Young Adult
Fantasy/Adventure
Published by BookRix: 5/19/2012
In a move that defies all logic and likelihood, a young boy named Spiff is called upon to carry
out the most important quest that has ever been undertaken. His mission drags him headlong
across the face of the world, through a veritable pantheon of hardships and threats that are at once
chilling and baffling. Along the way he meets dragons and madmen, and learns that the lovable
and the monstrous are two sides of the same coin.
Conceived as a darkly whimsical loose retelling of the Tolkien saga, The Long Way poses the
question that high fantasy rarely cares to ask: Why?
Aaron Redfern has been reading and writing fantasy since a time when he could count his age on his fingers. He went to Williams College and studied English, a language in which he was already proficient, and although he learned almost nothing from the English professors, dead poets and novelists taught him a great deal. While at college, he fell thoroughly in love with New England. He has decided never to leave and currently resides near Northampton, Massachusetts.
Aaron has written three novels, including The Long Way and its sequel, The Forgotten Way. His short-fiction titles include Stories About the Rain and Crawl.
LINK TO BUY
Buy this eBook on BookRix
out the most important quest that has ever been undertaken. His mission drags him headlong
across the face of the world, through a veritable pantheon of hardships and threats that are at once
chilling and baffling. Along the way he meets dragons and madmen, and learns that the lovable
and the monstrous are two sides of the same coin.
Conceived as a darkly whimsical loose retelling of the Tolkien saga, The Long Way poses the
question that high fantasy rarely cares to ask: Why?
Aaron Redfern has been reading and writing fantasy since a time when he could count his age on his fingers. He went to Williams College and studied English, a language in which he was already proficient, and although he learned almost nothing from the English professors, dead poets and novelists taught him a great deal. While at college, he fell thoroughly in love with New England. He has decided never to leave and currently resides near Northampton, Massachusetts.
Aaron has written three novels, including The Long Way and its sequel, The Forgotten Way. His short-fiction titles include Stories About the Rain and Crawl.
LINK TO BUY
Buy this eBook on BookRix
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Guest Post:
How to Make Your Characters Feel Real
Part Two: Our Bodies, Ourselves
Good characters are the basis for any
good story. They're what draws you in and makes you feel connected
to what you're reading, so if the characters feel shallow—especially
the characters who you spend the most time with as a reader—then
the whole story feels shallow. Writing deep characters that feel
like real people is one of the toughest challenges of writing
fiction. So how do you keep your characters from feeling like
cardboard cutouts? What makes the difference between a character who
feels vivid and one who feels like a disembodied name doing
unimportant things in blank space—or worse yet, one whose actions
all seem completely random and disconnected?
It's important to give your characters
a sense of physicality, a sense that they exist in a body rather than
just on a page. Your character's physical form is the key to his or
her interaction with the world. Are they tall or short, wide or
narrow? Are they perceived as beautiful or ugly; do they perceive
themselves as beautiful or ugly? Does he rub his scar and remember
the past? Does she have traits or abilities that set her apart from
everyone else?
An elf and a dwarf are going to
literally see things differently. Suppose they're standing next to a
stone wall. The elf can see over the wall easily and look out onto
the valley below; the dwarf mainly sees the wall. As much as I
prefer Tolkien's representation of Gimli, Peter Jackson sometimes
handles this aspect of the character better. Poor Gimli is unable to
see over the ramparts of Helm's Deep, so he has to try to find
another way to get a view.
In The Long Way, one of the
characters is a flying mouse. His body is so different from that of
the human main character that his whole way of interacting with
objects has to be different. While Spiff trudges, runs, and
crouches, Euclid hovers, zips, and flutters. He can hardly lift
anything, but on the other hand, he can dart up into the sky and
become unseen. I had to keep all of these things firmly in mind
while writing the character in order to make him make sense. The
sequel, The Forgotten Way, gave me an even greater challenge;
one of the main characters has an eye in the back of her head, and
she can see behind her at all times. I had to actually force myself
to take this into account time and time again while writing the
story. She has an entirely different way of seeing the world, and it
shapes how she tells the story. It has to—otherwise, she wouldn't
fit into her own skin.
Making sure your characters are
embodied is a critical part of making them feel real. Your character
may have a keen mind and moral depth, but if she doesn't have a body
too, she's just going to feel abstract.
If you missed Part One of How to
Make Your Characters Feel Real, you can find the post on Mom
With a Kindle:
http://momwithakindle.blogspot.de/2013/05/book-tour-guest-post-long-way-by-aaron.html
Virtual Book Tour - May 13 - June 7
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