Sky Rider is Live on Kindle! And MORE News!

Happy December, Spellmongrels!

Sky Rider is now up and live and waiting for you at Kindle!  And I have some MORE News about it, but first . . .

I've gotten a lot of quizzical looks from my fellow writers when I tell them about my Cadet series.  They're intrigued, but most "adult fantasy" writers feel a certain disdain when it comes to younger readers.  I can understand that -- Epic Fantasy is a hard art to master.  Incorporating adult themes and characters in a compelling fashion while also managing the world-building and plotlines of a multi-volume work is like juggling dynamite.  Considering a shorter, less-serious work after that is like going back to Maxwell House after you spent a year drinking pure Kona.

The thing is, I got the idea from George R. R. Martin, who, in his long career before Fire & Ice, wrote a few YA books I liked.  And from Anne McCaffrey, whose Harper Hall series is a direct inspiration.  Those books featured young characters tackling the challenges of adolescence in a fantasy setting.  That's an entirely different sort of book than adult fantasy.  But not only are the two subgenres not unrelated, they also have the capacity to be excellent narrative complements.

Seeing Sevendor through Dara's eyes is a much different thing than seeing it from Minalan's.  To Min, Sevendor was a magical DIY project.  To Dara, it was her home and entirety of her universe, changed dramatically over a very short period of time.  Between the two perspectives, our minds can fill in the details about the rest of the place, or at least ask intriguing questions about it. 

Some people would find this sort of inclusion distracting in a more adult work.  Martin puts children into his works, of course, but always in the context of a brutal adult environment.  The "kids" in his world are really but tiny adults forced to contend with adult situations.  No one is going to sit down and read Arya's part of the story to their ten-year-old before bed.  Martin does it really well, of course, and I'm not slamming him in the slightest.  But part of what attracted me to fantasy was the essential sense of wonder implicit in magic, and that foundation rests firmly with our childhood, and our discovery and exploration of the complex world around us.

Recapturing that, and reminding the reader what those moments in our own life were, are as important as Saving The World. 

It is valuable to the understanding of the reader as they imagine the world (not to mention helpful to the writer) to provide those perspectives.  It's also important to the genre as a whole.  Introducing children to fantasy literature is the best way to ensure a steady supply of adult fantasy readers. 

But I won't deny that I saw an opportunity in the market. 

While my Cadets are written for minors, I try to take the Disneyland approach and write them to be entertaining to both kids and adults.  That was one of the essential elements for Harry Potter's success, after all.  Rowling created a new market for fantasy that straddles the line between children's literature and adult epic fantasy.  The problem is, if you encounter the books early in your reading career and voraciously tear through them, when you look for similar works out there that will feed your newfound jones for epic fantasy, most of the "next steps" are into the dark and adult fantasy where there are lots of gruesome deaths and boobies. 

My Cadets aren't designed to be Potter-replacements, of course, but they are designed to fill that niche.  I want each of them to be complete novels (not a 50k word "novel") that don't strain credulity; thankfully, having the world of Callidore developed as a backdrop spares me from having to try to build a world for each book.  Having Dara as a minor character in the main series gave me the basic elements of her story.  All I had to do was fill in the details and tell it from her perspective. 

But I also tried to keep them focused on adolescent issues, not mere re-tellings of parts of the story.  In Hawkmaiden, Dara struggles with the realities of a social and political revolution, but she's also contending with both early puberty and challenging the adult rules that bind her.  Her emerging Talent made her the Spellmonger's apprentice, but it was her adolescent rebellion toward her family's rules that inspired her to capture her falcon.  In Hawklady, Dara not only confronts some uncomfortable truths about the world around her, but also has to contend with social issues, rivalries, sudden fame, and increased social position.

In Sky Rider, Dara's life is even more complex.  But it isn't all secret councils with elves and wizards, there's also the realization that she's grown apart from her family in ways that put her in opposition with it, sometimes.  She's also discovering her adult will, as she matures from a spunky adolescent into a teen saddled with increasingly adult responsibilities.  Yet she still maintains the pure childlike sense of wonder when she encounters something amazing . . . and sense of disgust when she encounters something gross. 

It is important for adult readers of fantasy to be reminded of those moments, and how important they were to our own lives.  Most of us spend the last eighty percent of our lives trying to come to terms with the first twenty percent, it is so important to us.  The feelings of teenage embarrassment, fear, awkwardness, regret, uncertainty, stubbornness, and other signs of immaturity stalk us throughout our adult lives.  Indeed, how we ended up avoiding and coping with those challenges largely shapes our adult character.  I think most adults can pinpoint some experience in their adolescence that was a watershed moment for how they faced the world, nor does it have to be particularly dramatic. 

