For Writers: How to Blog Without Really Trying But Still Managing Not to Be Half-Assed About It

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This is a piece of flash fiction written last year – I just got around to going through the notebook it was in lately and transcribing the fictional bits. This didn’t take too much cleaning up. For context, think of the hills of southern California, and a writing retreat with no other human beings around, and thinking a great deal about fantasy and epic fantasy at the time.

Is this a Tabat story? Naw. Just a little flash piece.

On the Nature of Gods and Magicians

The magician gestured. Out of the pool came musicians, the very first thing the tip of a flute, sounding, so it was as though the music pulled the musician forth, accompanied by others: grave-faced singers and merry drummers; guitarists and mandolinists with great dark eyes in which all the secrets of the moon were written; and one great brassy instrument made of others interlocked, so it took six to play it, all puffing away at their appointed mouthpiece. All of them bowed down to the priestess who stood watching, her sand-colored eyes impersonal and face stone-smooth.

“Very pretty,” she said, and yawned with a feline grace, perhaps even accentuating the similarity in a knowing way with a head tilt.

The magician smiled, just as catlike, just as calm. “You can do better, I am sure,” he said.

She shrugged, her manner diffident, but rather than reply, she pursed her lips and whistled. Birds formed, swooping down, and wherever they flew, they erased a swathe of the musicians, left great arcs of nothingness hanging as the seemingly oblivious players continued, their music slowly diminishing as they vanished, the instruments going one by one. The last thing to hang, trembling in the air, was an unaccompanied hand, holding up a triangle that emitted not a sound.

Landing, the birds began to sing. Though the music was not particularly sweet, there was a naturalness about it that somehow rebuked the mechanical precision of the song theirs succeeded. As they sang, more and more birds appeared, and the music swelled, washing like a river over the pair where they stood.

The priestess patted the air with the flat of her hand and the birds winked out of existence, leaving the two of them in a great white room, the antechamber of her temple.

“Will you go further in, then?” she said, her voice still casual.

The magician’s eyes were green as new grass and the black beard on his chin, which grew to a double point, was oiled and smelled of attar-of-roses. He considered her as though this was the smallest of debates, and finally stepped forward.

“We are still evenly matched,” he said.

She inclined her head and replied, “But my strength will only swell as we go deeper, and we have far to go before we reach the center of My Lady’s temple.”

His grin spread, as though encouraged by her lack of smile. As though he had some secret hidden about himself and was unafraid to admit it. She forced an expression to match it, and they stood there smiling at each other in hostility for some moments before she stepped aside and gestured him on.

The tunnels were made of adamant and alabaster, concentric rings that shrank then grew larger, then shrank and grew again and again until it was as though they walked inside an immense, undulating worm.

As they walked, they cast spells at each other, dueling lightly, a magical clash and flicker of blades with a deadly energy at its heart. This was a long quarrel between them, the strength of his magic and the might of her goddess, from whom all her power was borrowed. He maintained that while they might be well-matched, the fact was that she, a conduit, could never resonate to the degree of cosmic energy that he, a producer of such energy, could.

She had at one point asked him why it mattered. They’d been drinking in a tavern, an ordinary tavern where adventurers came. They both liked to come and watch those parties, scarred by magic and monsters, assemble and spin stories a thousand times more dangerous than any foe they had to face.

“It matters because there must always be an answer to such questions,” he said with decisiveness, not pausing a moment to think. “If there are no answers, then all in life is random.”

“Could not some of it be random?” she asked, wistfully.

He shook his head. “Randomness is the refuge of the feebleminded who cannot handle answers.” He paused when he saw her flinch. “Not you of course.”

“Of course,” she echoed.

Now they paced along and she put that conversation from her mind.

In the end they came out in a vast courtyard, in a cavern that stretched so far overhead that it would have swallowed a cathedral. The image of the goddess was carved into that ceiling, her arms outstretched, seeming to encompass everything, her serene face beaming down.

The priestess stepped aside, looking to the magician, for he had defeated her every effort along the way. Now they had come to the confrontation he desired.

He stared upward, and for a moment his face seemed daunted. Then he sneered and tugged at the necklace around his throat.

“Face me in direct challenge, you sham,” he said. “The gods are nothing but those with more power than ourselves, and this artefact will amplify mine till I can throw you down unhindered.”

“Indeed you can,” the stone lips said, in a voice sweet and merry and powerful. “For I am less than my handmaiden, much less indeed.”

He frowned. “She is your channel.”

“Ah, no,” said the Goddess. One great hand stretched itself from the ceiling and began to descend towards him. “You have misunderstood the nature of gods entirely.”

Sparks danced from his fingers, formed shining columns all around him, but the massive fingers disregarded them.

“They are not our channels,” she said as the hand closed around him. “Rather, we are theirs.”

And across the world, every worshipper lifted their head, and every priestess stopped, as the Goddess swallowed the magician whole, and then gave him to them, disassembled into fuel for their own magic, and then smiled, and began the climb back towards the ceiling and her accustomed position there.

