Platform, Fantasy and writing as a non-native English speaker by Alex Valdiers #guestpost

Greetings fellow book-loving humans! Today’s treat is a guest post by Alex Valdiers and as you can guess from its title, it’s going to be interesting for those attempting to write in English when it’s not their first language, and it’s equally interesting to those who live, breathe and write in English. Alex, over to you…

My name is Alex Valdiers. I was born in 1988 in Lyon, France. My parents are French and Laotian.

I’ve known I wanted to become a full-time writer since I was 8 years-old, but I’ve only released my debut novella,  The Choice of Weapons, last August (it’s currently a SFINCS semi-finalist). Why has it taken me so long? The answer is one word: platform.

There is no platform for a French native speaker to become a full-time SFF writer. There was none when I left France back in 2012 (I currently live in England), there is none today. You can write Fantasy in French and get it published, but you would never sell more than a few hundred copies at best. The market and the demand simply aren’t there. That is true for France and it’s also true for almost every other language in the world aside from English, Japanese and Chinese.

Japan and China have their own market and a huge demand for SFF but they also suffer from their own problems. Piracy is massive in China and almost no artist makes money on their art. Japan is geared towards manga, so most wanna be SFF authors would be geared towards that format.

The lack of market is one problem, the lack of knowledge is another, which in some way may be an even bigger issue. When you grow up in France, or Hungary or Ecuador, and you only speak your native language, you are reliant on whatever the publishers decide to translate in your language. The biggest series were not available and when they were… oh, dear me the translation was awful.

That was another problem. For French publishers, SFF is pretty much the lowest of all literary genres, so they assigned their least competent people to translate the random books they acquired. I may have read Asimov, Stevenson and LeGuin as a kid but all I remember was how bad the writing was. To give a concrete example, The Wheel of Time series only got its first translation in French in 1995, but the publisher at the time, Rivages, was so small that it was impossible to find the books in the biggest bookstores. The Wheel of Time books wouldn’t be available in France for the wider distribution until the late 00’s. The translations were reportedly so bad that Harriet McDougal, Robert Jordan’s wife, got the books taken off the French
publisher’s hands after auditing the translations. It has since found a new publisher but the last Wheel of Time book, A Memory of Light, was only published in 2022 in France.

So, without a market for French SFF and the biggest books in the genre being either not available or butchered, how then can anyone expect to write great SFF and make a living out of it in those conditions?
It’s impossible.

What then? Do authors like me, Fantasy-nerd born in the wrong country, just give up or compromise to write mediocre books that would sell very little?

I didn’t. In 2012, I moved to the UK with the crazy plan to write in English. I knew it was nuts and it would be almost impossible for me to acquire a grasp of English equivalent to my literary qualities in French. But it was my only angle if I ever wanted to write for a living and tell all those wonderful stories that lived in my brain for all these years. Besides, I had been working for years on my prose, and its quality in French was so high that surely, I thought, it would be easily transferable. It’s not.

The sensibilities of the French and English language are different. Best example: knuckles. The English language has a lot of idiom built around knuckles. The French language does not even have a word for knuckles. Vice versa. The primary attribute of the French personality is the ‘mauvaise foi’. Mauvaise foi is when you do something wrong in front of a witness but then you will lie your head off in front of that person to (try to) convince them that you are innocent, even though they saw you. It’s the root for a lot of comedy in
France. You would have guessed it, there is neither a word equivalent in English nor a feeling equivalent.

Another problem when it comes to writing: the French narrative tradition sealed in my brain by years of practice is very different from the English narrative tradition. So I’m having to relearn how to write POV and how to present events and characters. It’s almost like doing bone marrow transplants. It’s painful. It’s precisely for that reason that French books don’t export themselves well to English-speaking countries and vice versa.