Identifying and exploring those moments in a character's life, and being there to experience it with them, prepares a child for their own inevitable encounters by giving them models and examples upon which to draw for inspiration and guidance.  For adults, it reminds us of those tender moments of pure adolescent terror and joy, and how important the unimportant-to-adults problems were.  For those of us with teens, that's a particularly important thing to remember.  Fighting with your parents was never fun, even more so than fighting with your children.  But it is an important skill to learn if we want to thrive in an adult universe.  It gives us a pattern for how to handle situations with non-parents, and can shape our respond to crisis and authority.

But I crafted my Cadets not just as "children's literature" or YA; I tried to give them some muscle.

One of my complaints with the current crop of crappy YA dystopian novels, of whatever genre, is their abysmal use of words.  (The other is length: a 50,000 word story is not a novel.  Oh, and writing a desperate cliffhanger to compel the reader to buy the next chapter?  That's a time-honored cheap and tawdry trick that ultimately wears thin and loses the reader.  It just is.  Finish the story in the book, damn it, at least with enough resolution to keep your readers happy.) 

It's not just my complaint, either; young fans hate being treated condescendingly by an author.  Fantasy readers, I've noticed, like a meaty read.  They don't want simple, plain language, they like words.  As a writer I try to give them the words they didn't know they needed to describe something.  The predilection for modern YA writers to dumb-down their material means losing the best readers to adult fantasy prematurely, when they run out of good new books.  It gets even worse when the young reader realizes that the kid in the "fantasy" novel thinks and lives more or less like they do.  That's patronizing and boring. 

So I give them big words they probably won't encounter in other works.  If I've done my job right, then a kid reading one of my Cadets is going to have to look up a word.  That's on purpose.  English is one of the most varied and effective languages on the planet, and writers who don't take advantage of that are cheating the readers and themselves.  If the adult readers have to look up a word every now and again, I won't complain.  Read, bitches, read!

I also try to show them a world very different from their suburban existence.  Life in an agrarian feudal economy with a low life-expectancy is much different than life in our modern world, and it brings a different set of expectations and outcomes.  Fourteen year old girls in a medieval society were making serious decisions about their lives, or contending with other people making decisions for them.  Our modern ideal of childhood arguably didn't begin until Western Europe achieved food security.  Young marriage and hard work was seen as the best social security investment, and options were limited for the vast number of people. 

Yeah, it's exciting to survive a robot monster attack in a dystopian underground maze, but when the realities of your life also include dying of hunger or disease or early childbirth, surrounded with the constant threat of war and lawlessness, there is a certain drama there, too.  While those are not issues our children are faced with, largely, it is important for them to realize those perspectives as they grow to adulthood. 

My next three Cadets will switch genders to boys and not be Dara-centric.  This won't be the last of the Dara novels, however.  She's one of my favorite characters and there's a lot more of her story to tell.  But she's rapidly aging out of the cadet years, at least in terms of responsibility, and her next novel will be far more adult, though tastefully so.  If you haven't picked up on it by the end of Sky Rider, she has a love triangle to resolve.  That's an entirely different kind of story from a YA book.

I'm toying with a couple of ideas for the next Cadet novel.  My son Hayden is working on a Ruderal novel, but I don't want to pressure him - he's 14, and in all-honors classes.  It will be done when it's done.  That said, I'm thinking about doing a book about a Kasari boy's adventure in the Wilderlands.  Conversely, I've also got an idea for a book about an entirely new character, a peasant boy who discovers he has Talent just before Warmage, and has the Censorate chasing him.  Another story that has suggested itself concerns a homeless orphan in a small town in Gilmora who gets swept up in the invasion.  I'd be interested in hearing what kinds of future YA books you would like to see from me. 

Why?  Because my experiment has been successful.  Successful enough so that kids are starting to dress up as Dara for Halloween.  And write book reports on Hawkmaiden.  Successful enough that Podium Publishing and I just extended our contract to cover them.

That's right, the Hawkmaiden trilogy will be produced and sold as an audiobook! 

All three novels will be done, and likely combined into one volume.  Production cost on audiobooks is high, so it makes good economic sense to invest in longer works, not shorter ones.  The reason there aren't more YA audiobooks is largely because most new YA novels are too short to make that economically viable.  Because of that, it's difficult for a company to risk an investment on YA, leaving a market that is unfulfilled.

Bottom line: you can now listen to some quality fantasy in the car with your kids without having to worry about someone's boob metaphorically popping out.  From what I understand, there's a market for that.

I hope you enjoy Sky Rider.  It was my attempt to prove that sometimes the biggest struggles facing a kid isn't saving the world, but saving as much of your own personal world as you can.  And that's not always possible.  But it's also not always depressing.  Adolescence is just a phase . . . the most important phase of our development.  It should be treated with some gravity, and appreciated for its wonder.

More news soon . . .