Shawna Reppert is an award-winning author
of fantasy and steampunk who keeps her readers up all night and makes them miss
work deadlines. Her fiction asks
questions for which there are no easy answers while taking readers on a fine
adventure that grips them heart and soul.
You can find her work on Amazon and follow her blog on her website (www.Shawna-Reppert.com). You can friend her on Facebook and follow her
on Twitter, where she posts an amazing array of geekery. Shawna can also sometimes be found in
medieval garb on a caparisoned horse, throwing javelins into innocent hay bales
that never did anything to her.
Shawna has dropped by to talk about Urban Fantasy
Urban
Fantasy: Fairytales for Today
The thing that most people forget about
fairy tales is that they were born when once-upon-a-time was present-day. People
did walk through the woods to Grandma’s house, because there was a lot more
woods and a lot more walking. There were knights and woodcutters and chimneys
that needed sweeping. Storytellers populated the tales of right-here-right-now
with dragons and fairies, unicorns and werewolves.
From the gods and demigods of Greek myth
to the Seelie and Unseelie courts of the Celts, from Coyote and Raven to the
Japanese kitsune who were sometimes foxes and sometimes people, tales of
miracles and magic exist in every culture. The human race seems to have
developed with the idea that, for good or ill, magic could happen to anyone who
wandered off the path in the fog, or took the short-cut through the woods, or
made a bargain with a stranger they met at the crossroads. The universality of
these tales would indicate that they serve some deep-seated need.
In grade school, we were taught that the
myths were humanity’s way of explaining things like how the sun moved across
the sky before we discovered science. As an adult, I have come to believe that
explanation to be somewhat limited.
I think that tales of wonder fulfill the
human need to find a sense of magic in the world. Confronting the metaphorical
dark powers in these tales teaches the soul courage to stand against the real
evils of the world. Believing in elves and fairies for the space of a tale
helps readers to see and appreciate the beauty of the real world when they
surface from the book and look around them. I think the act of suspending
disbelief to lose yourself in a tale of werewolves and vampires shakes
something loose, leaves you open to seeing things in a new way.
We owe much to Tolkien for
re-popularizing fantasy, but for too long writers and publishing houses got
stuck in the idea that fantasy had to take place in the long-ago. Or else in
the far future (any hard-SF devotee will tell you that Star Wars is space fantasy,
not true science fiction. Which I personally consider part of its charm.) Now,
don’t get me wrong. I love a good space fantasy as much as the next geek, and I
could hardly criticize high fantasy as I write almost as much of that as I do contemporary.
But people forgot that fairy tales, the antecedents of fantasy, were born when
all the historical trappings were not historical at all. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been called the first
science fiction novel. It could also arguably be called the first contemporary
fantasy. She set her tale in her own time period, and the ‘science’ bears as
much resemblance to Merlin’s alchemy as it does anything else. Certainly the
reanimated corpse resonates with myths or religious tales the world over.
People ask ‘why urban fantasy’? To me,
the only response is ‘why not urban
fantasy? I think contemporary fantasy is our culture’s attempt to create its
own mythos.
As an aside, I prefer the term
‘contemporary fantasy’ to ‘urban fantasy’ as being both more accurate and more
inclusive. I mean, what if the story takes place in the suburbs? Does that make
it suburban fantasy? My novel Ravensblood takes place mostly in an
alternate-universe version of Portland, OR, and so I call it urban fantasy. But
a few key scenes take place in and around a cottage in the Old Growth forest of
Mariner State (The state of Washington in the Real World). Does that make it an
urban/woodland fantasy? How about its sequel, Raven’s Wing, which takes place mostly in AU Portland, with scenes also
in unincorporated Newberg and in Arch Cape and a chapter or so in the
Australian Outback? Urban/rural/coastal/Outback fantasy? Oh, my.
But since ‘urban fantasy’ is the term
readers search under in Amazon and reviewers use when outlining what they will and
won’t read, I mostly stick with that.
When Ravensblood
was still in the developmental stage, I got an excellent piece of advice
from an agent I was chatting up at a writer’s conference. (Lest I get a
reputation for bad behavior at conferences, let me clarify that I was chatting
up as in trying to get into a contract, not into his bed.) I told him I was
working on an alternate-universe urban fantasy set in a city very like
Portland.
He interrupted me right there. “No. Not like Portland. Set it in alternate-universe
Portland. Your readers will be much more invested.”
And he was right. Not only did it help
me out in the writing, since I was describing places that existed and that I
knew intimately, but it made for much more engaged readers. People who live in
the Portland area told me how much they loved the feeling that the story could
really happen here, and this despite the fact that the Ravensblood universe is a very
alternate universe version of Portland. Ex-pats of the Pacific Northwest said
the descriptiveness of my prose made them nostalgic.
Perhaps one of the most surprising
payoffs came from my OMSI/OMMSI reference. In the real world, OMSI is the
Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. In the Ravensblood universe, there is an extra ‘m’: the Oregon Museum of
Magic, Science and Industry. It was just a cheap throw-away I tossed in to
amuse locals, a brief mention of Cass seeing the red lights of the OMMSI sign
reflected on the river as she crossed one of the many bridges of Portland.
But one of my beta readers, a woman who
lives in France, e-mailed me all excited because she had done a Google search
and found the website for the real-world place. I hadn’t even told her there was a real-world place.
When she flew out later visit me and to
take the Ravensblood tour of
Portland, I greatly enjoyed showing her all the places where, in another
version of reality, magic could happen at any moment.
***
Go and check out Shawn's site where there's much more information on all her books. Many thanks to Shawna for the interesting post!
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