McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
What do you wish would be done MORE in urban fantasy?
13x13:
I was thinking of having the luck not actually be that lucky. The main character is lazy, angry, and a 20 year old adolescent. So what he really needs to be a "man" is to build character. So the luck knows this any puts him into situations that are beneficial to him in the long run...assuming he survives.
So his luck is just as likely to have him open up the phone book on the first try and find the number he is looking for, as it is to put him in the middle of a gang war(which would help him to develop his reflexes and stop complaining and realize that when he previously thought his life sucked he had no idea.)
So luck essentially has a plan to turn our protaganist into a hero, no matter how difficult or dangerous it could be.
JamiSings:
So we've got an average Joe for a possible hero. But how about a Plain Jane? Come on, I can't write worth a darn and I really think people need to write (something other then cheap romance novels) where the fat girl kicks supernatural butt.
Okay, granted, it's partly because one of my dreams is to be the inspiration behind a great character. *chuckles* But also because I want to see a fat girl kick a werewolf in the head.
novium:
--- Quote from: neurovore on November 24, 2007, 04:54:51 PM ---I like them a lot. The Atrocity Archives, which is the novel The Atrocity Archive plus the novella "Concrete Jungle", is readily available in paperback, and Jennifer Morgue is currently in hardback. They are about the division of the British intelligence services devoted to containing Lovecraftian threats, who these days mostly tend to pick up and recruit hacker-types who are innocently fiddling around with obscure bits of mathematics. The office politics is really something; it's like Dilbert with necromancy. Specifically, Atrocity Archive is pastiching Len Deighton, and Jennifer Morgue parodying Ian Fleming, though the central character is more of a Neal Stephenson type. There is at least another one coming.
Disclaimer: I have beta-read for Charlie, though only one not-yet-published novella in this series.
--- End quote ---
He writes well. Too well maybe! One thing that creeped me out about the atrocity archive is how well he managed to evoke the nazis. I was studying german history from the 1930s when I read it... and it conjured it up just a little too well for me. Usually I think the tendency is to make the nazis cartoonishly evil, to add crime after crime to their name... despite the fact that those embellishments always managed to fall far short of the true thing. this book managed to hit up the horror, so that what he added did not seem like an embellishment as much as an extension. That if the world of the books existed, that is how it would have been.
Kiriath:
I agree about the multiculturalism. I've heard that Lavie Tidhar does a lot of this, bringing in Hebrew mythology. I've had Snake Agent (the Liz Williams book) suggested to me before, and I plan to getting around it. American Gods had some occasional variety in it, too.
More... types of urban fantasy would be nice, too. There's a lot of detectives, and the Magic Council, which pops up everywhere, even in the Potters, is really starting to irritate me. How about something different, like an undersea investigator or an Indiana Jones archeologist? Strain the genre.
I have a Sidhe spy book brewing, though I don't know enough of the mythology to be able to write it yet. To my amusement, Simon Green got to the spies first, with The Man With the Golden Torc.
Oh, and technomancy. Hell yes. Magitech! Like WebMage, or the Mage the Ascension RPG. With some geeks in a world like that, some video game references could pop up.
Other countries, other cities... I love threads like this. :D
JamiSings:
What if magic was something that goes in cycles and there's sometimes centuries before a true witch or wizard shows up? So there is no higher ups telling them what's right and wrong. No council what so ever? What if there's been no real magic between the end of the Black Death and today? What if they have to learn it all for themselves and make their own person choices? What if some higher being just randomly throws out magic talents to test people and see if the earth is mature enough to handle magic?
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