To Whom it May Concern

To Whom it may concern,

You, yes you, you know who you are. I’m talking to you. You who inspired some of my favorite stories, you are the muse that Tolkien, Glenn Cook, Raymond Fiest, Frank Herbert and if you’re into that kind of sadistic George R.R. Martin, in fact all the great fantasy authors of decades past would have worshiped at the feet of.

Where did you go? Why have you left us all stranded without that feeling of wonder and imagination from way back when? To tell you the truth you and that feeling are what hooked me into writing my own stories. I wanted my readers to have that same feeling or wonder, or to be challenged into thought the way those writers challenged a girl of 15. I will admit that fantasy wasn’t my first genre, and before I picked them up, it was harlequin and Mills and Boons and V.C. Andrews that had me, but they were just things to pass the time, they didn’t inspire the same way fantasy novels did.

While we are at it, neither do those new fangled fantasy books either, being all full of dark dark dark humor, horror and logic set in this place as if the very fields of imagination from which new worlds sprang have all been leached and have thus been left fallow. With deep overtones of the dry, sarcastic, cynicism that has doomed this world to be quantified by an endless stream of derogatory outbursts by the new social alphas, the internet trolls. No more are the gates of the imagination flung open by authors who rely on magic and whimsy, instead we are bored with scientific justifications for the wondrous things that occur, when all we want is a thrill and not a how-to manual.

I guess what I’m saying is that the genre no longer provides the escape that it used to.No new ideas coming forward really and when they are they are so few and far between it leaves little in the way of hope. No longer are we transported to world and societies so dissimilar to our own that we are forced out of our comfort zone and into the shoes of someone else, to think and feel like we aren’t able and therefor to find and develop ideas that might change the doldrums that is real life.

It’s almost like the Fantasy Authors Union,(Is there such a thing?) all sold out to the political machine and instead of trying to inspire us to change the world, they want us all to conform to it. By now I know you are gasping in horror Dear Muses. After all that time you spent whispering in the ears of all those logical men to make them birth fields like psychology and sociology to have the fount from which their facts spring dry up as we all become Zombies totally accepting of the status quo as dictated by the oppressive bodies we are forcibly deluded into thinking we have the power to choose by casting a vote.

You see muse? This is what I am trying to say. That feeling, that whimsy,that innocence, that out of this worldly experience that can only be gotten in a blanket fort with a flashlight and a book, a fantasy book, is all but gone. Muse, I’m begging you to come back, to commune with and inspire the new writers, so that those who come after us aren’t just balls of hate and hopelessness.

I know it’s a lot to ask, and a whole lot to place on your mythical little shoulders, but it’s what made my teen into early adulthood great, those forays into epicness played out in my mind’s eye as I read David Eddings, and Robert Jordan, and David Gemmell and Anne McCaffery, even Robin Hobb to name a few more.

So please come back, please, please, please. I’ll even dance a moon lit ditty around a fire in a shire ore the way, in tribute to you if you do.

Sincerely

Hungry for new Ideas and old feelings.