I released the biggest (see, even I can’t resist the puns) fantasy book of the year last year, and will likely do so again this year.

However, after ten years in this business, I somewhat shockingly find myself to be one of the major voices for epic fantasy. If there were only one sort of book that people liked, the world would be a much sadder place overall. Oftentimes, what one person finds a book’s most compelling aspect (whether it be breakneck pacing or deep world-building) can be the very thing that drives another person away. It’s not my intention to stop such mockery as I said, it’s mostly good natured, and we in the genre have to be willing to laugh at ourselves. Some people call the books “fat fantasies with maps” as if to reduce everything the genre seeks to accomplish to the thing you often find on page one. We comment about “doorstoppers,” warn people not to drop the novels around any small pets, and joke about authors being paid by the word. Most of that mockery is good natured-the genre’s thick pagecounts and sometimes ponderous leanings do paint a large target. So, I find myself in an odd place when the genre is mocked. It is hard to define myself without epic fantasy. But epic fantasy holds that first and most important piece of my heart, as it was the genre that made me into a reader, and that in turn made me a writer. I have nothing against the shorter forms of fiction-indeed, I have a blast reading stories of all sizes. But it was only in these pages that I found the depth, the imagination, and the powerful storytelling that I thirsted for. I went from hundred-page middle grade novels directly into seven-hundred-page epics. You might say I learned to swim by jumping into the deep end. Soon, I was reading everything thick I could find, from Tad Williams to Stephen Donaldson, and was therefore perfectly primed to read The Eye of the World when I discovered it. This book, with its gorgeous cover seemed like the best shot. However, I was just coming off of the high of having discovered something beautiful and wonderful in this genre, and I was hungry for more. For those who don’t know my story, I was not a reader in my youth-and so the thought of approaching something that huge was daunting to me. I can be reasonably certain that Dragon Prince, by Melanie Rawn, was the first thick fantasy book I read.

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