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Monthly Archives: January 2019

Creating Story Conflicts with Politics

31 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Better Fantasy, Politics for Worldbuilders, Self-Promotion, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anthology, Fantasy, short stories, short story anthology, writing

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

For a long time now, I’ve been slowly accumulating material in the “Politics for Worldbuilders” series, which will eventually become a book with the same title. I think I’ve managed to cover all the topics necessary, but now I need to revise each section and create writing exercises. In the meantime, here is a concrete example of how I used some of the concepts to write strong fiction.

Recently I edited and published Ye Olde Magick Shoppe, a collection of twelve fantasy short stories. One of the stories is mine, written under the pen name of “Jake Lithua.” It was directly inspired by my studies of politics, and in this post, I’ll be showing you how.

In the story’s world, the Eridari Empire has established colonies in a new land across the ocean, which it has modestly called New Erida. Its plantations there are worked by slaves, captured or bought from the indigenous peoples living in the hills around the colonial cities. Nevertheless, the reach of the colonial troops is limited, and they cannot simply take whatever they want. To access the richest treasures in this new land, colonists need to trade with the locals—a risky proposition, given that these are the same colonists who work the plantations with indigenous slaves!

The parallels with Africa and South America are fairly obvious. Beyond that, however, the setup borrows liberally from James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. In particular, Scott notes that urbanized states often took slaves from stateless foraging peoples—but just as often, it was competing stateless groups who were raiding each other, and selling the losers to the city-dwellers.

Moreover, the foraging peoples often had much greater penetration into wild country than did urban powers, which meant that they could gather valuables such as spices, exotic animals, or gems and then sell them. In fact, for most of human history until the past two or three centuries, states and the surrounding stateless peoples lived in a kind of uneasy symbiosis, alternating between war (in both directions!) and trade.

What this meant for the short story was that the protagonist, a young trader venturing into the hills in search of rare magic, immediately finds himself facing justified hostility from the Men of the Hills, who have suffered greatly from the colonial power. But the Men of the Hills were also open to trade, in principle—if the terms were good enough. And the intermittent relations between the colonists and the indigenous people also sets up the main antagonist, who has secretly been doing some trading of his own.

Building the setting from specific political-historical patterns, rather than simply relying on the tired trope of the Noble Savage, helped create compelling conflict with high stakes and surprising twists. You can read the story yourself and decide if the end product was successful (and leave a review if you liked it!). But I think this illustrates how our fiction can be enriched by injecting a bit of political texture. I don’t demand realism for realism’s sake; but having more tools to work with can help us craft new, effective stories. And isn’t that the whole point?

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“Ye Olde Magick Shoppe” Paperback is Out!

17 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Self-Promotion

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Amazon, Fantasy, short story anthology

Well, after all the minor annoyances and oddities, the hardcopy edition of Ye Olde Magick Shoppe is now available for purchase!

Amazon has not yet linked the Kindle page to it yet, so reader reviews are not yet shared; but that should happen in a few days.

Enjoy!

Frustrations with KDP Paperback…

09 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

kdp, Kindle, Self-publishing

UPDATE: And of course,  Amazon tech-support responded within hours of this post going up! It turns out that the problem was with their backend not working nicely with Apple’s PDF generator, Quartz. I had to re-export to PDF using Adobe’s PDF Pack service (at the low, low price of $9.99 for the month, grumble grumble), and then it worked fine. Today I learned…

———

Almost three weeks ago, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe was launched on the Kindle Store. The original plan was to offer the paperback edition along with the ebook; unfortunately, I’ve been running into some problems submitting the files to KDP, which persist until today.

For whatever reason, when I launch the Previewer tool in the title setup process, it hangs for several hours (!) and then tells me that there was an unknown error with the interior files. Amazon’s tech support, which is usually pretty responsive, has been quite slow with its responses this time.

Which is all very annoying. I know several people who prefer paperback books to electronic, and would love to get the anthology into their hands.  Many reviewers also require a hardcopy version, and won’t look at electronic files. Some indie writers stick to Kindle digital,  and given what we’re now going through I can certainly see why; but still, the lack of a paperback option is holding us back.

The PDF file I’ve been submitting is generated by Scrivener 2.  Publishers like Ingram Spark require more professional formatting, but at least in the old days of CreateSpace any old PDF would do. Does anybody know if that has changed? Amazon’s FAQs were rather vague.

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