Friday, September 30, 2011

Beyond the British Isles

My first fantasy novel. Yeah!
When I was a young lady of about 14, I was smitten with fantasy novels. I craved them like dark chocolate and Moo-llenium Crunch ice cream (best flavor ever). It didn’t take long for that love to turn to sword and sorcery. I read everything by Mercedes Lackey that I could get my hands on. She introduced me to familiars and gryphons. My first sorceress was Kethry who often bested the men around. Before I knew of Mongols and Huns, I knew Tarma, the chaste swordswoman from the horse breeding tribes of the plains.

I was satisfied with these stories then, but as I grew older I began to realize that something was lacking. Missing even. The stories were growing stale to me. They all seemed to be about the same knight on the same quest who encountered the same magical races. He fought against the same evil lord to fall in love with the same girl. Meanwhile, my knowledge and love of world mythologies had grown too vast to be contained by the traditional scope of the genre.

Then one fateful day I was introduced to the term Sword and Soul. Fantasy set in the myriad of kingdoms of Africa, the lands of my ancestors. I discovered authors who were bringing alive the fantasies I loved with heroes (and heroines!) that looked like me.

Which brings us to this blog.

It’s incredibly easy to find information on Northern European mythology, researching into African, and many other cultures’, mythology can be frustrating. In this blog, I hope to create a resource that those who wish to write high fantasy, adventure fantasy, and sword and sorcery in settings other than medieval Europe can come to for information and inspiration. Hopefully, we will have many more novels in the near future that have fantasies coming out of Africa, India, South America, China, and all the other places beyond the English Isles.