A Bad Spell in Yurt

 How does one become a writer?  My first published novel, some 35 years ago now, was A Bad Spell in Yurt.  It was however far from the first book I'd written.  Like many authors, I'd been making up stories since before I even started school.  A lot of my early efforts were, shall we say, derivative.  But I loved writing stories and, in grade school, illustrating them.

I'm a pretty decent speller (in spite of how totally weird the English language is), and I think it's because when I was writing out my stories I'd keep asking Mom how a particular word was spelled, and I'd remember what she told me.

In junior high I moved from writing kids' books with pictures to writing novels.  In ninth grade I read JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for the first time (certainly not the last!), and it had a profound effect on me.  Fantasy rules!  From then on, the majority of what I wrote was more or less fantasy—although initially a lot of it was stories set in a pseudo-medieval world that had lots of action but no magic.

Starting when I was in college, I tried intermittently to get something published.  This was back when there was no self-publishing, so it was traditional publishing or nothing.  For years I didn't get anywhere, and it's probably just as well, because some of it I'd now be embarrassed to have attributed to me.  I was also busy being a graduate student and getting established as an academic in the field of medieval history (again, I think Tolkien is largely responsible).

But then I had an unusually vivid dream, which featured the opening of what became A Bad Spell in Yurt and much of the characters.  I started writing, and my husband encouraged me to finish and try to find a publisher.  And I did!  Some twenty-five years after I first packed up a manuscript and mailed it off to a publisher, my first novel was published (my first academic book preceded it by a dozen years). With a great cover by Tom Kidd, it became a national science-fiction/fantasy best seller.

 

(When I was about seven I'd decided both that I wanted to write fun books that people would read and that I wanted to write a "history of the world." Medieval history isn't the history of the whole world, but to a large extent I've achieved my childhood dream.)

 The publisher, Baen, brought out much of the rest of the Yurt series.  I hadn't planned on a series, but (again) my husband encouraged me to make it a series, and he was right.  But then the books went out of print, as books do, and once I got my rights back I turned to self-publishing.

Baen had published the Yurt books as mass-market (small) paperbacks.  I reissued them initially as ebooks, whch remains my best-selling format.  Here are the US link and the UK link.  The book is also available in other Amazon stores around the world.

As well as the ebook, I've brought Bad Spell out as a large-format ("trade") paperback and a hardcover. The rest of the series is available both as ebooks and as paperbacks (some in omnibus editions). I've also written and self-published a "Yurt, the Next Generation" series and some other books as well, having more time to write now that I've retired from that pesky day job.

Don't know if I'd recommend my path to anyone else, but that's how I became a writer. 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026 

Medieval-themed fantasy

The majority of modern fantasy is set in an alternate versions of Europe's Middle Ages, complete with knights, castles, and swords. North America and Down Under, which have no castles but whose culture is European-derived, produce large numbers of fans of medieval-style fantasy--and a fair number of writers of such (including me).

I'm often asked, "How much research do you have to do to write medieval-themed fantasy?"  Well, in a way I've been doing the research my entire adult life.  As I've discussed previously, I've somehow managed to balance being both a fantasy writer and a professor of medieval history, with a decent collection of books I've written in both areas.

And of course I've used a lot of motifs from real medieval history in my stories; see the discussion of an example here.

Fantasy as its own genre got off the ground in the 1950s-70s, indubitably due to JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien himself was a professor of medieval literature, so it is not surprising that his own fiction was imbued with the tropes that medieval authors put into their own literature--almost all of which we would now label "fantasy."  (For them, it was just literature.)

Once people found how compelling Lord of the Rings was (and realized it was not "super science fiction," as an early review of LotR stated), they started looking for more, and discovered such earlier works as CS Lewis's Narnia series, Lord Dunsanay, and a few others.  Then people started writing their own, and they haven't stopped.

These days, fantasy is a mix of several quite different sources.  One of course is Tolkien himself.  There are plenty of stories where an ill-assorted group of comrades set off on a dangerous quest to overcome the Dark Lord, even though most of these stories end up having the comrades find the powerful magic artifact to whack said Dark Lord, rather than following Tolkien, whose heroes sought to destroy such an artifact.

Once one gets past imitation Tolkien, there is plenty of influence from real medieval literature--the King Arthur stories (especially in the late fifteenth-century version by Mallory), the epics and romances, and the Norse sagas.  The wizards and dragons now found in many works of fantasy were, however, very scarce in medieval literature, as I discuss more here.  Interestingly, Tolkien never used King Arthur stories, having an expressed dislike for anything Celtic.

Another source is real medieval social and political history.  George RR Martin says that he started with the history of the fifteenth-century War of the Roses in England (between the Yorks and the Lancasters, sound familiar?), though he kept the war technology in the pre-gunpowder era.  And his very realistic and gritty touches, like food production and the horrors of war, are to some extent undercut by the dragons and walking dead--which are fantasy!

Another source is nineteenth-century folk tales.  Not until the nineteenth century did people find it worthwhile to "collect" the stories told by the folk.  These include everything from the stories of the Brothers Grimm in Germany to the Kalevala in Finland.  There are some great stories here, and most have a sort of medieval-like look, but they aren't actually medieval--unless you assume, which I sometimes do myself, that in many ways life for three-quarters of Europe's population didn't really change from the Middle Ages until the coming of railroads and telegraphs and semi-universal education.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015
For more on medieval fantasy and medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.