Why am I blogging, again?

Call me odd, but my desire to write fantasy long pre-dated my desire to read fantasy.

Correction: I’m still working on said desire to read fantasy.

It’s not that I don’t like reading. Sure, there are those books like Robinson Crusoe and The Scarlet Letter, which feel like that trip to the dentist when he shoved a needle into the roof of my mouth and scrapped the pulp out of my front tooth.

But, under the right circumstances, I’ll happily spend a Sunday slouched on the sofa, turning pages at the same rate that ADHD-inflicted children flip channels. (The right circs., by the bye, could include Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair or N.K. Jemisin's Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.)

The dampener for me is the Fantasy Books Out There. Most of them just aren’t what I want out of fantasy.

Part of my problem is an ancient bit of history—that I grew up reading and re-reading fantasy stories written by my brother, Renaissance. They are, in retrospect, rough pieces, the narrator often stuttering over his own account of uninteresting events and one-dimensional characters. Renaissance, however, had an uncanny literary optimism, an uncultivated playfulness that reflected a spectrum of possibilities.

The second part of my problem is that I graduated from Renaissance’s stories about the time I started college and sunk my unclenching (werewolf) teeth into a fantasy manuscript written by my sister, Press. Press’s writing is engaging and stylistically popular, although it inevitably suggests her background (master’s degree in English literature) and assumptions (art as exploration of life). Her take on fantasy combined neatly with my somewhat-analytical-but-mostly-whole-hearted adoption of my professors’ professorial ideas about literature.

All of this to say, most fantasy books I’ve read don’t have that playful spark that first drew me to the wide-open horizon of fantasy, neither do most of them have that mark of personal reality or contemplation I’ve come to associate with Great Books like The Sun Also Rises.

Time is a limited thing, so my first solution to this Seeming Problem With Fantasy Books was to read only Great Books and not fantasy.

But, that didn’t stop me from writing fantasy. In fact, nothing has stopped me from writing fantasy and fantasizing about publishing fantasy.

And, the reality—which has finally slapped me in the face—is that I love writing fantasy, and I should know what other fantasy writers are writing. After all, I’ve enjoyed most of the fantasy books I’ve read, even when they aren’t the sort of thing I want to write.

Thus, I have come back to the answer of my titular question.

I am blogging because I want to read a lot of fantasy and because blogs are scary. They have deadlines. Real people read them. I Feel Obliged To Keep Up.

And, of course, I’m blogging because I have Awesome Effete Opinions With Which The World Would Be Better.

I mean, seriously: Haven’t you ever wanted to apply post-colonial criticism to Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings?

…

That’s what I thought.