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Introducing Peat Long
233 Plays1 year ago
When Chronscast was originally set up I wanted different co-host folks for different co-host strokes. I wanted my guest today, the blogger Peat Long, to contribute to the podcast particularly in the area of fantasy fiction, in all its guises and possibilities. For various reasons he couldn't commit at the start of the venture, but I'm pleased to say that Peat has agreed to be an occasional co-host with me in the future.
Today Peat and I are having a short conversation to introduce him, his thoughts on genre fiction, his prolific blog, and his own writing habits and capacities. Pete will be joining us later in the spring to discuss books such as Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan, and Stephen Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane.
Links
Peat Long's Blog
Next Episode
Our next full episode will see Bean and I joined by the inimitable Bryan Wigmore, who'll be telling us how to make like Michael Jackson and heal the world with the sword pulled from the stone in John Boorman's 1981 Arthurian epic, Excalibur.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Pete Long
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello, everybody. I'm here on my own today. Well, not quite on my own. I'm here with the blogger, Pete Long, who's a good friend to Chris and me. And we've long wanted to have his contributions on the podcast because he's a source of great knowledge when it comes to certain aspects of genre fiction. And we've got quite a lot of interesting guests and books coming up, as usual.
00:00:40
Speaker
And we wanted to draw on Pete's expertise. So before we have a little chat with Pete and introduce him properly, I'm just going to read out his biography. He's a blogger primarily, a prolific blogger, I would add to that, with a deep and a broad knowledge of genre fiction and particularly
00:00:59
Speaker
fantasy fiction in all its various forms. His blog specialises in ludicrous theories, reviews of books, considerations of the various aspects of genre fiction, considerations of the aspects of genre itself.
Pete's Aspirations and Interests
00:01:16
Speaker
He has aspirations to become a fully published author, but hasn't managed that quite yet. And like Rick Maddock in Sandman, he seems always to be overflowing with fabulous ideas and concepts. Some of them make it to his blog, some of them make it to manuscripts, and others disappear into the ether.
00:01:36
Speaker
He's a cat lover, he's a glutton, he's a metalhead, and he's an aficionado of violent team sports, such as writing, I suppose. And for a day job, he reads newspapers for a living. That last bit is actually true, I can attest to that. He was born in London and now he lives in United States of America. Which part of America are you in now, Pete? Western PA. Western PA, there you go. So welcome to the show.
00:02:04
Speaker
Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Yeah, good to have you. Always good to speak to you. And well, we haven't actually spoken properly since you moved to the US. So it's nice actually just to catch up. But we do have an ulterior motive. We do want to draw on your knowledge, your experience of reading, essentially. I mean, you're a super reader when it comes to genre fiction and fantasy
The Evolution of Pete's Blog
00:02:28
Speaker
fiction.
00:02:28
Speaker
So, we'll talk a little bit about that, but we'll focus on your blog because your blog has made great strides and it's, you know, got quite a bit of traction. So, how long has the blog been going now? It's called Pete Long's blog, so it's got a... Yeah, I decided to keep the title very simple. It's been going for about five, six years at this point, but I think
00:02:54
Speaker
It only really took off and I only really got serious about it when I moved it to WordPress at the beginning of 2021. And did it start getting traction around that same time as well? It's been up and down and honestly I've never actually really compared my stats from my first platform blogger to WordPress.
00:03:20
Speaker
Um, I think, I think it's sort of like taken until the last six months, I think perhaps to get the occasional attention I'd like it to get.
00:03:32
Speaker
Well, it just shows, you know, you have to work hard at these things and you are prolific. And the quality is, you know, you keep the quality to a high level over a long period of time, which is, you know, quite some achievement in itself. And it does get, you're being slightly modest, I feel, about some of the traction it gets because it has had a reasonable amount of visibility as far as I can see. So why did you start the blog?
Blogging as a Self-Promotion Tool
00:03:58
Speaker
Honestly, I originally started it as a means of self-promotion as I was planning to self-publish shortly. And at that point, I then looked at the manuscript I wanted to publish, decided it wasn't good enough, but the blog just kept on going. And I think the thing about the blogs, it's been a very good outlet for me.
00:04:24
Speaker
whilst I've been struggling with getting manuscripts to where I want them. You can maybe expand on that a little bit. Why is the blog a good outlet in that respect? Because we've got lots of writers listening to this and
00:04:42
Speaker
almost all of us will struggle to keep the output, the writing output at a consistent level, disregarding quality because we can edit and we can refine and we can tweak and we can polish. So the quality isn't necessarily always the issue, but the consistency of output is a real problem for a lot of especially aspiring writers. I think
00:05:08
Speaker
I think a thing with writing, particularly novels, is sticking with an idea and refining an idea for 80,000, 100,000, 140,000 words is an endurance task.