But the priestess sighed, looking at the spot where the magician had been, and only his shadow remained. He had been good company, now and again, and now he was only embers in her heart.

As a hardcore F&SF addict, I love the fact that nowadays I can go into the grocery store, look at the rack that used to hold nothing but Regency and Harlequin romances, and see covers with vampires and were-wolves and djinn and selkies and goddess knows what else. It makes me happy. I’ve spent a lot of time reading urban fantasy and paranormal romance over the past couple of years, and I wanted to provide a reading map of sorts for fellow genre lovers. So I’ll be posting about my favorites (and some not-so-favorites) over the next couple of months.

You can argue about where it all started (or even what it is) but I’d rather take the tack of looking at the authors that shaped the genre. Let’s begin, accordingly, with Laurell K. Hamilton, who started so much with her heroine, Anita Blake. Necromancer and private investigator, Blake kicks ass and takes names, at least early on in the series, which begins with Guilty Pleasures. (did Hamilton know the direction she’d go in from the first? The title seems to hint in that direction.) In the early books, Anita is tough as nails and prone to smartassery. She’s got two love interests: Richard the werewolf and Jean-Claude the vampire and, unlike a lot of romances, you don’t know what will end up happening. It’s great stuff.

Certainly Hamilton wasn’t the first person to write about vampires. The writer who had moved them into popularity was Anne Rice with her vampire series, which began a couple of decades earlier with Interview with the Vampire. On one level a sexy, intriguing story, the series also spoke to an anxiety floating around in the American zeitgeist at that point: sex and blood had become problematic with the arrival of AIDs. Its popularity rose as did media mentions of the disease.

But Hamilton came along and created a very specific vampire mix. She added Anita Blake, a tough but reader-identifiable character who was a smart-ass, had love-life problems, and tried to solve mysteries. Honestly, how could the series not be a hit? Blake first appeared in 1993, while four years later the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer would teach vampire lore to a new generation of readers who would soon discover Anita and her rapidly increasing ilk.

Somewhere along the line, though, the Anita Blake series…turned. Was that Hamilton discovered that sex sells or that with success she was freer to write the sort of thing she wanted to? Soft core porn began to get sifted in with a heavy hand, and none of it was vanilla. I don’t mind that, though. It’s fascinating to get a well thought out take on what sex with supernatural beings would be like. There are, unfortunately, some moments where it overshadows everything else. I’m thinking of Micah in particular, and if she stuck to the pattern of that book, I’d be about done. Luckily, she doesn’t. I like the fact that Anita has multiple lovers, that she’s in control, and that she changes her attitudes over time. But the books have become a guilty pleasure – although still, let’s admit, pleasurable when she maintains the balance between sex and storyline, and I’m certainly still buying them and, on occasion, re-reading them too.

Hamilton’s other series, the Merry Gentry books, which begins with A Kiss of Shadows, follows the same pattern. It’s a fascinating world, but sometimes we don’t get to see it because we’ve spent so much time in the bedroom. The overarching story line is that of a Faerie princess who must get pregnant. In case you don’t understand the implications, here’s a hint: Fairies do not reproduce through mitosis, but rather through lots of hot sex.

Again, a fascinating world, with a rich mythology and a premise that paves the way for plenty of nifty little jokes and eyeball kicks. Sometimes we don’t see as much of it as we’d like because we’re watching Merry get merry between the sheets, but it’s well-written and steamy sex that sometimes transcends space and time and/or summons ancient elemental forces. I found the most recent one I read, Divine Misdemeanors, which featured a serial killer of demi-fay who was using the tiny bodies of the victims to stage elaborate tableaus, nicely creepy and memorable.

So tell me what you think. Is Hamilton a guilty pleasure for you too or are you on some other terms with her books?

And for those interested in the books, here’s the lists, in chronological order:

Anita Blake:

• Guilty Pleasures (Kindle)
• The Laughing Corpse (Kindle)
• Circus of the Damned(Kindle)
• The Lunatic Cafe (Kindle)
• Bloody Bones(Kindle)
• The Killing Dance (Kindle)
• Burnt Offerings (Kindle)
• Blue Moon (Kindle)
• Obsidian Butterfly (Kindle)
• Narcissus in Chains (Kindle)
• Cerulean Sins (Kindle)
• Incubus Dreams (Kindle)
• Micah (not available on Kindle)
• Danse Macabre (Kindle)
• The Harlequin (Kindle)
• Blood Noir (Kindle)
• Skin Trade (Kindle)
• Flirt (Kindle)
• Bullet (Kindle)

Merry Gentry

• A Kiss of Shadows (Kindle)
• A Caress of Twilight (Kindle)
• Seduced by Moonlight (Kindle)
• A Stroke of Midnight (Kindle)
• Mistral’s Kiss (Kindle)
• A Lick of Frost (Kindle)
• Swallowing Darkness (Kindle)
• Divine Misdemeanors (Kindle)