I think I need a new category here on the blog: Movies I Didn’t Stay Awake Through. We started watching ERAGON tonight, and I dozed off about twenty minutes into it, waking up just in time to see the big battle at the end. From what I saw, the photography looked pretty good and the special effects were okay, but don’t go by me. I couldn’t tell you much about the story other than that it seemed like standard high fantasy.
Which means I’m not really the target audience anyway, since with the exception of THE LORD OF THE RINGS I’ve never been much of a fan of high fantasy. Give me a book with dragons, elves, quests, magical talismans, etc., and most of the time I'll yawn and put it back on the shelf. I mean no offense to people who enjoy those novels; they just don’t resonate with me as a reader most of the time. That’s probably the reason I never had much success writing in that genre, although Lord knows Livia and I both tried for a while and have the drawer full of unsold proposals to show for it. We actually did sell a novel based on a fantasy role-playing game, LYRON’S LAMENT, that I think turned out pretty well. And I once wrote an entire 75,000-word novel about knights battling dragons in 5th or 6th Century England. That was a ghost job for a semi-big name in the field. However, the book was never published and I never got paid for it, since it was three years late when I took the job and the publisher didn’t want it anymore. Didn’t know that at the time I was writing it, though. Still, it was fun to write, so that’s worth something, I guess.
Dang. Now I’m thinking about writing fantasy again. Some of those proposals were actually pretty good . . .
Which means I’m not really the target audience anyway, since with the exception of THE LORD OF THE RINGS I’ve never been much of a fan of high fantasy. Give me a book with dragons, elves, quests, magical talismans, etc., and most of the time I'll yawn and put it back on the shelf. I mean no offense to people who enjoy those novels; they just don’t resonate with me as a reader most of the time. That’s probably the reason I never had much success writing in that genre, although Lord knows Livia and I both tried for a while and have the drawer full of unsold proposals to show for it. We actually did sell a novel based on a fantasy role-playing game, LYRON’S LAMENT, that I think turned out pretty well. And I once wrote an entire 75,000-word novel about knights battling dragons in 5th or 6th Century England. That was a ghost job for a semi-big name in the field. However, the book was never published and I never got paid for it, since it was three years late when I took the job and the publisher didn’t want it anymore. Didn’t know that at the time I was writing it, though. Still, it was fun to write, so that’s worth something, I guess.
Dang. Now I’m thinking about writing fantasy again. Some of those proposals were actually pretty good . . .
5 comments:
Man I'd love to see some of this stuff, Jim. I'm not huge on "high fantasy," but I sure love the barbarian fantasy stuff.
It also helps when the film isn't based on juvenilia. Or the novel isn't juvenilia or similarly derivative to juvenilia...
Copies of LYRON'S LAMENT are available pretty inexpensively on ABE. It was supposed to be the first book in a trilogy, but the second and third book never happened for various reasons. This one stands alone fairly well, though.
I doubt if the dragon book will ever see the light of day. I don't know if the person I wrote it for is even still alive. I suppose since I was never paid for it I might have the right to try to sell it, but that seems like a can of worms I wouldn't want to open.
Would it help if you changed the names of the places and characters?
Juri,
I've thought about trying to do that, but since it was written from an outline by the other author, it seems like removing all the elements that came from that outline would be a lot of trouble and wouldn't leave much. Still, I never throw anything away, because you never know when you might need it.
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