Guest post written by author Sarah J. Daley
Sarah J. Daley is a former chef who lives and writes in the Chicago Metropolitan area with her husband and teenaged son. She earned a degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Though she still enjoys the heat and chaos of a professional kitchen, she is now writing full-time. She enjoys traveling, creating costumes for comic con, riding the occasional horse, and streaming old sitcoms for background noise.
Sarah’s debut novel Obsidian is available to purchase from Angry Robot, Amazon, Books a Million, Powells, IndieBound, B&N, and Bookshop.org.
Back in the day, before cable TV, before streaming services, I had to watch what my parents liked to watch, and my dad had an affinity towards classic Westerns and The Godfather movies. He loved The Godfather so much you’d think we were an old Italian family rather than the Irish-catholic brood we were. ‘Alla Familia’ was his toast at every big, family meal. For, even with all its violence and crime and blood vendettas, The Godfather was about family. To my younger self, it all looked so cool, I couldn’t help but love it. There existed this whole underworld I found fascinating, and compelling.
We also watched The Magnificent Seven more times than I can recall, along with my dad’s favorite John Wayne flicks. I was steeped in the aesthetic of the old west, the tumbleweeds and isolated mining towns, guns and horses and shoot-outs. I absorbed these images and enjoyed them almost as much as I enjoyed books about magic and swords and dragons. (This is a bit of an aside, but my enthusiasm for The Magnificent Seven led me to watch The Seven Samurai, a far superior film than the Hollywood version. Which in turn led me to consuming as many Toshiro Mifune movies as I could. Imagine my surprise when I learned the Japanese movies inspired the spaghetti Westerns I thought were so awesome. Those movies taught me blades could be just as deadly as guns, and even better in a duel!)
When I started writing fantasy, I couldn’t help but be influenced by these two disparate genres that I had loved as a child. I wanted magic and fantastical settings, but I also wanted that gun-slinging, loner protagonist battling gangs of mafioso. I wanted gunfights in the street, shady criminals with a code of honor, and cunning mob bosses. How could I make it work?!
My first few attempts were met with skepticism. The earliest drafts of my heroine and her world, short stories mainly, got me confused rejections: Why would you mix such disparate genres like Westerns and Fantasy? It doesn’t make sense! Stung by this, I dropped the old west setting and my character’s drawls, but I kept the leather belts riding low on their hips, heavy with their quickdraw weapons – blades in this case, long, sleek blades made from gemstones. (Not samurai swords, unfortunately; there’s only one sword in my book and it’s carried by Raiden Mad, who’s totally not inspired by Toshiro Mifune, wink.) My wizards remain the swaggering, hard-eyed gunslingers I’ve always loved, only sans guns. Then I dove back into my world and focused on my version of a mafioso-controlled land.
I entered my first, full-length novel set in my imagined underworld, Malavita, in the now-defunct Amazon book contest, and it made it to the level where you received a real review from Publisher’s Weekly. It…did not go well. My book, my heart, garnered actual disdain from this anonymous reviewer: What the hell does the mafia have to do with wizards? Why would you try putting La Cosa Nostra in your fantasy story? (Oof, that last one really hurt.) It killed me for a time. I think I might have been legally dead after reading that review. Rejected and dejected, I tossed my manuscript in a drawer and decided I was on the wrong path.
But, funny thing, the story, the setting, the characters wouldn’t let me go. This was one person’s opinion, after all (even if they were a ‘big-time reviewer’), and I had a story to tell. So, I took a minute to reset, and I wrote a whole new book set in the same world with all the same inspirations as early drafts. I wrote the first draft of this new project during NaNoWriMo in a furious outpouring of words. Nothing inspires like an eff-you attitude, in my humble opinion. From that rough, rough draft, Obsidian was born.
Though the story and setting evolved, the original inspirations for the work remain. In Obsidian, Shade Nox, my heroine, is the quintessential lone gunman taking on the evil mayor of an isolated town, its people firmly under his thumb. In my novel, however, those isolated towns are the Veils – magical shields which protect their inhabitants from broken and twisted magic. The deserts of the western frontier I so adored in movies like Silverado and The Quick and the Dead became the Wastes, and the evil mayor became an all-powerful church which uses gangs of bloodwizards to enforce their corrupt, oppressive rule. These blade-slinging bloodwizard thugs operate like the mob, extorting and threatening, an ersatz police force following their own rules and codes. (Yeah, I kept La Cosa Nostra in my fantasy story. Deal with it, dude who told me it made no sense!)
In the end, I told the story I wanted to tell despite some negative feedback. It doesn’t matter from where your inspiration comes, only that you are inspired. You can make a lot of elements work, even if they seem out-of-place or strange. If it’s the story you must tell, don’t listen to the naysayers, write what moves you, what thrills you. I’m proud to say, this time around, my Publishers Weekly review went a lot better. They liked it, they really liked it. Hopefully, you might like it, too.
