Why I Love Editing Fantasy
While I love paranormal and contemporary romances as much as the next romance editor, I have a special love for fantasy. Even so, I tend to be extra-selective about contracting fantasy romance projects, because so often fantasy can feel derivative. I’ve been fortunate enough to have edited eight wonderful fantasies for Samhain Publishing, and I’ll be giving away a free ebook of one of them today—winner’s choice.
One thing I particularly enjoy about fantasies are all the nifty things authors create. I’m not talking about fabulous creatures so much as creative concepts of how magic works. In R.F. Long’s
The Wolf’s Sister and
The Wolf’s Mate, magic is an inherited trait that drives the characters insane unless properly treated. In The Scroll Thief by the same author, the protagonists are trying to recover a magic scroll that allows one to rewrite history. The high iron content in the heroine’s blood affects the powers of the Fae in Long’s novel
Soul Fire. In
Myla by Moonlight by Inez Kelley, magic-wielders use their powers to serve justice by becoming Truthbearers, while the villain uses his to manipulate memories in order to pervert the course of justice. Myla herself is a creature of magic and therefore not fully human, which forms the romantic conflict of the novel, a conflict which requires an accomplished author to pull off well. Happily, Inez Kelley has the requisite skills to make this utterly convincing and compelling.
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hereSetting a story in an imaginary land creates a distance that allows the author to make her characters suffer to a greater degree than I could bear in a more realistic contemporary romance. Everything can be more intense: the nature of sacrifices made, the level of emotion endured, the amount of pain inflicted on the characters—and the characters themselves can be truly larger-than-life. The flawed wizard hero of
Ilfayne’s Bane by Julia Knight—a current EPIC award nominee for best fantasy—suffers intense guilt over the vengeance he wrought centuries earlier, following the death of his wife and children. This, combined with his immortality, has made him flip and distant, unwilling to form any sort of attachment with humans who will only die soon.
He is the über-flawed hero, down to his missing hand, the type you think you wouldn’t want your daughter or best friend to hook up with, but who will win your heart by the last page. One of the heroines of
The Scroll Thief committed a similar type of grief-driven, revenge-based sin in her past, leaving her penitent and willing to go to the ends of the earth to atone.
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hereSome fantasy authors just blow me away with their awesome world-building.
The Scroll Thief is a fantasy of epic proportions. R.F. Long draws us into every aspect of her world until we absorb the politics, religion, history, and justice of Ithian, bringing to life the mean streets of the city, the palaces of the powerful, the tents of the desert nomads, and the silent cloisters of the religious. This story isn’t for the faint of heart, since it depicts graphic violence and heartbreaking sacrifices. And it carries a three handkerchief warning—while editing this long novel, I must have read it all the way through a half-dozen times, but it still made me cry every time. I love big, fat fantasies written on an epic canvas with a large cast of characters and a fully realized world, and I love deeply emotional reads, so when the two are combined, it’s magical indeed.
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hereJulia Knight’s Oathcursed series is another epic-scale fantasy. In
Ilfayne’s Bane, the author has created a world still reeling from the long-ago mage wars, in which the gods contend for worship and the kyrbodans and humans keep well away from each other, leaving the heroine (who’s half human, half kyrbodan) reviled no matter where she lives. The gods play an even larger role in book 2,
Love Is My Sin (releasing next month), with the jealousy of one god creating all kinds of problems for the honorable hero.
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hereI love books with strong conflict and, when well-written, fantasy romances contain impossible odds. In
Myla by Moonlight, the hero prince must have an heir in order to secure the kingdom and end a bloody war, but the non-human heroine can’t give him one. In
The Wolf’s Sister, the heroine must depend on the hero to escape her brother, who’s been driven insane by magic, without revealing to the hero that she’s related to the man who murdered his sister. In
Love Is My Sin, the regent has vowed to help his foster son form a badly need alliance by marriage to the very woman he ends up falling in love with.
