Meredith Mansfield, Author

I recently had a comment about my blog that got me thinking. You won’t find the comment here, it was someone on another forum where I’m active and the comment was made there.

Basically the comment was that there seemed to be a disconnect between the person from my About Me page (I take care of my mother who has Alzheimer’s disease) and the person who would write stories with titles like BLOOD WILL TELL and MAGE STORM.

Well, first, neither BLOOD WILL TELL, nor, certainly MAGE STORM is probably the story this person is imagining. I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m not always great at coming up with the exactly right title. Of all my titles, only DREAMER’S ROSE strikes me as being close to perfect. BLOOD WILL TELL is an urban fantasy/paranormal romance. And MAGE STORM is about a 15-year-old boy who discovers he has out-of-control magic.

But the comment got me thinking about one of the purposes of fantasy in the first place–to take you somplace else.

Any good story has the capacity to take you out of your surroundings and immerse you in the world of the story. That’s part of the draw, whether that world is a time before you were born, a place you’ve never been, or someplace that never existed at all. But that capacity can be particularly strong in speculative fiction of all kinds (fantasy, science fiction, and horror), because the writer has to create the world from the ground up. Literally anything is possible in fantasy if the writer can make it seem real. We’re writing about magic, in some sense, after all.

And some of may just need that escape more than others.

In other news, the first draft of SEVEN STARS (possibly to be retitled CURSED, unless I come up with something better) is coming along swimmingly. I wrote two chapters yesterday alone. Another week like this and I should have it finished.