Anton Strout Guest Post: Life Bites

From VBC HQ: We’re really excited to have Anton Strout on the blog today. He’s here to talk about his Spellmason Chronicles and generally be awesome.

Let’s face it, readers.  The modern world blows.  If I didn’t need a place to keep all my stuff, I totally wouldn’t live here.  Going to day jobs, paying bills, dealing with idiots… the list of modern annoyances goes on and on.  And in New York City?  Forget about it!.

That’s why I need to fill it with monsters.  Lots and lots of monsters.  Readers thing that books—especially science fiction and fantasy—are escapist for them, but really they’re just as escapist for the authors themselves.

When I write, there is much blowing off of steam in what I do.  When I wrote my first series starring paranormal detective Simon Canderous, I had spent years as a temp doing mindless computer work in midtown Manhattan.  It’s no small coincidence that he discovers an actual zombie typing pool on the 33^rd floor of the Empire State Building.

And after twenty years of living in or around Manhattan, I do have to take my frustrations out on my beloved city of choice. What’s a little destruction among friends, right?  In The Spellmason Chronicles—Alchemystic, and the just released Stonecast—the art and architecture of my fair city are in constant danger from cultists, alchemists, and gargoyles.  It’s fun to make with the smashy smashy all around New York… it’s why I loved reading Marvel for so many years.  New York took a beating at the hands of many a villain.

But it always remained standing.  And that’s important to me.  The real world frustrations, both for the reader and the writer, can’t allow for the important things in the fiction to be utterly destroyed.  I didn’t want to write about a magic infused Manhattan only to destroy it.  But I did have to put it in jeopardy so the readers felt that there was real risk at hand.

As I said at the top, the modern world blows, or rather can blow.  Perhaps part of the reason I got into writing urban fantasy eight years ago was because my city and the rat race though it were all a bit much.  Maybe I just wanted to bring the magic back into the City That Never Sleeps in a way only I could, through my books.

And what better way to bring the magic back than through the Spellmason Chronicles tale of magic, alchemy, and gargoyles?   I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to discover what type of grotesque (as one of them prefers to be called) stories there were to tell.  And gargoyles have that great appeal to them—solid, dependable, eternally watchful and protective, making sure I don’t take our my frustrations too harshly on New York City.