is invaluable, interesting, and downright fun to read. In addition, I think that they could cobble together a great book on “How to Write (literary) Genre Fiction.” I can see it now! They already have loads of content for chapters on Mary Sue, Hooking the Reader, Sample 13 Line Critiques, Vampires, Fantasy vs Science Fiction, Know Your Hovel, Genre Definitions, Conventions, etc….

At the risk of getting carried away, I’ll end this post here. Cheers!

Thanks! (If you do read one of mine, i hope you enjoy it!)

Erin: I read Kerouac in college . . .”On the Road.” That book almost made me drop out of school. That whole Beat writers thing was hugely appealing to me and I just wanted to dress in black and take off across America with a typewriter, writing stream of consciousness stuff and seeing the world.

I don’t think I’ve still quite gotten over it.

Sherwood and Katherine: I don’t know if you two ever wonder if this website is worth your time in terms of personal benefits. (I would wonder, lol.) I thought you’d like to know that I enjoy your posts here and so went looking for your books today. I’m looking forward to sampling your work.