The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant by Jeffrey Ford Read Free Book Online Page A

that lined his study. He had written short stories, long stories, novels, and even a poem or two. All of it, every word he had birthed from electrons on that computer screen, had gone toward advancing the career of Glandar, the Sword Wielder of Kreegenvale. Those thousands of pages contained more sword wielding than you could fit in a stadium.
    That rugged thug of mountainous muscles, sinews of chain link, and spirit that was the thundering of eight and a half wild horses, had slain dragons, witches, elves, giants, talking apes, and legions of inept, one-dimensional warriors whose purpose of creation was to be mown down like so much summer hay. When Glandar wasn’t wielding he was wenching, and occasionally he wenched and then wielded. He was always outnumbered, yet always victorious. No one in the realm rode or drank or satisfied the alluring Sirens of Gwaten Tarn like Glandar, and no one so completely bored me to the brink of narcolepsy.
    In comparison with the fiction I was used to reading, my fantasy writer’s writing seemed like redundant, cliché-ridden hackwork. Say what you will of Glandar, though, his wielding pleased Ashmolean’s readers no end. My fantasy writer was richer than the Pirate King of Ravdish. After his fourth novel, he could have lived comfortably for the rest of his days, existing extravagantly off the interest that Glandar’s early adventures had generated. Ashmolean continued on, even though, as one unusually insightful article told, his wife had left him long ago and his children never visited. His house was falling down around him, but still he worked incessantly, pounding on the keys with an urgent necessity as if he were instead administering CPR. It was not like anything new ever happened at Kreegenvale. Sooner or later it was a certainty there would be generous portions of wielding and then Glandar would end the affair with a phrase of warrior wisdom. “One must retain a zest for the battle” was my favorite.
    The critics raved about Glandar. “Thank God Ashmolean is alive today,” one had said. About The Ghost Snatcher of Kreegenvale , the famous reviewer Hutton Myers wrote, “Ashmolean blurs the line separating literature and genre in a tour de force performance that leaves the reader sundered in two with the implications of a world struggling between Good and Evil.” His fellow authors blurbed him with vigor, each trying to outdo the other with snippets of praise. I believe it was writer P. N. Smenth who wrote: “I love Glandar more than my own mother.”
    My part in all of this was to keep Ashmolean from committing inconsistencies in his fantasy world. There was nothing he hated more than to go to a conference and have someone ask him, “How could Stribble Flap the Lewd impregnate the snapping Crone of Deffleton Marsh, in Glandar Groans for Death , when Glandar had lopped off the surly gnome’s member in The Unholy Battle of Holiness ?”
    Ashmolean would never turn around from his computer, but shout his orders to me over his shoulder. “Mary,” he would say, “find out if the horse with no mane has ever been to the Land of Fog.” Then I would scramble from the lawn chair in which I sat, book in hand, boning up on the past adventures, and search the shelves for the appropriate volumes that might hold this information. The horse with no mane had been to the Land of Fog on two separate occasions—once while accompanying Glandar’s idiot first cousin, Blandar, and the second instance as part of the cavalry of the famous skeleton warrior, Bone Eye.
    This process was rather tortuous at first, as I struggled to learn the world of Kreegenvale the way a new cabbie learns the layout of a foreign city. After a time, though, by taking books home to peruse at night and with the speed I had accrued as a well-practiced reader, I had been over almost every inch of the mythical realm and probably knew better than Ashmolean