00:05:30
Speaker
The good thing about blogging is you can blog about literally anything. So instead of having to stay on the straight and narrow of your self-appointed task, you can just write about what comes naturally. You can throw your imagination around hither and thither. And
00:05:57
Speaker
It's a good way to keep the writing habit going when the story is becoming complicated and sometimes it's easier to just let your mind rest and unjam that way. I think for some writers it's possibly too easy. I think it is maybe too easy for me. I think for some writers they wouldn't be able to switch threads like that but
00:06:24
Speaker
I do think there's a lot to be said for having other methods of worthwhile writing that get you some happiness other than your novel. Well, that's an interesting word, isn't it? Happiness. Do you derive happiness from that form of writing? From blogging? Oh, absolutely. I wouldn't be doing it if it didn't make me happy.
00:06:47
Speaker
So tell us about the sort of things that you have covered on your blog. I mean, it's far and wide. So what sort of things have been catching your interest in the last few weeks and months?
00:06:59
Speaker
One thing that I'll draw attention to something that just to you know kick it off and if there's anything else you can jump in and say oh this is this has jumped out as well was the something that originated from the conversations that we've been having on on crons on the boards and it was about what would you call it genre theory I suppose.
Intricacies of Genre Theory
00:07:22
Speaker
I guess that's as good a name as any up.
00:07:25
Speaker
Yeah, shall we call it genres? There we go. We've coined the term for genre theory. That's one of the things that interests me. Basically, I talk to people and what is interesting I take and run with. I think genre is a naturally interesting topic.
00:07:43
Speaker
because genre exists on several different planes at the same time. We have genre as publishers perceive it in terms of their commercial goals. We have genre as academics see it in terms of trying to come up with taxonomies that make sense. We have genres as fans perceive it in terms of their tribe and their identity. And none of these
00:08:12
Speaker
have been particularly considered in terms of the other. Obviously, there are natural links, but when you start looking at all the definitions together and start trying to make them actually work, you have to do a certain amount of
00:08:31
Speaker
poking it around and basically treating it like a mental Rubik's Cube before I think you find definitions that touch and all three. And sometimes you get definitions that only touch and one and that's fine.
00:08:46
Speaker
obviously one of the big things about genres is sometimes you're lumping things together sometimes you're splitting them off and I'm a big believer that you should be able to lump and split as when necessary. If I think about your writing and I've read your manuscripts or your completed ones and they're very good they are what you would call
00:09:06
Speaker
firmly ensconced in the conventions of the fantasy genre. So you have a classical faux medieval type setting with low magic, what they call low magic
00:09:22
Speaker
Knights brought low taverns, you know, that sort of thing, castles and scurrilous plots and conspiracies being undertaken in hushed corridors of power in shady castles, that sort of thing. So the regular sort of thing you'd expect in fantasy. But
00:09:45
Speaker
You're right. I often feel that genre fiction, so the sort of thing that we cover on this podcast of science fiction, but also fantasy horror, which is a bone of contention with Bean, who isn't here to say his piece, but he will do in the future,
00:10:05
Speaker
But also, you know, you could expand that to magical realism, you could expand that to speculative, maybe speculative historical fiction, things like fatherland and such things. So you can play around with that. The one thing I think that sort of coalesce, the thing that unites genre fiction is that the people who follow genre fiction can't decide on anything.
00:10:33
Speaker
No, they can't, although I've never met any group of people who could decide on anything. I mean, it's economists who have the famous joke about if you ask a group of three economists for, did I just lose connection? I think I just lost connection. So
00:10:51
Speaker
Well, I'll start from the beginning anyway. No, they don't, although I've never met any group of people who agree about anything. I mean, it's economists who have the joke about if you ask a group of three economists for an opinion, you'll get five opinions back. And it's the same with genre fans. It's the same with sports fans. No group of people agrees about anything. I think perhaps with genre, it's more
00:11:21
Speaker
for now because half the time we can't even decide what the definitions we're talking about means. Yeah, because as you said, you've got the publisher's definition, which is to do with marketability. You've got the fan's definition, which is how they sort their various bits of literature and film into the different categories that they like to enjoy or that they bracket together for maybe various thematic reasons or character or universe reasons.
00:11:51
Speaker
And yeah, it's very difficult to unite around that.
Exploring Fantasy and Horror Genres
00:11:57
Speaker
So, I mean, we'll consider the horror question. Bean always says that when we consider, you know, horror should stand apart from science fiction and fantasy, and it often gets lumped in there erroneously, purely because, I suppose, in this sort of
00:12:15
Speaker
the mainstream conventions of horror, you just think, oh, vampire, werewolf, Frankenstein's monster, or something like that, some big bogeyman that's out to get you. Whereas he would say, and that's obviously a speculative creature. So it's speculative, it's a fantasy creature, therefore it's lumped in with the other stuff.