And then there was my lack of SFF culture. I had read hundreds of books growing up, almost all the classic novels, but very few SFF books and when I did, they were mostly badly translated (aside for the Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe books). I was fortunate to have access to the Dragonlance series by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, but there again the translations were shaky. The character’s names were not even consistent from one book to the other: Riverwind was sometimes called Rivebise, sometimes Riveboise, sometimes Riverwind.

I had to make it up and I am still trying to catch up. I’ve read 160 novels this year, on top of writing my own books, 200 last year, 150 the year before that. I’ve now read almost all the big books in Fantasy and SF but I still feel I’m lagging behind, especially when it comes to indie fantasy, the community I am a part of.

We’re now in 2024, days away from the release of my debut novel, A Wolf in Space, the first Raoke Gang novel. In a few months I’ll turn 36. It will mark my 28th year as a writer. It’s taking 28 years to get my debut novel published and now you know why. The odds were insurmountable. And I am speaking from my experience as a French person growing up in France, one of the biggest literary market in the world (just not for SFF). I can’t even imagine how much harder it must be for all those wanna be Fantasy writers in Slovakia, Botswana, Laos or Estonia.

It’s not that folks outside English-speaking countries can’t write good Fantasy that earns them a living. It’s that we don’t have the platform. The journey to get to the suitable platform is a perilous one. I am one of the few who made it. There are only a few others like me out there: Joao Silva, Kian N. Ardalan, Sadir S. Samir, Philinna Wood, being the most notable ones. But there are thousands of great writers who never make it, whose words, characters and stories die in limbo. It’s sad. It pains me, and I always have a thought for all those anonymous great minds when writing. I am glad I’ve survived the journey and how welcoming the indie community has been to me.

So when I say thank you to a reviewer or a reader, I really, really, mean it, with all my heart.

– Alex Valdiers

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Alex Valdiers is a French indie Space Western Fantasy author of Laotian descent who currently lives in the South of England. The lack of a suitable platform and market for French Fantasy prompted Valdiers to move to the UK in 2012. After years of practice, his debut novella The Choice of Weapons, the first Raoke Gang novella, was released in August 2023 and reached the SFINCS Semi-Finals. His debut novel, A Wolf in Space, the first Raoke Gang novel, comes out on January 23rd. Valdiers has over 40 novels planned for the Raoke Gang series.

Website I X I Goodreads I Amazon I Instagram

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You can pre-order A Wolf in Space ahead of its 23rd of January, 2024 release date (that’s only a week from now, folks!) on:

Amazon UK I USA

Gunslinger. Skyhorse rider. Lone Wolf. Malvius is a veteran gunslinger in Larragon, a six-planet solar system with two rivers: two train lines linking each planet together. The two rivers are a beehive for opportunistic merchants and feisty gunslingers.

All you need to survive in Larragon is a skyhorse to roam the open space and a gunblaster to protect your hide and earn your keep. Wild moons and saloons are aplenty, money is easily made and lost, but life for Malvius isn’t about money, it is about helping who needs helping, shooting who needs shooting.

Along comes the Raoke Gang, shattered, their leader wounded, half of the gang incarcerated. Malvius feels compelled to help. Little did he know that simply relaying a message from their leader to the survivors of the Raoke Gang will send him on a wild course of events that will see him facing off a space wizard, assisting a space train heist, and become Larragon’s most wanted man.

If you would like to read The Choice of Weapons, a novella, ahead of the upcoming A Wolf in Space release, you can do just that. 

Amazon UK I USA

Ren is an officer on the rise, going from planetary conquest to conquest, until he crosses path with a senior female officer from his native Japan. His meeting with Izuna ends in a bloody duel — the first of many.

As the war against other species progresses, Ren’s obsession for Izuna grows and his discontentment for army life along with it. When Izuna gets isolated on an icy hell, Ren volunteers to rescue her for what may be his ultimate mission.

The Raoke Gang series is prime entertainment with heart and brains, humor and sex (occasionally, when the story commands it), and, most of all, incredible characters running wild in the most exciting of settings: the Far West in space!

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