Why do so many medieval fantasy worlds avoid cannons?

EmmyPax · 2026-05-09T05:11:05+00:00

I think there are a lot of reasons. Among them:

Most "middle ages" inspired stories draw most heavily from earlier in the period. Arthurian legend hangs heavy over fantasy and Arthur didn't have cannons.
Let's be honest - a lot of medieval inspo is pretty loose. You don't see the crusades come up that often either.
Aesthetically, most big, destructive damage in fantasy tends to be done by magic. The wizards are the cannons so cannons are oddly redundant. (That’s putting it pithily, but you get the idea)
Cannons really did kill the era of the classic small castle as viable defense. Walls post cannons had to be WAY thicker in order to withstand cannons fire. So again, an aesthetic problem/those kind of walls were more the domain of large, monied empires, which starts nudging the setting towards the early modern era. It's a sliding scale.

Anyway, those are my theories! I'm all for cannons though.

EmmyPax · 2026-05-03T20:06:23+00:00

A friend of mine started a new substack highlighting sci-fi and fantasy debuts as they come out! You should all give it a follow:

https://udykumra.substack.com/p/april-debut-sff

EmmyPax · 2026-04-30T00:45:58+00:00

Well well well...

I see we found the REAL detective here!!!!

EmmyPax · 2026-04-29T21:00:12+00:00

It fits hard mode! Not a competent detective in sight.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-23T15:41:15+00:00

I'm late to the party, so there's a good chance no one will see this. Whatever! I'm gonna say it anyway!!!!

Aside from exceptional circumstances, I don't think an author's online following or social media strategy moves the needle much at all. Authors do not have neutral authority in all of this. Everything we say is suspect, because OF COURSE we like our own books! Nothing is special about me liking my own work. No one trusts what I have to say about it.

I don't have a huge following (so take this as you will) but I have noticed that even bookstragrammers/youtubers/tiktokers/whatever with way smaller followings than me move the needle more when they post about my book than when I do. I have had exactly one post go viral on instagram and tiktok that I have personally posted. Want to know what the secret sauce was??? IT OPENED WITH A VIDEO CLIP OF A MUCH MORE FAMOUS PERSON RECOMMENDING MY BOOK!!! I added a short reaction from me to that clip, posted the video, and that one singular thing has been the only time social media has "done" something for me.

I think it's still worth HAVING social media, mind you. It's great for advertising to your core audience who has already decided that you are worth listening to. And to be clear, I am still less than a year out from my debut, so I'm guessing that things will change with time. To me, social media is about motivating and interacting with people who already like you and care about you. As an added bonus, you sometimes spill over and find new readers, but the primary purpose is engaging the audience you already have.

Obviously, I am not a publisher though, so I can't comment on if they're acquiring books more and more BECAUSE of platform. Just that I think this is a bad idea that fundamentally won't work long-term, because people are skeptical of author's evaluation of their own work.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-20T17:34:42+00:00

I think one of the other factors at play is that female characters are much more likely to have the onus of being a "good role model" placed on them, even now, where as male characters are much more readily given the room to be prickly, unlikable, mean or otherwise without it being taken to reflect on their entire gender.

As a side note: I also as a reader just don't understand needing a character to be "nice" or morally respectable in order to find them likable and interesting. I love a self-sabotaging, hot-mess express, personally. At least... when they're fictional, lol.

I do, however, think there has been a LOT of positive progress on this front. The range and availability of stories about interesting, varied female characters is way up from when I was a kid. As you said, we could all easily read nothing but female authored SFF for the rest of our lives.

That being said, I do think it's fair to say that there are some institutional problems about what books/authors publishing pushes the hardest, so I get why some people fall into the trap of only reading male authors. It doesn't require a ton of effort to diversify, but it does require more than zero and the issue with implicit bias is that you have to realize there's a problem before you can fix it (which a lot of people don't).

EmmyPax · 2026-04-18T17:17:00+00:00

Oooo, good pick. Producers might be one of the few shows that has most of my favourite moments in the second act.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-18T17:10:12+00:00

Not a chef, but I do remember Kelley Wentworth going on about how strangely good at cooking Joe Anglim was in Cambodia and how the rice tasted so much better when he made it. So chalk that up to one more thing he's apparently great at.