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hereFantasy lends itself well to exciting action climaxes in which the reader can’t figure out how the hero and heroine are ever going to escape. In
Myla by Moonlight, author Inez Kelley puts her characters into such an impossible situation that readers are convinced that all is lost, and the clever resolution comes about through a tear-inducing sacrifice. It’s the kind of ending that sticks in a reader’s mind for months after putting the book down.
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hereSex can be a lot of fun in erotic fantasies. Imagine sex without any of our society’s norms, expectations, taboos, or hang-ups. That’s what you get in
Ritual Passion by Cathryn Brunet (releasing next week). I normally don’t like it when plots rely on sexual acts, but this author’s writing is so strong, I was easily able to get beyond that and be utterly caught up in her world, one populated with a jealous goddess, jungle-hardened warriors and corrupt priests. In
Love Is My Sin by Julia Knight, the heroine uses her sexual favors as a political tool to retain control of her tribes, a practice that is the norm for her country. However in the hero’s land, this behavior is shocking, so her sexuality drives a dimension of the conflict in this richly layered novel.
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hereSometimes a book set in our contemporary world can read more like a fantasy than a paranormal. In
Soul Fire, a prince of the Fae gets stuck in 21st century England, and hosts of his enemy Sidhe come after him, enmeshing the heroine in a sensual, highly romantic adventure based on folklore.
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hereAnother reason I love fantasy is that authors can indulge in lush descriptions that would feel out of place and overdone in contemporary-set commercial fiction. Ritual Passion opens with this evocative passage:
Sunlight dapples the old temple walls, the ruins of a lost time. They stand, these shrines to forgotten gods, but precariously, half eaten by our ravenous jungle. I touch a lichen-encrusted figure etched in the crumbling tufa. I do not know which of the old gods this is, but I fear that I should. My race is dying, withering under nature’s exuberant gaze. The god knows this, and taunts me from his stone prison.
Butterflies drift past my face, iridescent escapees from the encroaching forest. Heat pummels my skin. This close to the city boundary, the atmosphere hangs thick and dense. Oppressive, as though the earth is leaden with expectation.
The world waits, breathing the shallow air of anticipation, like I do. From a distance comes the triumphant wail of a hunter’s horn. Startled birds shoot for the sky in an explosion of cobalt, emerald and scarlet wings. They quickly resettle, hiding amongst the intense verdant foliage and resuming their incessant chatter.
Yet another fun part of reading fantasy is the gorgeous cover art. Some of my favorite fantasy romance covers include the EPIC-nominated novel Ilfayne’s Bane, which vividly depicts the wizard-hero casting a spell, the moody and magical cover of The Wolf’s Mate, and the lush, oh-so-romantic cover of Soul Fire (currently out in ebook, the print edition releases next May) which is almost worth buying for the cover alone—but don’t worry, the story is just as lovely.
Which Samhain Publishing fantasy cover do you like best? Tell me the title of your favorite Samhain Publishing fantasy romance cover, which you can see here:
http://samhainpublishing.com/category/fantasy-romance, and I’ll enter your name in a drawing to win a free Samhain Publishing ebook! You’ll be able to choose from The Scroll Thief, Ilfayne’s Bane, Love Is My Sin, Myla by Moonlight, The Wolf’s Sister, The Wolf’s Mate, Soul Fire, and Ritual Passion. And be sure to share what you love—or hate—about fantasy romance.***Open to everyone. When entering the giveaway don't forget to leave an email address if there isn't one in your profile. The winner will be announced after 12am midnight in the comments.*** ------
Deborah Nemeth is an editor for Samhain Publishing, Ltd. Since Deborah began reading before her fourth birthday and stops only when she absolutely has to, it was probably inevitable that she would major in English literature and eventually become an editor (a job that allows her to indulge her compulsion for straightening out tangled syntax and putting dangling modifiers in their places). As an utter bookslut, she loves to read all sorts of things, from mysteries to historical fiction to fantasy. Over the years she’s lived in Ohio, Michigan, Chicago and Puerto Rico, although she spends most of her time in places such as nineteenth-century Bath or Middle-earth. Currently she lives in Virginia with her husband (a candidate for sainthood) and two beautiful daughters.
