Anyway, like you said, your names are deliberately based on real-world places, and I’d rather not be reminded of the real world in any way, because fantasy, to me, is an escape from reality.

“I fell of my chair laughing”.

Thanks for the compliment. I was trying out satire for a bit, seems quite fun, but very draining.

(2) You’re not poor if you can afford to turn down anything.

(3) “semi-illiterate masses who wouldn’t know good writing if they tripped over it in broad daylight” is probably what the highbrow literature types call fantasy readers 🙂

A lot of the dicussion here reminds me of something that was told to me back in the early days of my writing (I won’t say career…) life. For a story to work on the most basic level (and I don’t mean be monetarily or critically successful) it has to be able to exist outside of the genre. Can you transplant your characters and their conflicts from fantasy to suspense or action or, dare I say it, literary? If this works, then your story can transcend genre and become simply what you wrote it as, a story.

As a writer, I hate classification of any sort. Fiction or non-fiction is about as far as I go. I follow authors, not genres.

Cheers, Lisa.

In fact, of all my fiction-writing friends, I think I can safely say every single one of them would continue writing till their dying day, even if they were never paid another penny.

I started writing fiction while still at elementary school. I received my first payment for it when I was fifty plus. Much of what I wrote I never showed anyone. It was done for love, for joy, for the satisfaction of a creative urge. What prompted me to push for publication was a need to share, not the money I thought I would get.

I still write for love. I turn down better paying work to give myself more time to write, and given my precarious financial situation at the moment, that is a sacrifice! It is nice now to receive some remuneration, but it is nicer still to share a world with other people, to have them lose themselves in my stories for a while, to have their imaginations soar because of something I wrote.

You seem to think that is something sells in today’s world, it must be somehow rubbish. If people write fine literature that resonates, it sells. I bet Banville’s “The Sea” (winner of the last Booker-Man) has sold a ton more copies than any book of mine. I know I bought it and loved it and will reread it from time to time. It is a truly beautiful piece of work. If people aren’t selling, then maybe they should not blame those who don’t buy, and not blame authors who do sell well, but look closer at their own product.

My naming of places is very deliberate (as was Tolkien’s – Anghara is probably the best person to talk about where his names came from; he didn’t pull them out of a hat but looked more at where European names might have come from) and you are exactly right. I want to remind the reader of something that I don’t want to say outright. The biblical reference is important and I want them to have that in the back of their mind as they read – but I don’t want to stop the narrative and say (as 19th century writers did all the time) : look, dear reader, what I mean is actually this.
For me, the story is the thing.

One reason I use fantasy as a medium is because it offers me a way to write a two-level tale – a story about people in a mythical place, yet firmly anchored in today’s world. Some readers miss this second level altogether (I know this from reading my fanmail)and that’s fine. Others see it and revel in it, and that’s even better.

Another reason I write fantasy is because it enables me to say things that would upset a great many people if I placed them in today’s world. If you live where I do, you will know what I mean.

The third reason I write fantasy is because I love a good story that gives wings to the imangination.

I don’t write fantasy because it sells better than “literary” fiction. I don’t write it for money. I certainly don’t see it as “selling out”, or writing something that is innately crap simply because it is fantasy (which is surely circular illogic), I certainly don’t see it as something that is read by the semi-illiterate masses who wouldn’t know good writing if they tripped over it in broad daylight.

Try reading some of the authors suggested. I think you’ll be astonished at the qulity of writing that is out there.

That’s exactly it. I think they have a right to be mad at how prose has evolved from an art to a product. Not to say anyone needs their approval, but they’re more than right to complain that books are no longer labors of love (yeah go ahead, argue with me, would you be writing if no one paid you a cent, honestly ? 🙂 ) people write for money these days when they used to write for the sheer love of writing. It’s a product, a commodity, like soap. You write, you sell, you get paid, you write more, life goes on. It’s a commodity now, but it doesn’t mean anyone HAS to like the way things are now.

It’s not random names I’m talking about, it’s names that have an old-world “feel” about them, but are not taken or copied from anywhere. Like you said, your Tyr comes from someplace that already exists, you just removed an “e”. Places like Rohan and Pellucidar, where were they taken from ? nowhere you can guess. That’s the difference. I’m just not into books where I can guess where the names come from. I think a fantasy novel should not remind readers of the real world. It’s just how my mind works. I mean, here you an in this great fantasy world, and all of a sudden it’s called Tyr, which reminds you of Sidon, which reminds you of the Bible, and all of a sudden you’re back in the real world. See that’s the problem, the words trigger associations to the real world. “Cimmeria” doesn’t trigger any associations, so you can imagine how it’s like w/o your mind going off on a tangent and ruining things. So that’s why I don’t like names which are based on real-world names.

It’s not that anyone “despises” this, it’s just that.. it’s sad that books have become a commodity, so they’ve chosen to react in this manner because they feel that you’re the “enemy”, they’re fighting for what _they_ believe in. Quixotic maybe, but who denies them that right ? it’s just sad. Cold and harsh and brutal and realistic, but sad nevertheless. We’ll probably never see another book written the way books were written in the early days.

See that’s what they’re mad about. It used to be that people wrote for love, now they write for money. And they don’t like it. Of course they’re mad at you, they see you as destroying their way of life, “selling out”. In time they’ll pass on, and “belles lettres” will just be a dim and distant memory. But for now, they’re fighting for what they believe in.