There are three main parts to Out of Tales: the poetry, the essayistic prose, and what I mentioned I call the “Normal Novel,” though it is neither normal nor a novel, being three rather subversively plotted overlapping novelettes from the points of view of three different characters.
The Normal Novel is the oldest part (I came up with the much of the plot in dark flashes of revelation my senior year of high school, more than a decade ago), and also, alas, the one I find hardest to love.
I have been gradually breaking up with straightforward genre fantasy as my preferred source of mythopoetic beauty. I still love Diana Wynne Jones, much of whose work is a fine example of unambiguously formally straightforward genre fantasy (maybe not Hexwood or “The True State of Affairs,” but they are somewhat outliers and neither goes into the kind of fussy and strange literary artifice I use here), and is for all that brilliant and in no way “normal,” but for whatever reason it’s no longer something I seek out. So perhaps it’s natural I find it frustrating how the portions of the Normal Novel included in Out of Tales still fall firmly within those boundaries.
Of course, it’s easier to find an audience for genre fantasy than, well, whatever the rest of it is, and there’s a real danger that, much as I love the rest of it, most readers will feel precisely the opposite of how I do (and preliminary reader feedback has confirmed this fear to some extent). But I doubt most such readers are likely to find even these three stories particularly satisfying: they end fairly unresolved (I am working on finding a way to indicate that future books will reveal more of the story, in hopes that will help).
But specifics. The three characters I write about all have powerful magic. The first, Michael, is (I say, mostly as a joke) one of my few male characters who is not a pedestalized romantic object. He exudes main character energy: he’s nice, intelligent, heroic, and endearingly nerdy.
The second is a woman he rescues (the wrong woman; he was trying to rescue a dead princess!), and the less said about her the better (spoilers).
The third is his magic teacher and, in most conventional senses, both the main character and the only one who is psychologically complex (the relative flatness of the other two I am, uneasily, sticking with for now; it is allegorically appropriate and I’m finding ways to make it interesting to read too). The three characters’ connections are, to put it mildly, not happy and healthy, and their unfolding, rather world-shaking drama forms the subject matter of the Normal Novel.
They live in a pocket universe called the Kingdom (rather in the way I have read most groups of people initially call themselves just “the People”), a small universe that mirrors ours to a disconcerting degree.
I am walking a strange line. One reason I chose to put not one but three pieces of Normal Novel in Out of Tales is that they provide a coherent, densely intertwined introduction to the primary fictional world I write about, but another is that I do find them frustrating and January is, as I have observed, the month of garbage. At the same time, I still see (exhaustion aside) a lot to love in them, so my goal (which feels almost impossible) is to make my three strands of writing equal and deeply connected, so that any reader who is openminded about poetic, dense prose will not see this as merely a decoration on the “real” story, but (if anything) see the Normal Novel as just one more piece of upcycled garbage, because in some sense that’s what it is.
Of Elsewhere 