First pub week post! This one very technically contains spoilers for the book, although I would not consider them real spoilers.
For my pub week posts, I’m not planning on talking much about, e.g., nuances of worldbuilding, or themes, or characterization. Death of the Author (original flavor) as a lens of criticism is not a tool I use very often as a reader (I don’t look up stuff about authors, but line-level intention is a big part of line-level reading to me!) But I keep thinking about it because for the very tangentially related question of being an author talking about my book, there’s a part of me that’s like, I already wrote tens of thousands of words. They’re the reader’s problem now! 😊
There are quotes floating around that say that very thing in a snappier way, but some of them imply authors should avoid talking about their book…which is a judgement I sharply disagree with as a reader because I love hearing about people’s processes. I’ll probably write more about my book some time in the future too!
For pub week posts I’m doing music, research, a dubiously-related post about D&D and Shakespeare, and TBD for Thursday and Friday if I draft something in time. For this Sunday starting post, I did pick something about my story itself — talking about putting dudes from different genres into the same story.
Some of the fun I had writing this book was putting characters “from different genres” in the same story. Thinking back, I didn’t set out to do that. I never said “I’m going to put character types from different fictional genres into the same story!” It came naturally with one character, then another, then another, until it had become a thing.
I think part of why that happened was because it’s already a story building on references, and part of it why it happened was because it’s got that D&D-like “Romantic Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery setting where medieval characters say ‘Yeah’ and ‘Okay’” thing, which I think encourages meta stuff even in a book that takes itself too seriously to, for instance, have memes in.
More than that, though…I think it made sense because a big aspect of the story is the refraction of similar ideas through different characters (hey look, here I am undying and talking about themes).
I would say the overarching genre of the book itself would best be described by the current genre of “fantasy romance:” a romance (genre) novel set in a fantasy world. It’s also drawing heavily on the “romantic fantasy” genre of the 1980s (and thereabouts). The ‘fantasy’ in “romantic fantasy” means the same thing, the setting of a fantasy world, but the ‘romantic’ was the other historical meaning of romantic (rather than “people falling in love”). Neither of those genres have chatty first-person narrators very often, but if you asked me what genre my book belongs in I would absolutely say fantasy romance inspired by [1980s-definition] romantic fantasy. (Try contextualizing that to people who only read nonfiction).
What genres do the characters who ended up in this romantic fantasy fantasy romance “belong” to? For those for whom I did have a genre or body of work in mind, it’s pretty cut and dried — for example, Thief is noir and hardboiled, Lysas is country song, the hero is a romance (genre) hero,* Iuliana is Arthurian lady. For some of the others, I didn’t have a genre in mind when I was creating them, so it’s fun to try to fit them into that lens retroactively. Cerhun probably fits in Sword & Sorcery and Romantic Fantasy better than any other genre (and possibly better than any other character), making her the least generically astray.
*It’s tempting to joke about “a guy who coincidentally wants all the same things you want in life,” and certainly he is very conveniently present and loving and supportive and heroic, but finding someone who “coincidentally” wants most of the same things out of life you do is kind of how real life relationships work, if you think about it.
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