Tara Maya's Tales

My friend Rayne Hall's dark epic fantasy, Storm Dancer, is currently on sale for only 99 cents! Definitely worth checking out, especially if you're a fan of The Unfinished Song! Demon-possessed siege commander, Dahoud, atones for his atrocities by hiding his identity and protecting women from war's violence - but can he shield the woman he loves from the evil inside him? Principled weather magician, Merida, brings rain to a parched desert land. When her magical dance rouses more than storms, she needs to overcome her scruples to escape from danger. Thrust together, Dahoud and Merida must fight for freedom and survival. But how can they trust each other, when hatred and betrayal burn in their hearts? 'Storm Dancer' is a dark epic fantasy. Caution: this book contains some violence and disturbing situations, and is not suitable for young readers. British spellings. Storm Dancer is available to download on Amazon (US),  Amazon  (UK and other countries), B...

Tolkien is usually credited with kicking off the fantasy genre, but if Ancient Summaria had had a higher literacy rate than 0.000001% back in the 18th Century (we're talkin' BC here), it might have been the Epic of Gilgamesh. This epic has all the qualities we now consider epic fantasy. Behold and marvel: 1. The mighty hero. You can't deny Gilgamesh is a badass. He's not a perfect man, which makes him a perfect hero. Like many a fantasy hero, he's a king but one who, inexplicably, leaves the boring work of debating about health care tax reforms to his minions and spends his time traveling the world in search of adventure and immortality. He's also an antihero. What--you thought that was a recent development? When we first meet Gilgamesh, he's a brutal tyrant and a womanizer, sleeping with all the new brides on their wedding nights. Shame on you, Gil.  2. The mighty sidekick. A hero is only as good as his sidekick. Gilgamesh has this in Enkidu....

The Literary Lab had a post recently about making each word, each sentence count in a novel. There was some argument in the comments about whether this was possible, or even desirable. One interesting accusation was that novelists who try to do this are secretly short story writers who haven't figured out the difference between 1000 and 100,000 thousand words. It may be even worse. It may be that novelists who try to do this are secretly poets. At times, especially if I've been off my meds for several days, I think of my novel as a ballad or epic of the ancient sort, in heroic rhyme. And why not? Much of the source material, the original epics upon which modern fantasies base their structure, were book-length poems. When I become stuck in my prose, and everything I type is ugly and repetitive, when all beauty and simplicity escapes me, I fall back on poetry. Seriously. I write a scene as a poem. Sometimes even with aliteration and rhyme, though often just with unrhymed mete...