00:12:38
Speaker
But in actual fact, horror is an emotion, is his argument. And the more we've thought about that, I've found it to be a convincing argument. And it doesn't necessarily have to be the speculative element there. And, you know, a vampire in a world, in some ways, is a pretty blunt instrument when it comes to writing horror.
00:12:56
Speaker
I think there's a lot to that. I mean, I've been going for a period recently of reading a lot of like 30s pulp, which is a period of fiction where the boundary lines between fantasy and horror are very, very thin, but obviously fashion has changed. I mean, the argument that Chris was presenting about horror being different because horror
00:13:22
Speaker
being an emotion is, it is what led me to my favorite piece of genre theory at the moment, which is that you can divide the building blocks of genre into three types. The action type, whether
00:13:39
Speaker
a book is a romance or a mystery or an action or a thriller. The setting whether it's fantasy or sci-fi or contemporary or historical and then the mood whether it's horror or comedy or tragedy or drama and then
00:13:59
Speaker
you align those all together and that's the type of book it is and some combinations we have come to recognize because they are very commercially viable and fandoms have grown up around them.
00:14:13
Speaker
And so we have the genre of fantasy, which, you know, has a fantasy setting and it usually has an action adventure type. It usually has a dramatic mood. That's obviously not everything fantasy can be. And
00:14:33
Speaker
obviously, I mean, horror can be fancy, it can be sci-fi, it can be completely contemporary and non-fantastical at all. So yeah, in that respect, I think he is right that it's different. And of course, there's also the fact, you know, in terms of fandom and where they come from, what was once a genre that was very close to fantasy and sci-fi has now got a significant amount of distance from it.
00:15:03
Speaker
Yeah I think that's probably because the roots of horror come from the fantastical and I suppose ghost stories around the campfire essentially
00:15:17
Speaker
are essentially fantasy stories, but they're fantasy stories with a very particular ambition, they've got a very particular purpose, which is about confronting the abyss or confronting the terror of existence and how are you going to cope with that and how are you going to act in the face of that terror.
Pete's Fantasy Journey
00:15:38
Speaker
Okay, this is always very interesting. I want to
00:15:42
Speaker
move the conversation on to the podcast because we are going to be enjoying your insights into fantasy fiction particularly. We've got some good books and good guests lined up. Just before we actually go on today, it might be worth talking a little bit about what it is about fantasy particularly that drew you
00:16:08
Speaker
to it and continues to draw you to it because I know you appreciate it in all its different guises and possibilities and all the diversity of different work that's out there so if you just give us a little bit of an idea of what brought you to that that would be great. Well my parents started reading The Hobbit to me when I was seven or so as a bedtime story and then Lord of the Rings and
00:16:33
Speaker
I mean, it just caught me. It caught my imagination and has never let go. And obviously, when you're seven or eight, you can't really make sense of what exactly compels you towards something. I think for me now, it's
00:16:58
Speaker
I like fantasy as a playground for exploring so many of the things that has brought a culture to where it is, its myth, its history. Also, there's just the fact that, for me, a lot of interesting stories about people and about culture are made better by a magic sword and a big, terrifying dragon.
00:17:25
Speaker
Well, we are doing Magic Swords in the next couple of months. We're talking with another one of our friends, actually, Brian Wigmore, about Excalibur. So Magic Swords is coming up and we're talking with Tade Thompson about different aspects of horror. So, you know, this stuff is going to be, we are going to talk about this stuff in more detail.
00:17:47
Speaker
um but yeah there are but it's it's it's more than just you know magic swords fantasy isn't it it's it's it's almost about a world of possibility wouldn't you say and even though it has
00:18:01
Speaker
It has the reputation for being somewhat conservative because it always seems to be set in the historical past or in somewhat an analogue of a historical setting, whether it's European or otherwise. That's not necessarily reflected in the types of story. There is a sense of
00:18:24
Speaker
maybe certainly in mythologically based fantasy like Tolkien, there's a need to revivify the land and clear away the potential corruption that's spreading from, well, the fascistic state of Mordor, for example. But fantasy can do more than that.
00:18:46
Speaker
Certainly fantasy's possibilities make for an incredibly broad charge. And I think one of the problems, challenges, opportunities to talk about fantasy today is how we have this place where fantasy is the name of the whole genre, everything from Piranesi to Conan the Barbarian.
