💁♀️ Just a suburban girl...
It's an urban fantasy world and I'm living in it.
In this newsletter…
🌆 My newfound enjoyment of urban fantasy!
⏱️ A fistful of free thrillers!
👨🚀 Sci-fi stories from indie authors!
I grew up in the suburbs, went to school in a city, spent a brief time in a major metropolitan sprawl, and now live on a relatively rural property. I haven’t resided in either of the extremes—I’ve only visited larger metropolitan areas and more remote locations (all of this within the U.S., by the way). But I do have experience with a pretty wide range of population density and the buildings, amenities, and sights therein.
I love to bring the speculative into my daily reality, so you can imagine that I’ve written stories set in all kinds of living situations. Lately, I’ve been focused on the urban settings.
(Kind of. I’ll get back to that at the end of this section.)
But… let’s jump back to those suburban roots for a second.
The suburbs are where creativity, initiative, and innovation go to die. It’s a place of cookie-cutter houses, lifestyles, and mindsets. When you step outside of the very well-defined lines in a suburban life, you’re quickly a pariah.
“You” are a pariah? I mean, me. It’s me, hi, I’m the pariah, it’s me. The suburbs were my childhood neighborhood, well-disguised warts and all, and I was the weirdo kid in our cul-de-sac. I didn’t even really follow the rules of my household. I was the oddball in all of my social situations, familial or otherwise.
When it came time to choose where to go to college, I chose “the big city.” (Hilarious, because Seattle is not that, relatively speaking.) It was somewhere I could go to get a fresh start, to escape the boxes I’d been in all my life. In the city, I vanished. I was one in a million (or a few), a nobody in the big picture.
It was fantastic.
Back then, going to school in the city—and now, when I write urban fantasy—I really appreciated the good things about the city setting even while I noted the not-so-good things. All of them became plot devices, ratcheting up the tension in my stories set in urban locations.
Here’s what I’ve come to like most of all about urban fantasy settings.
Cities put everything on top of everything else—the combinations are endless. Even before you start layering in supernatural elements, the depths of what you can find in a given big city location are nearly bottomless. Put dragons, goblins, and elemental spirits on top of that, and if you can dream it, it’s not unreasonable to write in an urban setting.
I delight in how many different human possibilities are unlocked in a city dripping with the supernatural. I could follow the adventures of a magical landscaper who spends her days taming wayward soulplants. I might peek in on a slice of the life of a factory worker haunted by his grandmother’s ghost. I could toss a troll into the supervisor role of the construction crew working on a massive modern skyscraper, just to see what comes of their lunchtimes.
(Or I might follow a little hodgepodge of a found family as they traverse the Eastern seaboard of North America, trying to escape government conspiracies and supernatural threats, like in my Chaos Caretakers series with Paige and Percival… Even in my alternate history science-fantasy disaster romance BOILING POINT, I explore the implications of the ancient city on its citizens, including the three main characters.)
Unlike the suburbs, where only the unusual is scrutinized, everything is normal in the city. As a person who rarely fits in, that holds massive appeal.
Then, there’s the fact that in a city, there are only man-made—or at least man-curated—resources.
How fascinating is it that in our current times, humans no longer have to scrape berries out of the unfriendly ground, but can in fact curate the foods they want in their densely-populated areas? (What a fragile thread of a system… yet consistent for many, day after day.) In an urban setting, nature is actively discouraged from taking hold, and so there are very few natural resources.
When people go from gatherers to curators, biases and prejudices become obvious, innocent or otherwise. One person’s clean, charming park is another person’s wasted potential. Communities are often built around grocery stores and other sources of food—or lack thereof. Water has to be harshly treated, air has to be scrubbed, roads have to be constantly repaired. Or not.
Every one of these human choices creates an opportunity for clash, contrast, and tension. In the Chaos Caretakers series, Maelie’s obsession with McNuggets becomes particularly challenging because the cast is living in a commune well outside of populated areas. This seemingly benign absence of fried chicken becomes a source of consternation and even danger for Reece, Devon, and the others living at Fire Oak Island in MONSTER TRAINER.
Then there’s the vibes of it all: urban settings are gritty and dirty, a perfect contrast to shiny magic things. I’m sure many, many authors of urban fantasy appreciated this long before me, but here I am, following their footsteps. It’s delightful, okay?! Neon and concrete make a potent aesthetic, and it takes things to the next level when magic and power get involved. Who wouldn’t love a troll under the underpass, a vampire who runs the rare book section at the city library, or a magic battle between wizards at the seaside aquarium?
And some urban legends—which dance with mythology quite intimately—embrace the gritty and grimy side of monsters, which means urban fantasy as a genre gets the chance to put some extra zest and sparkle into these kinds of threats and foes. Minor spoilers, but the Jersey Devil shows up in MONSTER TRAINER, warts and all, alongside some more aristocratic monstrous types, and none of it feels out of place in the big city.
Finally, in urban settings, danger lurks beneath the surface. Whether it’s literally a monster down in the sewer system running below the city, or a network of corruption and darkness infiltrating the seemingly innocent aspects of daily life, a lot of what threatens the population of a city isn’t immediately obvious. When you’re hoping to build mystery and intrigue in your urban fantasy story, this kind of undercurrent of danger is priceless.
All in all, I’m really enjoying urban fantasy as a playground for my usual themes: found family, reluctant leaders, and hopeful endings. And there’s no question that talking animals fit right into magically-infused urban settings!
(OK, back that something I said at the beginning: I’ve been kind of focusing on the urban settings lately. While it’s true I’ve indulged in several urban fantasy series, including of course the Chaos Caretakers series, and most feature scenes that take place in major cities… the other type of setting I found myself accidentally focusing on in both series was road trips.
But that’s for another newsletter…)
Do you enjoy urban settings, or do you prefer other backdrops for your speculative fiction? Reply and tell me all about it!
Looking for some thriller shorts to jolt you into your summer?
Snag your copy of the third Infinite Pieces collection of shorts from the Sterling & Stone authors, A Good Day to Die and Other Thriller Stories! It’s free on all the major ebook platforms, so you can enjoy these exciting tales at no cost. Faceless hackers, vengeful time loops, and a hostage standoff in a museum await you in this thrilling collection.
The Free-zer
It’s another installment of THE FREE-ZER—the section where you’ll find something that will cost you zero monies. (That’s no dollars, cents, pounds, pesos, Republic credits, Monopoly money, latinum, or dubloons.)
👉 They told him peace was worth any cost. Even genocide. But in Kevin Sanon’s dark sci-fi thriller novella Ashes of Xyphos, elite soldier Elias Kade will challenge this seemingly unquestionable truth. Seize your free copy today!
👉 Space holds many secrets. He is one of them. Jump into the universe of Benjamin Boekweg’s Knights of the Solar Winds with this first book of an epic space opera trilogy, Aberrant Star. Follow starfighter mechanic Vance Brewer as he takes up the mantle of destiny as a Knight of the Solar Winds along with the fate of humanity…
👉 There’s still time… Free stories await you in these indie author bundles, such as:
SUPERNATURAL SUMMER: 💀 Out for Blood 💀 🐈 9 Lives 🐈 🏍️ Embers of Justice 🏍️
JUNE FANTASY/SCI-FI FREEBIES: 🕰️ Hands of the Future 🕰️ 💻 Optimised 💻 🐦⬛ The Proud Bird 🐦⬛
A blessed Summer to you all,
August
Maybe we'll have to write a UF road trip together next :)
But FIRST the secret project!!!