Are you a FanGirl too?

I went to MileHiCon in Denver last month, and I picked up enough news and information for multiple columns. This time around, I'll focus on one of my big thrills from this convention: meeting Katherine Kurtz. I started reading her Deryni fantasy series when I was in high school, and I was obsessed. I guess you could say they were my Twilight, but that was back in the Dark Ages before the Internet, so I couldn't get on message boards and discuss these books with anyone, and I barely knew anyone in my town who read books at all, let alone these books, so I was just about bursting to hash over all the little plot and character things with someone else. I ended up buying the first book and sending it to a long-distance friend so I could get her hooked. I suspect that most of my first attempts at writing fantasy were really bad imitations of Katherine Kurtz's writing. Fortunately, they were handwritten, and my handwriting was so bad that even I can't read them now.

I did what I usually seem to do when meeting a writing idol: I start out nervous and fangirly, and then about five minutes later, I forget about the idol thing and just talk to them like a person and a professional peer. A lot of the time, I even forget to talk about books and writing. My hanging out time with Katherine Kurtz at this convention mostly involved watching boat races at the hotel swimming pool, so I didn't pick up any exclusive tidbits, but I did attend some panels and sessions and got some news there.

One of the big pieces of news is that the first novel in the Deryni series, Deryni Rising, has been optioned for film, and a screenplay is in the works. I thought it had a very cinematic feel to it, so I'd always thought it would make a good movie, though I suspect all the mental casting I did when I was a teenager would be woefully out of date -- like those people's kids might now be the right age for the roles.

Kurtz was one of the authors who established the modern fantasy genre in the 1970s and 1980s. She wrote the initial trilogy of books, then wanted to write a book about a character mentioned in those books as a historical figure. When she was about two-thirds of the way through that book, she realized she'd need two books to tell the story, and then later realized it wouldn't all fit in two and she'd need three books. That established her pattern of writing books in groups of three, and since it fell into the trilogy pattern from the publication of The Lord of the Rings as three volumes, it also helped firmly establish the expectation among readers that fantasy had to come in trilogies.

She said she's currently working on the third book in the series about the childhood of Alaric Morgan, the central character from the initial trilogy, and it's possible that this will be one of those stories that ends up needing two books. After that, she may go back and pick up the story from the earlier timeline for this universe.

Next month, I'll have some insight into some popular fantasy series.