What is Fantasy? ~guest post by Jane Toombs

We're pleased to have author Jane Toombs here with us again at the Speculative Salon. She offers an interesting post that answers the question--What is fantasy? Enjoy her post and also, please, check out her latest fantasy release, Taken In. 

                                              What Is Fantasy?

The dictionary describes it as: “The creative imagination; unrestrained fancy.   Also  literary or dramatic fiction characterized by  highly fanciful or supernatural elements. Illusion; hallucination.”

    Ah, supernatural.  In other words, paranormal.  That’s the sub-genre of fantasy I usually tend to write. How each author approaches fantasy tends to be different.  Take werewolves for example.

   Some authors apparently feel that since wolves run in packs,  therefore their man-wolf or woman-wolf also has a pack. That’s certainly one way to present them.  But I don’t feel that way.  This being is not only a wolf but a man.  Men do not need to run in packs so my werewolves tend to be loners.

    Sometimes my shifters aren’t any species of animal, they’re simply a beast when they shift. This is true of my MOONRUNNER  TRILOGY--beasts that can stand erect, but can also run on all fours. After all, since it’s my “creative imagination” I can do anything I chose to do as long as I keep to my own guidelines of what such a creature can do or not do.

    When I wrote my chapter of  The  Guide To Writing Paranormal  Novels, Volume 1, I mention this.  My chapter is Dropped Eyes And Unattached Tentacles, where I also go into what bothers me as a reader--having a character, whether paranormal or not doing something impossible--like a human dropping his eyes or a creature flinging off a tentacle to capture prey.  While humans cannot literally drop their eyes, an imaginary creature can certainly fling off a tentacle if necessary, but as a reader I need to be prepared to know this, even if the prey has no idea it can do Though octopi, as far as I know, cannot detach tentacles, imaginary creatures can do anything the author sets them up to do.

   I agree that in a story, it might be the character does not know what an imaginary creature’s abilities are, so the reader finds out along with the character. That’s fair enough.

   I call many of my stories Paranormal Suspense Romances, because that’s what they are. I always try to keep the reader aware of what any shifters I write about can do. But in some cases, like my DARKNESS OF DRAGONS TRILOGY, some of the characters don’t even know they’re capable of shifting, so the reader has to find out when they do.   

  Fairy tales, whether or not they’re meant to illustrate a point, are also fantasies. In many cases about cultures which no longer exist. I write those, too, in my UNDERWORLD SERIES about gates between Earth and other worlds.

   My latest trilogy, DAGON HOUSE, has the first book out now--Taken In.  And this one is about ghosts.  Whether or not they do exist, they still fall into the fantasy genre.  I personally have never seen or felt a ghost, but I know others who believe they have.  I never disbelieve what others tell me they’ve felt because I guess I sort of like to believe they could exist.    

   

BLURB for Taken In:

 

Gail Sarandon flees New York City after seeing the murder of a man she knows--with both the hit man and Jason Tregarth, a Special Agent following her trail. Jason finds her first, but the hit man arrives before he can get her to safety. Gail with him, Jason manages to elude the hit man, only to crash on a lonely mountain road, totaling the car. He's injured, but Gail’s able to get him to the only shelter around--Dagon House. She believes they're safe, but she's wrong...

All of my books are featured on my web page along with buy links. www.JaneToombs.com

Guest post: The Lure of Fantasy by Jane Toombs

THE LURE OF FANTASY  by  Jane Toombs

  Never mind that all fiction essentially is fantasy in that it isn’t “real” but created by an author.  Even as I child I knew the difference between fiction and true fantasy. I was taught by a master--Edgar Allan Poe.  

   My parents never restricted my reading, something I’m eternally grateful for.  I must have been about ten when I pulled Poe’s book of poems from the family bookcase.  It was a small black book and the printing was tiny, but I persisted. I soon realized I held magic in my hands.  I don’t claim to have understand exactly what he meant at that age, but loved the mystery of  words like “the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”

I believe the mystery is what I enjoy the most about fantasy.  Not mystery as in who killed whom, but a speculative kind of mystery that Poe must have loved as much as we do.  As readers we can enter worlds that never were and enter lands that never were, but we believe in those lands, those times, and what‘s happening for the time we’re happily engrossed in the book.

I  can’t be sure when I changed from simply enjoying speculative  fiction to wanting to write it.  The first book I sold in 1973 was a gothic and was loaded with weird stuff.   I had made the heroine  of Tule Witch a nurse who was at work in an  ER in the basement of an old hospital where water dripped from pipes running across the ceiling.--a setting that actually existed at the time, but suitably spooky.  

Still, a nurse heroine doesn’t sound like fantasy.  And what I wrote didn’t seem too weird until a bit later on in the book.  I was thrilled with the sale and wrote six or seven gothics after that book which also sold, every last one of them a fantasy.    What happened?  Well, I sold another of my weird gothics to  Harlequin so long ago that they still referred to that book as a “product.”  As a matter of fact I have the rights back and eventually will scan it. But now I was a Harlequin author and I quickly discovered they wanted no part of anything weird or spooky (these were early days.)  So I had to fit in a “line.”    

Yes, I confess I did what they wanted me to.  Hey, the money was good and kept coming.  Who turns down money?

I didn’t foresee the day when I couldn’t stand to do this any longer and need to immerse myself in weirdness again. But here I am happily writing fantasy for ebooks and not making all that much money--but I’ve reached an age where I have to love what I‘m doing.  

And now, once again, I do.  Fantasy is always just beyond our reach in real life, but easy to find in books, thank heaven…  And yes, I’ve written about that ghoul who lives in a cemetery called Weir.  He’s green and in love with a human. The story is called “It Can’t Be Mine!” and is in an ebook called TEN PAST MIDNIGHT.

Ten Past Midnight Blurb:

An awkward heroine who has no sense of smell and wants to be loved. Her so-called friends pull a prank on her, which makes her so angry that when she passes the Weir Cemetery on her way home and sees someone green, she believes it's some guy dressed up for another scam and is determined to confront  the prankster. 

A hero who is a starving green ghoul living in a cemetery called Weir. He can't believe it when a human woman actually talks to him. Is it possibly she can't smell his scent, which is foul to humans?  

This is one of the weird stories in Ten Past Midnight, but it does end happily, unlike some of them,  all my books can be found at my website with buy links, or Amazon.

Ten Past Midnight may be purchased at Amazon.

website: www.JaneToombs.com

Author Bio: Jane Toombs, author of ninety published books if you count novellas, lives across the road from Lake Superior with her calico cat, Kinko, in Michigan's beautiful Upper Peninsula wilderness. She writes in most genres, but fantasy is by far her favorite.