Beware the Rose-Quartz Dingleberry of Doom!

Teresa Neilsen Hayden has some words of wisdom for aspiring fantasy writers:

If you're writing novels, it's not enough to arbitrarily have standard genre fantasy characters running around loose in standard genre fantasy settings, questing for the magic rose-quartz dingleberry while they try to defeat the Dark Lord who's trying to take over the world. If that's all your audience wants, they can get it elsewhere.

In other words, if you want to publish a 5000 page epic based on your last D&D campaign, please don't.

Of course, if you read Making Light, you have to read the comments as well. Otherwise you'll miss gems like this:

Some of the things I rant about when I'm reading slush:

(1.) Why do Dark Lords only ever want to take over the world? Why don't they ever want to appear on the cover of Vogue, or bag all the Munros in record time, or convert everyone in the world to Lutheranism?

(2.) Why is it always a Dark Lord? Why isn't it an evil syndicate or axis or cabal? And while we're at it, why do Dark Lords never have enough staffers to administer a large operation?

(3.) Why, in worlds that have a long tradition of working magic, a low level of technology, and little or no organized religion or codified theology, does everyone hate and fear magical powers, and persecute people who develop them? Most especially, why do peasants who have no other source of medical or dental care go out of their way to persecute and alienate their witchy-but-kind village healers?

(4.) Why do people who find out they're heir to great temporal and thaumaturgical power never say "Oh, goody!" And why is their artificially prolonged reluctance to do this obvious thing always referred to as "accepting their destiny" -- especially in causal universes in which destiny is not otherwise a recognized force?

(5.) How can illiterate characters living in an illiterate culture have non-phonetic and orthographically outre names?

(6.) How much does this author think his mommy is paying me to read and remember these thickets of superfluous nomenclature, when I haven't yet seen enough of the plot and characters to care who they are or what's going to become of them?

I'd better quit now ...