Hello, Readers! Clevenger here.

So Graham laid out some foundations in his “Best from the Best” article, and I shall dig into a few of these deeper.

As Graham stated, we spent a decent chunk looking at videos that talked about “How to Write” various things. And for a lot of those, we knew we were already on the right track. Some BookTube channels were better than others. While I enjoyed Jenna Moreci’s “Worst advice” videos… I learned more from Diane Callahan’s “How to” series. Following this more instructional path, I watched interviews with published authors like King and Sanderson who would be honest and say that writing is a personal style, but consistency is the key. Leading me one of my favorites, Sanderson’s entire Creative Writing course on-line for free!

The entertainment videos of “the Worst Tropes” and “What’s missing in Fantasy?” helped us cement our original ideas of putting a map in our book, going back to chapter titles, and other gems that reminded Graham and I of our early years of reading fantasy and the nostalgia we could return to. By avoiding some modern trends, and returning to the roots of fantasy storytelling, we could bring our story to a modern life and enhance our original ideas by knowing what to bring forward even more than we intended to originally.

While we never changed anything about Manticore’s Shadow because of these videos, we went back and spent extra effort on the nuggets of ideas that we heard spoken about. Echoes of the past being given a vast open area to explore in our story. It excited us, motivated us, and pleased us to know that we were “on to something” here.

So, before I go… Graham promised I would tell you a tale about our races. Let me be honest and say that when we first started writing I was very, very green. And thanks to the BookTube community, I was able to see clearly where I struggled. And Graham noticed it very quickly for me as well. I knew my characters. I knew their hopes, thoughts, pain, struggles, and personalities. But I just didn’t “value” their descriptions. The physical. Because I wasn’t concerned as a reader about them. And because I didn’t care about physical descriptions, when Graham would talk about all the races he wanted to introduce into the story, I was just like “meh, sure.” No investments, but no genuine concerns.

But watching BookTube and listening to other authors talk about their processes, I realized that I was clearly wrong (or at least in a severe minority) and that physical descriptions were essential. So I started to look at our characters. I would go back and touch up scenes using Symon’s feline heritage. I described his friends, elves, treefolk, and more. Suddenly, our entire book looked like the “Cantina Scene” in Star Wars. Races were everywhere, and the fantastic dial was cranked up to eleven.

Then Graham became worried. Were there too many races? Had we gone too far? Would it be better if the main characters were human? (That was a concern I had thought about early as well) But we kept going back to Daniel Greene and Merphy Napier and their comments that modern fantasy isn’t fantastical enough. They were begging for races to be added back to the equation. And we had inadvertently obliged, and by the gods… let’s lean into it!!! So, here we are with our crazy races, and a rich vibrant world which results from a marvelous pendulum swing of emotions of two fledgling authors worrying endlessly if people will love it as much as we do.

This story, I believe sums up what BookTube has brought to our process and its impact on the evolution of Manticore’s Shadow and other future tales that Graham and I may bring to light.

Now, we’ve talked about the best… let’s talk about some of the least helpful. Graham’s up first.

Be Kind.

-Clevenger

P.S. Graham already let the Gen X cat out of the bag, so I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you all that when I hear Best of the Best, I immediately think of all the 80’s action and martial art flicks… which puts “You’re the Best Around… Nothing’s ever gonna get you down” on an endless loop in my head. And now, hopefully, yours, too. 😛