MathiasCavanaugh.com

In an episode of Family Guy, Peter is listening to the police scanner.  Brian walks in and remarks, upon hearing a crime being reported, by saying, “Is it just me, or is rap music just getting lazier?”

Well, I have come to believe something similar when it comes to what is popularly known as “dark fantasy”.  Dark fantasy is that sort of fantasy where you have an anti-hero with morally questionable motives.  Decades ago, I read The Black Company by Glen Cook.  It’s a great piece of dark fantasy, following a band of anti-heroes (The Black Company) and narrated by an analyst (named Croaker) who has a knack for coming up with really fun, yet bizarre, ways of describing common occurrences and The Company’s exploits. Read more…

Since I have now been forced into a conversations about how “great” LotR is several times over the past week by fanboys of the books, I thought I would blog about the experience.

Let me start off by clarifying that I really do like J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy series Lord of the Rings. But, that said, it doesn’t make it on my 10 top list in the Fiction/Fantasy genre. And, honestly, you Tolkien fanboys really piss me off. Especially since you Tolkien fanboys regularly, and laughably always resort to the same, tired arguments to make LotR sound like it is something it was not and is not. That “same, tired argument” is an attempt to portray LotR as some unique story and everything that has come since in the realm of fantasy literature is just some thinly veiled carbon copy.

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Just giving a shout out my my buddy J.R. Fitch who has been giving me some great leads on literary agents to submit my novel to.  Ok, some of them don’t look like good fits but some of them do and I always appreciate the help.

I’ve started to construct an agent contact database to help track my submissions even though I am not quite there yet.  I like being organized though.

My database looks like this:

The categories are:

• Agent Name
• Agency
• Interests
• Recent Relevant Sales
• Send (Y/N)
• Date Sent
• Heard Back (Y/N)
• Interested (Y/N)
• Followup

The list contains both loose and hard matches.  If an agent says generically that they accept “Fiction” they go on the list.  They might not be among the first few batches of queries to go out unless I see that they have recently sold something in the Fantasy genre however.  The category that agents through around that bugs me however is “YA Fantasy”.  This field is so poorly and broadly defined that I have come to realize that no one really knows what it means and every one seems to have different definitions they opt to go by.  But I will still target them as well as Under the Darkened Moon can easily fit into that category under many of the available definitions.

I think that this sort of a list will help me keep track of where my submissions have gone and see if there are any trends in terms of out right rejections versus interest.