Portal Fantasy: ysabetwordsmith

Portal Fantasy

In the "fuck that noise" category, here is a thoughtful discussion about gatekeepers who reject portal stories without regard to the quality of the writing, only the content.

1) If you are an acquiring editor, you can rule out categories of things you don't want to buy. But it really sucks when everyone gangs up on a topic and tries to choke it out of existence. That amounts to censorship. You hold great power, and an obligation to use it responsibly.

2) Everything is liked by somebody. Many fans do, in fact, adore portal stories. It's a top favorite for me, because it's a major subset of my all-time-favorite motif, Fish Out Of Water. I have done whole panels on this topic! My favorite thing is to take some hapless character out of their comfort zone and dump them somewhere utterly unfamiliar. A portal works great for that, whether it transports Terrans to another world or vice versa. It is aggravating to imply that "nobody likes" something, especially when their are great examples of it in literary canon already. You just make yourself look stupid.

3) In good hands, a portal makes an awesome plot device. Something like the Teflon Tesseract in my Schrodinger's Heroes series is a never-ending source of challenges. Sunnydale's Hellmouth is another good example, and Narnia remains a splendid classic. I would, you know, like to see the next one without some editor smothering it in the cradle.

4) Any motif in entertainment can be done well or poorly, and they all have been up one side and down the other of Quality Street. So quit trying to steal things out of the writers' toolbox. *smack* *SMACK*

5) Are you actively trying to murder traditional publishing with knives and poison? Because hey, crowdfunding is over yonder yelling "Come here! Bring your spending money and your unmet desires. Bring your awesome ideas and your unpublished entertainment. Let's have a party!" Because if you don't meet the needs of a whole swath of customers, somebody else will.

The stupid, it burns like hydrogen.

moonwolf1988

October 20 2012, 15:03:52 UTC 8 years ago

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Personally I love a good portal story, which is why I write them. Maybe I'm a little mean, but I love picking up a character and throwing them through a portal to see how they deal with things, because stories are firstly (to me) about characters. The plot is simply what life events, whether they be real or fantasy, the characters have to deal with, and shoving someone through a portal is a great way to see how they react.

I do something a little different with my portal stories. I have some people who have to build new lives because they've been dragged away from their old life and others who are given a chance to live a safe life, because they've never had that before. If someone looked at that and said it was just like any other portal story I would walk away, because no two portal stories are the same. It's just not possible. All writers are different, all characters are different, and a plot doesn't make the story the same as one they've read before. (Someone rewriting Narnia, for example, would probably come at it from a very different viewpoint to C. S. Lewis.)

That's why I love crowdfunding, from both sides. As a reader I get beautiful stories I probably never would have seen because some gatekeeper would have stopped it and as a writer I can write stories people want. There's no one to tell me that what I'm doing is too like someone else's, or it won't sell, or I can't have gay characters.

technoshaman

October 20 2012, 15:15:27 UTC 8 years ago

+a-bazillion on that last graf. Gay characters, kinky characters, characters of colour, characters of colour that don't get whitewashed on covers, stories that don't necessarily end tidily but lead you places... this is what small press, self-pub, crowd-funding, and all this new hi-zoot stuff is *all about*. One- and two- and ten-person shops aren't beholden to risk-averse shareholders, they're beholden to the *fans*.... and as long as the stories are good? Portal schmortal! Does the tip jar go cha-ching? then, more, please!