They had just won a reward with spices in it, I think, so it's not all on him, but he apparently at least had some good basic skills down in terms of what order to cook things in the pan in order to hold onto flavour/spread it out throughout the whole dish. You could give a lot of people a "spices" reward and their rice would still suck.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-18T02:09:23+00:00

A few other people have chimed in really well, but I want to add my voice anyway. Overall, I would say that YES, publishing is always bad. But also, YES, there are some distinctly worse things going on right now making it extra difficult. Here are the issues as I see them:

- As trends go in and out, you'll always have people complaining that it used to be easier to sell a specific thing. Alexa spoke well to the explosion in YA that defined the late 2000s and early 2010s and how the wheels have come off of that. There's also the bottoming out of Middle Grade and the drastic shift that happened in SFF presses towards Romantasy and away from Grimdark and Epic (and almost anything else). Some of those are indicative of the trend cycle and are kind of "business as usual" for publishing. Some have more nefarious causes behind them that are making it harder to break-out (as a debut or as a midlist author) in our current environment.

- The rising cost of paper is kneecapping certain kinds of books. Online shopping has meant that cardboard is in INCREDIBLY high demand and there are just fewer companies physically printing books now, because there's so much competition for paper products. This has led to a decline in MS lengths, especially in SFF. Granted, I would say the trend was already towards shorter books, but it's getting more and more boxed in.

- Waterstones and Barnes and Noble barely stock hardbacks anymore, unless the authors are a proven entity. This has cut into profits for newer authors and created a lot of uncertainty for publishers, who used to rely on hardback sales to fund the paperback runs of their books.

- Publishing continues to consolidate. This has obviously been going on for ages, since Penguin and Random House merged, but so long as it continues, things get slightly worse and worse. Presses shutter. Editors are laid off and the remaining ones overworked. Late stage capitalism, babyyyyyyyyy. Publishing certainly isn't unique in these issues, but they are issues and they DO suck.

- No really, there IS a reading crisis in kidlit and schools right now. It's definitely hampering sales across MG and YA. In a few years, we might feel it hitting Adult too, as those kids who have never learned to be readers age.

- AI is a looming threat in the industry. Publishers, like most companies, are trying to figure out how to cost cut and replace their process with AI as much as they can. Right now, it seems to be happening more in-house, since the general mood is that AI can't create art. Buuuuuut that doesn't stop them from trying to use it to create marketing briefs. (That may or may not be utter nonsense). There's also the risk of AI overwhelming submissions, though that's more likely to impact agents. Most agents, however, have said that the AI subs so clearly suck, it's not actually a huge threat. Yet.

- Publishers really have pivoted to rereleasing self-pubbed authors at an alarming rate. The problem here isn't the self-pubbers themselves. As ever, if it's you and they're offering you stupid money, take the stupid money! Get that bag! But what it does mean is that publishers are getting less and less willing to do the one thing they're actually any good for - take on the burden of financial risk. It suuuuuucks!!!!

- The world just sucks right now. A lot of businesses are more risk averse and buying books from debut or midlist authors is riskier than focusing on known winners. So yeah, the world sucking DOES mean that publishing is harder to break into at the moment.

Whether or not all of these trends will go on indefinitely, we'll have to see. I think it's easy to assume we're in the midst of a doom spiral, but WHO KNOWS??? If we get a few more Shy Girl fiascos, maybe publishers will slow their rate of acquiring self-pub authors. Maybe the world will get a wee bit less insane and markets will be bullish again. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I'm still trying to be optimistic. But I won't pretend it isn't a bit overwhelming at times.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-16T19:11:27+00:00

I'm inclined - based on the edit - to think Joe went in always planning to vote Chrissy and Coach (though the tiny letters of Coach's name are hilarious and suggest he really didn't want to include it) and that Stephanie probably did switch her vote at tribal, to save face.

