This week on @creators-club!
I'm probably gonna write a few of these throughout the week, in between celebrating 15 years together with husband on 11/02, but. The writer brain never stops.
And the first inspiration I want to talk about is the inspiration that started me on the Fantasy writer's pathway:
(you wouldn't believe how hard it was to google the cover of the version I own <<)
I was still a teen with a growing love for the English language (note I am natively French speaking, with Dutch next-to-natively) and an obsession with Dragons and Fantasy in general, and one day while visiting the FNAC in Brussels with my dad and scouring the English literature side, a cover spoke to me. This was in the '90s, in a country where Fantasy was basically unknown, and there was this book with a Dragon on the cover. DRAGONSBANE. Yet there was this strange vibe about this Dragon cradling this wounded woman in its massive claws, so of course I had to read the blurb.
This book changed my life.
It was SO WELL WRITTEN. And I mean, fantastically descriptive and atmospheric and it sucked me in right with its misty start and this moody, middle-aged protagonist using her magic with deep thought and consideration. Nowadays, I see all the ways the story had needed more edits, but back then I was completely under its charm. The world Hambly wrote to life remains, for me, the epitome of worldbuilding. And thus I started to emulate her style and found that, yeah, I do love writing literary prose a lot a lot.
Now, my style remained pretty much literary but to a lesser degree. What I focus hard on are the characters mostly, teh emotions, psychology, and my style now rather adapts to a character's voice and may be extremely wordy (as with, say, Sokyte or Devon), or way more simple as with a Kassandra or a Nalyn. But, at the core, I do like to write elegantly and with a certain song to it, because I speak French natively and French has a way of singing.
But none of my stories would exist had I not encountered this magnificent book in my youth. Thank you, Barbara Hambly, for ever writing it. Also let me recommend it to you if you enjoy slowburn Fantasy with intelligent Dragons, protagonists that are on a quest simply to help their lands survive a harsh winter and have real depth and shortcomings, and an intricate magic system that to this day makes me hear the Dragon's own song.
