Are You Writing Serious Fantasy?

[Aosama, the Wandering Star]

Well, I am writing a story, or series of these. "Aosama" is actually one of my characters I've created and imagined in my mythical world. It's very hard not to imitate other writers. But everything from my life, including everything I've read before, will somehow slide it's way onto the paper in a different form, and I'll be writing away, and reading what I've written, I ask myself: 'now how did that get there?' and keep on trucking. It's like my religion: I tried so very hard to keep everything in my story neutral. But, just like some of my characters are my relatives personified, it just leaked out until I stopped trying to hold it in. Maybe, when its published, people will congregate in forums like these to examine my work and my worlds and compare it to the Bible and to Tolkien. All I can say is Tolkien influenced my life and changed me. He changed how I write and how I think about my own writing. I'm not too embarrassed to read my stories out loud to others anymore. Stephen King, Gordon Korman, and Brian Jacques did the exact same thing. But I'm trying to keep all my characers all *mine*