Broadly, I classify my writing as speculative fiction, which includes the genres that are typically shelves under both the fantasy, and science fiction categories. Yet, you will notice that the majority of my works, both published so far on the site, and in progress, fall in the fantasy genre. Considering that my "real" job involves working with advanced, experimental satellites, that might seem somewhat counter-intuitive, and indeed I've gotten a lot of questions recently about why I don't write more science fiction. So, I've decided to try to provide an answer, other than the fact that I'm not nearly as skilled or imaginative, to why I'm not the next Isaac Asimov.
Stories Come From Somewhere
No, it's not a magical fairyland. No pixie whispers into my brain what I should write next, what stories I ought to tell. Actually, I don't think that very many stories could come from a magical fairyland, if such a place existed. It would be too nice in such a magical place, and stories, at their heart, require a digression from the pleasant or the normal. Otherwise, there would be nothing worth reading, much less writing. Which is not to say that there couldn't be a magical fairyland in which things don't go beautifully, but let's leave that possibility be for the purposes of this discussion.
Plausible Impossibility
If you've been a follower of the site for awhile, you may remember the post "Written in a Corner." In that post, I mentioned that I would write another post addressing the topic of plausible impossibility, which is an important concept in speculative fiction writing. Of course, if you've been a follower of the site for awhile, you probably also have realized that I'm not always very good at following up on these post ideas that I drop in my posts in anything approaching a timely fashion. Don't worry, I'll get to it eventually. In this case, it's only taken me a couple months.
DUNE Review
Ultra-tough, misunderstood desert cultures can be a slightly overused trope in fantasy writing, especially alternative world fantasy. They often crop up as the much-needed army for the beset hero, at just the right time, after the hero properly impresses them and meets some ancient prophecy. It might be that the origin of this tendency lies with DUNE.
Written in a Corner
As I'm working on the Fo'Fonas series, I've made the decision that I'm going to write rough drafts of every novel in the series before I will seek to publish even the first one. I think this will improve the strength of all of the novels, since I'll be able to better tie everything together and generally make for a tighter story. It will also make my job as a writer easier, because I won't be stuck with an immutable origin when I get to later parts of the series.
Genre Jargon
Speculative fiction, broadly, includes the stories that are typically classified as science fiction and fantasy, but if you've written in the genre realm for long, you may have noticed that the terminology employed by libraries and other sources to classify genre fiction is somewhat limited. Maybe we genre writers aren't as "serious" as the "real" authors, but that hasn't stopped us from developing our own terminology to help describe our works. Since I think that many of these terms would be useful for both readers and writers to know, I've sought to describe some of them below.
A Place to Start
Maybe, if I were some kind of amazing author, a writing protege, with nothing to do but labor lovingly over my works of fiction, I could think about doing this the "normal" way, if such a thing even exists. There's something attractive about traditional publishing, mostly that the publisher usually takes care of all of the logistics, advertising, and social media outreach. In other words, the traditional publishing route (at least as I imagine it) would allow me to hide in a cave and write, without worrying about all of this publicity and business.
IGC Publishing 