etymologies<\/a> (scroll down the page), having to do with sea monsters and demons, but the modern fantasy-novel concept of orcs as a race of marauding evil humanoid creatures to be slaughtered by a party of adventurers derives almost entirely from Tolkien by way of D&D. The huffy author missed the point, even though I stated it explicitly in our rejection: we're not interested in stories that read like transcripts of D&D sessions, and using the word orc<\/i> is one of the usual signs that an author is writing a story heavily based on a D&D adventure.<\/p>\n(I should note that I'm a lifelong gamer myself (talking tabletop RPGs here, not computer games); at yesterday's workshop meeting there was a long discussion of RPGs, which made me really wistful, 'cause it's been over two years since I last played. And I'm sure there are many entertaining and enjoyable books based on D&D games. But I have yet to read a story based on one that did anything at all for me.)<\/p>\n
At Clarion, I wrote a story that included some beings that I called elves. Lucius Shepard told me something like, \"I don't want to read about Tolkien's elves, I want to read about Hartman's elves.\" I was annoyed with that comment at the time, but in retrospect Lucius was absolutely right: there was no reason for my characters to be called elves<\/i> other than that I wanted to evoke Tolkien, as a shorthand for having to come up with a culture for them myself.<\/p>\n
Moral: be specific and original; don't rely on tired cliches, no matter what their source, as props to hold your story up.<\/p>\n
Second moral: don't get huffy with editors who reject you.<\/p>\n
Third moral (for editors): don't bother trying to explain rejections. . . . Okay, so I don't actually believe or follow this advice. But in this particular case I may have let the tone of my rejection drift a bit too far toward snippy; if I'd explained more, or less, or just generally been nicer about it, I probably wouldn't have gotten the huffy note back.<\/p>\n
Now I have to decide whether to behave sensibly and ignore the note, or whether to attempt to explain more to the author, thereby either placating him or provoking flames.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday at workshop, I saw a fantasy novel by Mary Gentle that contained orcs. I had to admit I was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}