Well, it’s the same Driftwood, but in different format: Podcastle has just bought the audio rights to “A Heretic by Degrees.” (“Driftwood” itself has already been podcasted by the original publisher, Beneath Ceaseless Skies.)
I really should get cracking on more stories in that world.
My friend gave me the ARCS for your novels. I LOVE this genre, and am now following your blog.
I also read your entry at FFF about what makes a fairy but everyone’s answers are so specific.
See, for me fairies are ancient nature creatures. In my world, they include everything from the Irish brownies to the Native American earth spirits (each tribe has so many names) and right up to mermaids (which is what my WIP is about).
Vampires have fangs and werewolves fur. These could never be part of the fairy realm because they are not natural. What I mean by natural is that both of these things were once human, where fairies are not a type of virus, for a lack of a better term.
Originally, fairies were anthropomorphic. They were meant to represent/explain things about nature that these tribes couldn’t explain. Irish and English fairies are just more common and we have more knowledge about them.
Welcome!
I don’t know if I necessarily see all faeries as being nature-based, but that’s definitely a big component of what they’re about.
I really should get cracking on more stories in that world.
This.
Congrats! I look forward to hearing it! I really need to write some new fantasy so I can submit to that market.
Awesome! The more Driftwood stories the better, imo.
As I listed to more podcasts, which are inherently flash to short story rather than my usual novels, I have been struck by a fundamental difference about the world-making. With the short format, you don’t have to answer deeper questions about “why” and “how”, because the image presented to the reader/listener is brief. If the author only had a dream-fragment visualization of the world building it’s okay.
Contrast with a gaming world setting, which has active participants who will dig in and find all those inconsistencies or other troubling areas, breaking the dream down until it cannot sustain life anymore.
After listening to Driftwood, I certainly found that I was wondering about that world, and if the setting could sustain more than just a short story. The place is intriguing, but I wondered if scratching deeper would break it. So I’m really interested to read/hear more stories indeed…
Bingo, on several counts. I like writing Driftwood stories because I’m an obsessive worldbuilder (I blame my anthropology degrees), and this is the one place where I can tell myself not to worry about such things; not only am I writing short stories instead of novels, but the fragmentation and decay inherent to the setting mean the links which joined Religious Idea H to Governmental Structure Q have broken anyway, so I don’t have to figure out what they are.
And then that, in turn, means that a Driftwood novel might just be missing the point. With the exception of avant-garde things I don’t really like to begin with, novels are big, coherent structures, and that’s exactly the kind of thing Driftwood doesn’t contain. A novel-length story would probably make the house of cards fall down, in a way that a collection of short stories might not.
