Although I’ve written horror and science fiction stories I’ve not tried fantasy. Some of my horror leans towards fantasy in that I invoke spirits, ghosts and supernormal abilities. Check them out at http://horrormasters.com But I’m shortly to embark on writing Xaghra’s Revenge, a story inspired by the real life abduction of the entire island of Gozo in the Mediterranean in 1551. The fiction in my story has modern-day descendents but the spirits of the ancients become invoked and they want to play. What I’m not sure of is exactly how to pitch the fantasy element. Gozo has the world’s oldest building at Xaghra and the later pirates and their victims will have spirits, some of whom are demonic. But do I invite these phantoms into play right from the start? Throw the reader in at the fantasy deep end? Some surveys of fantasy readers reveal their reasoning for liking the genre lies in their desire to be lost in alternative universes where it is normal to have dragons, elves, magic and vampires. I understand that with no problems at all, but it’s not the way I usually write. Practically all my stories have main characters that are bog-standard normal people but to whom extraordinary things happen. Readers (OK, two of them) tell me that they like my characters because they identify with them – the well-behaved ones anyway! I am inclined to have two ‘normal’ characters meet in Paris and let the weird stuff with phantoms be a shock, and then become normality for them. What do you think?

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