In Today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* A New Short Story
* Update on Ingram Spark
* Some Thoughts on Fantasy
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab.” George RR Martin
A New Short Story
“Keep Calm & Carry On” went live on Saturday at 10 a.m. on my Stanbrough Writes Substack. Go check it out. It’s free.
This is an intense short story, one of my best. But had I written it later, it would be even more intense, with improved pacing due to shorter, more terse paragraphs. Shrug. Live and learn.
If you enjoy the story, please click Like. Comments are welcome too. Both help with my Substack algorithms. Then tell Everyone else. Gracias.
Update on Ingram Spark
Re the recent post about Amazon doing something stupid and harmful, writer Peter passed along this good news:
“On the plus side of things: For those of us with print books on Ingram Spark, beginning February 1, all p-book updates for interiors and covers will be free. I have to say, I’m quite pleased to hear that. It’s long overdue in my opinion.”
Some Thoughts on Fantasy
The writer of 1440’s Society & Culture newsletter defines fantasy this way:
“Fantasy is a literary genre that embraces supernatural elements and often takes place in alternate universes that have their own languages, physics, lifeforms, and societies.”
I readily agree that all fantasy “embraces supernatural elements,” but “alternate universes, … physics, [and] lifeforms” speaks primarily to science fantasy.
In fact, as I’ve said many times, the specific difference between science fiction and science fantasy is that the former extrapolates on reality (including physics as we know them), and the latter makes up its own rules as it goes along: its own physics, lifeforms, societies, etc.
I’ve written a great deal of fantasy, though no ‘high fantasy’ (think Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, et al).
Some of my own fantasy works were in the realm of my magic realism short stories and the novel Keeper of the Promise, which relies heavily on some of those short stories.
But in a much broader sense, fantasy means “realistic unreality.” And it’s ‘realistic’ only enough that the reader chooses to buy in and suspend his or her sense of disbelief.
Which further means pretty much all fiction is also fantasy, or that all fiction at least incorporates fantasy elements.
In my longest saga, the 22-volume Wes Crowley story, does anyone really believe one man could dispose of that many Comanches, Comancheros, banditos and other various bad guys without suffering any serious consequences or societal repercussions?
Of course not.
In my longest-running Blackwell Ops series, does anyone really believe an organization like Blackwell Ops could actually exist? Much less that TJ Blackwell’s operatives could pull off his requests so efficiently?
Even the best agents among the CIA or Great Britain’s MI-6 can’t hold a candle to Blackwell Ops operatives—well, at least as far as we know—and I’m good with that. Sometimes happiness is nothing more complicated than a clean sight-picture.
All of the protagonists in either of those collections of novels and short stories are trained or skilled or warped (or any two or all three of those) to superhuman levels. And all of them experience an inhuman, unrealistic level of sheer luck.
So if “all fiction is fantasy,” then all fantasy (okay, minus the altered physics contained in science fantasy) mimics real life.
If I’d written a story or novel before September 2001 about how a group of men living in a cave halfway around the world (albeit with cell phones that seem never to be out of range of a cell tower or drop the cell signal) could successfully manage the destruction of the twin towers in NYC, that might easily have been labeled fantasy.
That story or novel probably also would have been ignored by any traditional publishers as too improbable and unrealistic to be acceptable for publication. Yet that improbability became a reality.
So write on. If you’re partial to the hero’s journey (well, Wes Crowley did that) and magic and potions and spells and elves and sprites, etc. write high fantasy.
If not, write any other fiction with the comforting (or disquieting) knowledge that you have at least a toe in the fantasy world.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
A Brief History of the Fantasy Genre
13 Writers Who Grew to Hate Their Own Books Be prepared to wade through dozens of popups.
Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week: Humility
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 780
Mentorship Words…………….. 0
Total Nonfiction…………………. 780
Writing of
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date………… XXXXX
Fiction for January………………………… XXXX
Fiction for 2026…………………………… XXXX
Nonfiction for January.…………………… 14780
Nonfiction for 2026………………..……… 14780
2026 consumable words………………… 14780
2026 Novels to Date……………………… 0
2026 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2026 Short Stories to Date……………… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 123
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29