Melanie Card· Website
Books:
· Ward Against Death [Buy]
Thank you Missy for inviting me to be your guest. I'm so excited to be here. My debut novel, WARD AGAINST DEATH, came out August 2nd from Entangled Published. It’s a YA fantasy novel set in a magical world of princes and necromancers, so today I'm chatting about why I write fantasy.
I started writing fantasy at a young age—I still have the little picture book I made in grade 3 about the Adventures of Sprinkle the Fairy—and have always been drawn to magic. I'm sure if you ask my mother she'll say I went through a princess phase, but as I grew up I wanted to be the princess who defeated the villain and saved the handsome knight in peril.
You could say it started with fairy tales, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think a lot of kids start with fairy tales and not all of them start writing their own. There was just something about the magic and the adventure that attracted me. While my Dad and brother were reading science fiction and my Mother was reading mysteries, I was still reading stories of magic. I read about unicorns discovering fire (Birth of the Firebringer by Meredith Ann Pierce), I read about hobbits (The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien), I read about girls who wanted to be knights (Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce) and I read about magical horses who found kids who had magical powers (Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey). And as I grew older I found writers like David Eddings, Guy Gavriel Kay, and Patricia A. McKillip.
I love the freedom and challenges that come from writing fantasy. The freedom is I can write just about anything I want in just about any time period. People can cast spells, they can come back from the dead, and they can literately be monsters. And I love the challenges of creating a magical world and characters who have desires like you and me but magical complications.
I've come a long way from Sprinkle the Fairy. The magic in my novel, Ward Against Death, is a tad darker than a pink sparkly fairies. The hero is a reluctant necromancer who starts the story by bringing the heroine back from the dead, but I don't think I'll ever forget my roots. Sprinkle had a pretty big adventure saving the world from a terrible (and slightly homesick) dragon.
Thanks for joining me today. I shared some of the titles of some of the books that inspired me to write fantasy. What’s your favorite fairy tale or fantasy book?
I started writing fantasy at a young age—I still have the little picture book I made in grade 3 about the Adventures of Sprinkle the Fairy—and have always been drawn to magic. I'm sure if you ask my mother she'll say I went through a princess phase, but as I grew up I wanted to be the princess who defeated the villain and saved the handsome knight in peril.
You could say it started with fairy tales, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think a lot of kids start with fairy tales and not all of them start writing their own. There was just something about the magic and the adventure that attracted me. While my Dad and brother were reading science fiction and my Mother was reading mysteries, I was still reading stories of magic. I read about unicorns discovering fire (Birth of the Firebringer by Meredith Ann Pierce), I read about hobbits (The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien), I read about girls who wanted to be knights (Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce) and I read about magical horses who found kids who had magical powers (Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey). And as I grew older I found writers like David Eddings, Guy Gavriel Kay, and Patricia A. McKillip.
I love the freedom and challenges that come from writing fantasy. The freedom is I can write just about anything I want in just about any time period. People can cast spells, they can come back from the dead, and they can literately be monsters. And I love the challenges of creating a magical world and characters who have desires like you and me but magical complications.
I've come a long way from Sprinkle the Fairy. The magic in my novel, Ward Against Death, is a tad darker than a pink sparkly fairies. The hero is a reluctant necromancer who starts the story by bringing the heroine back from the dead, but I don't think I'll ever forget my roots. Sprinkle had a pretty big adventure saving the world from a terrible (and slightly homesick) dragon.
Thanks for joining me today. I shared some of the titles of some of the books that inspired me to write fantasy. What’s your favorite fairy tale or fantasy book?
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