00:19:09
Speaker
And where we also use fantasy as the name for a particular sub-genre of fantasy where we basically mean Lord of the Rings, Conan, Game of Thrones. So when you definitely get to fantasy the whole genre and
00:19:27
Speaker
you talk about something like Piranesi, you talk about Lud in the Mist, which I knew you did recently, and you talk about the things that maybe aren't typically considered fantasy like magical realism and fantasy, which are technically types of fantasy. You can cover so much ground and
00:19:57
Speaker
The way you can do it, I mean, it's endless. You can write about revolution. You can write about the past in a way that challenges it. You can write about the past in a way that celebrates it. You can write about the future.
00:20:13
Speaker
And I think that is definitely something I've come to appreciate in the last few years, just how big the genre can be and just how many things have been done with it and are being done with it. It's so wide and so filled with possibilities. It feels like genre, especially when you do expand it to include science fiction.
00:20:39
Speaker
that the genre fiction is surely bigger than let's call it commercial fiction in terms of the spread and the remit and the possibility of the stories that it can tell or the ideas that it can convey, let's say.
Speculative Storytelling in Fantestica
00:20:55
Speaker
It's an engine room for ideation.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, the big thing about, I like the term fantestica for all of the speculative genres put together, you know, fantasy, sci-fi, horror, alt history, and so on, is you can tell any story that you could tell with complete the memetic true to reality fiction.
00:21:28
Speaker
But you can also tell a great many other stories through having elements that defy reality as we know it. But in defying reality, show reality in a very clear form. Let's talk about podcasting then. I mean, it's great that you're going to come on board. So what are you hoping that you're going to get from joining us on the podcast?
00:21:55
Speaker
I think the main thing I want to get from this is simply the opportunity to pick people's minds and talk about stories of people who know and love these stories very well and get a chance to see these stories, the stories of our guests and just stories in general in whole new lights because of what I learned here. That's it really, I'm just here for the ideas.
00:22:24
Speaker
Well, you are, I mean, you're well known in our writing group and in our circle of friends as being the fountain of ideas. So surely you don't need any more. I mean, Pete's, Pete's that he had, he's constantly coming to us, which, you know, us by us, I mean Bean and other people in our writing group, that includes Brian Wigmore and others.
00:22:49
Speaker
with crazy brilliant ideas for a new novel or a short story and it's continuous. I've just had an idea for whatever it is, something involving gods and monsters and knights usually. But the cons, I mean, coming up with just gods and monsters and knights is not enough. You've got a real knack for identifying
00:23:10
Speaker
strange situations in which characters are faced with strange decisions, which sounds pretty easy on the face of it, but to come up with these odd scenarios continually is quite the gift.
Pete's Creative Process
00:23:25
Speaker
So we've genuinely had this question of
00:23:29
Speaker
how do you come up with your ideas which i think is a terrible question but it does seem to be a common question so maybe it is worthy of some consideration and some people have said
00:23:41
Speaker
I struggle with coming up with ideas. Now, other people like you seem to be overflowing with them. So, you know, everybody's different, but what's your experience of developing that? Do you spend as much time considering the idea, like sitting down and thinking, right, I need some ideas. Let's get some ideation going. Or does it just pop fully, not fully formed, but popped somewhat formed into your head one day?
00:24:07
Speaker
There have been times when I've sat down and thought I want to do something and I'm not sure what, so let's bat around ideas for it.
00:24:19
Speaker
But mainly I will just read something or see something and my brain will take it and give me a single sentence prompt, usually it's like a question, what if a D&D palatins solve crimes? And I think the big thing about ideas
00:24:39
Speaker
is it's like any other form of muscle memory. If you want your brain to keep coming up with ideas, then you have to keep looking for ideas. Once it's a habit to look at everything and say, is there a story there? Then that's what your brain does. I think you can train that.
00:25:08
Speaker
And so I think I've done that for myself. Are you in that space with your blog posts as well? So you're looking at things and there's something that could be sort of, there's a thread to be pulled there. Yeah. I had a conversation the other day, which gave me two blog post ideas. I haven't done them yet. One is very stupid. The other one kind of worthy, but any conversation can be the seed.
00:25:34
Speaker
we are hoping that we'll have many conversations and so provide you with many seeds.
Upcoming Podcast Topics
00:25:40
Speaker
The first couple that we've got coming up with you, and these are not firmly scheduled, but we've got Titus Grown, a Mervyn Peake's novel, Titus Grown from the 40s, and I think Lord Vowelsbane, so Stephen Donaldson from the 1970s, is that right? 77, I think.
00:26:01
Speaker
I'm really looking forward to having you on board. I know Bean is really looking forward to having you on board, even though he can't be here tonight. It's going to be a lot of fun. So thank you for joining us and we'll see you soon. Thank you for inviting me on and I can't wait. Cheers. See you soon, Pete. Bye bye. See you soon.
00:28:10
Speaker
you