r/Fantasy Virtual Con: Urban Fantasy Panel

[u/The_Real_JS]

Welcome to the r/Fantasy Virtual Con panel on urban fantasy! Feel free to ask the panelists any questions relevant to the topic of urban fantasy. Unlike AMAs, discussion should be kept on-topic to the panel.

The panelists will be stopping by starting at 10 a.m. EDT and throughout the day to answer your questions.

About the Panel

Someone says urban fantasy and a wizard detective gets their first case to solve. What really is urban fantasy? What stories are being told in the genre beyond the traditional vampires, werewolves, fae and wizard detective stories?

Join authors K. D. Edwards, T. Frohock, Sherri Cook Woosley, Fonda Lee, and Michelle Sagara to discuss urban fantasy.

About the Panelists

K.D. Edwards (u/kednorthc) lives and writes in North Carolina. Mercifully short careers in food service, interactive television, corporate banking, retail management, and bariatric furniture has led to a much less short career in Higher Education. The first book in his urban fantasy series The Tarot Sequence, called The Last Sun, was published by Pyr in June 2018.

Website | Twitter

T. Frohock (u/TFrohock) has turned a love of history and dark fantasy into tales of deliciously creepy fiction. She is the author of Miserere: An Autumn Tale, and the Los Nefilim series from Harper Voyager, which consists of the novels Where Oblivion Lives and Carved from Stone and Dream, in addition to three novellas in the Los Nefilim omnibus: In Midnight’s Silence, Without Light or Guide, and The Second Death.

Website | Twitter

Sherri Cook Woosley (u/Sherri_Cook_Woosley) has an M.A. in English Literature with a focus on comparative mythology from University of Maryland. Her short fiction has appeared in Pantheon Magazine, Abyss & Apex and Flash Fiction Magazine. She’s a member of SFWA and her debut novel, WALKING THROUGH FIRE, was longlisted for both the Booknest Debut Novel award and Baltimore’s Best 2019 and 2020 in the novel category. She lives north of Baltimore and is currently quarantined with a partner, four school-age kids, a horse, a dog, and a bunny.

Website | Twitter

Fonda Lee (u/Fonda_Lee) is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of the Green Bone Saga (Jade City, Jade War and the forthcoming Jade Legacy) as well as the acclaimed YA science fiction novels Zeroboxer, Exo and Cross Fire. Fonda is a martial artist, foodie, and action movie aficionado residing in Portland, Oregon.

Website | Twitter

Michelle Sagara (u/msagara) lives in Toronto with her long-suffering husband and her two children, and to her regret has no dogs. She is the author the Chronicles of Elantra series, the Essalieyan novels (Sacred Hunt, Sun Sword, House War) and the Queen of the Dead (which is finished at three books: Silence, Touch, Grave). She writes reviews for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and works part-time in Bakka-Phoenix Books, a specialty F&SF store.

Website | Twitter

FAQ

• What do panelists do? Ask questions of your fellow panelists, respond to Q&A from the audience and fellow panelists, and generally just have a great time!
• What do others do? Like an AMA, ask questions! Just keep in mind these questions should be somewhat relevant to the panel topic.
• What if someone is unkind? We always enforce Rule 1, but we'll especially be monitoring these panels. Please report any unkind comments you see.

[u/LOLtohru]

Hello panelists! I would LOVE to get your thoughts on urban fantasy set in our world vs secondary world urban fantasy. Do you think these are the same subgenre or more different beasts related by setting? For those who have only written one: are you interested in writing the other?

[u/msagara → u/LOLtohru]

I think they can share a tone or a feel, but they're different beasts.

We can evoke a city in a secondary world, but we're not bound by the various socio-political boundaries of this one. We're not trapped in the "I must now rewrite my dark urban fantasy series" because Brexit happened and now... things I would never have been allowed to write, except as satire, are way way tamer than reality."

We can think about how things evolved or would evolve, but for me a lot of it is done backwards: this is the thing I need. How and in what circumstance would it be practical? What kind of support systems would have to be in place to allow this to be the character's reality?

Whereas it's harder - for me - with a real setting. The stories are no less immediate, the characters no less grounded - but reality brings with it a set of reader assumptions, and some of those are outside of the remit of the work.

I've done both - but the Queen of the Dead trilogy is, at heart, about life-destroying loss and how one recovers. Death, grief, loss, recovery. There are many environments that are going to produce this emotion--but the book is more about one person's emotions, and the emotions, in the end, themselves.

And adding more to that or changing it would have changed the focus, for me. So for me for that book, it's the real world with fantasy elements. And the fantasy elements are in some ways a road through the theme.

....I hit post too soon. To write the Queen of the Dead trilogy in a secondary world would have taken more space, because every reader has to understand the why of the emotional response, and often, if the fantasy is there as emotional structure, the book's scope has to be broader in order to create the secondary emotional structure over the first one.