Why Writing Fantasy Is Awesome

I have never really thrown myself into the world of high fantasy. I've tended to focus on contemporary reality, even when including paranormal elements. In many ways my books, even those involving

VAMPIRES

ANGELS

FAIRIES

have been rooted very much in reality with the paranormal elements weaving themselves into everyday life, or at least as every day as you can get with the fey or shifters or vampires.

I've thought about writing fantasy for a long time. I love to read it after all. I hate the thought of being one-note in my writing and love to experiment with everything from setting to point of view to genre. I've dabbled in sci fi and toyed with paranormal but never committed myself all the way.

Then, an idea came to me and I ran with it. The result is not yet fully crafted but has been contracted with eXtasy as my first series.  I have a well-formed idea for three books, with possibly a fourth bubbling away in the back of my head. It's so new that, although I have named each book, I have no idea what to call the entire series. I'm hoping it will come to be soon.

Creating a world is, in itself, an exciting project. "Fairyland" is such a huge concept and has been written about so many times, it was a challenge to come up with new things. Thankfully, my twisted imagination and experience of living for more than fifty years in my own world, has come in handy in that department.

As usual, I started in the "real world" with a very ordinary sixteen-year-old boy and his ordinary friends, who are in the middle of their school exams. Tay has plans. He's going somewhere, although the last place he expected to go was Fairyland. This is a new take on the old trope of "Fairy prince sent to the human world to hide from demons". Tay takes his ordinariness into the other world, along with his best friend Caleb who's possessed by the very demons Tay was unknowingly hiding from. From there, he dodges assassins, makes powerful friends and tries desperately to come to terms with the fact that his parents were never his parents and his true family are fairies, people he's never met who expect him to slot into the role that should have been his. He's so lost he needs a map to find his way around his own head.

We follow as the strange new world unfolds, and my imaginations does crazy things to everyday animals and even inanimate objects. Feathered flying panthers, amphibious foxes, double-ended snakes and buildings that turn out to be sleeping dragons.

This is one of the places featured, where Tay meets the feathered panther with Wisp.

With images like that to work with, it's easy to let your mind go crazy about the wondrous creatures that might inhabit this place. Other things, like the skink wizard, are just plain crazy

The biggest challenge I've come up against is what the heck to name the series. I have names for the individual books - Willow's Way, Tay's Trials and Cale's Cunning, but what to call them all together?

Look out for Willow's Way coming soon (hopefully by the end of the year) from eXtasy to find out what I finally chose as the series name.