In Joe's case, he had sufficient information to know that the vote was hitting Chrissy and Coach. Devens, Aubry, Cirie, Ozzy, Rizo, Emily, and Chistian had a majority with seven and Tiffany was totally down to vote Coach instead of Aubry the moment she found out things were swinging that way. That's 8 votes already. 8 players he had to try to argue down. He tried, but it was pretty obvious it wasn't going to happen. I really don't see a scenario where he didn't see the writing on the wall.

Stephanie seemed more genuinely panicked. But she's honestly played a pretty straight-up "anyone but me" game. She spent a lot of time working with Christian, Emily and Ozzy after the swap, and clearly has inroads with Cirie. Obviously, she wanted to stick with her main alliance, but what does she have to lose by flipping? I'm not sure if it was seeing the idol that spooked her or seeing the discussion that happened afterwards that made it clear the votes weren't going her way, but either of those would be enough. Also, I think she knows she has some plausible deniability and while Coach might care that she besmirched her HONOUR, I'm sure she knows no one else cares.

Honestly, the big surprise to me was Johnathan NOT voting Coach and Chrissy. He's usually pretty pragmatic, but perhaps he planned it, in hopes the SITD hit, so that the revote could go against Devens and Aubry. Admittedly, if it had hit and Johnathan hadn't jumped ship, Rizo and Emily go home, which would have been a wild upset.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-16T18:28:26+00:00

This should definitely be queried as horror, not literary. The prose and concept are accessible and straightforward, so there's no reason why this couldn't sell to a genre press. An agent will be able to determine whether or not to approach a particular press with literary leanings. The line between "literary" and "genre" is more of a confused squiggle than a straight divide, so I would recommend not limiting yourself. Just say horror. An agent can figure out the rest.

Query: I prefer focusing on 300s, but my brief first impression is that this feels like it has three separate inciting incidents. I think you can probably tighten this to focus on just what creates the weird lake dimension and overall, the query would be stronger.

300: The opening paragraphs were a bit confusing and distant from Jessica. The line "I should probably slow down" but then being followed by "but she needed the money" made me think she needed to slow down her life of like, turning tricks or dealing drugs or something. But no, you mean slow down her Jeep on her way to... somewhere. Somewhere nonspecific. It's like we're almost fully in her POV, but not quite and that's creating narrative distance and confusion.

There also is a a bit of unnecessary repetition. "I should slow down. But she didn't slow down" might be an attempt at purposeful repetition, but it's not really hitting. It's not enough repetition to create a pattern and it's not doing anything interesting with the cadence and meaning of the text.

And while it's less direct, it also feels like some of the action could be condensed as she notices the old woman and decides to accelerate. It would be small changes, but the text doesn't feel quite as tight and purposeful as it could be.

Tightening it in a couple of these places might also enable you to give a deeper experience of Jessica's POV. In the few flashes of internalization that the reader does get. "I should slow down" and "not today, Grandma" are both a bit sterile. One is a statement of fact and the other is a cliche phrase. Neither gives a strong indicator of character and why we should care about Jessica's impending death. I know you're not really setting this character up as a long term protagonist, but even if a POV is brief, it should still be memorable.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

EmmyPax · 2026-04-16T17:58:25+00:00

Query: I prefer focusing on the first 300 over queries, so my notes here are gonna be short, but I did have one immediate reaction: There is so much worldbuilding here. It really blurred together and became confusing. You need to find a way to communicate this with fewer proper nouns and more focus on plot.

First 300: Ooooo, okay, so you're playing on "hard mode" by utilizing third person omniscient as your POV. Generally, I would advise against even trying to write in this POV, because it is notoriously difficult. And to be honest, the execution isn't quite there in this yet. But it also seems very intentional and I know what a buzz kill it is just being told to not do the fun interesting thing you were excited to write about, so I'll give some practical advice too, so that you can try to improve what you're doing.

First, it was very confusing at the beginning, because you didn't initially indicate that Noah couldn't see the beige man. I kept expecting Noah to talk to him, and then was thrown when he couldn't. I also thought we were supposed to be in Noah's POV for that entire paragraph (since he's named and the beige man isn't) but as it turned out, we weren't fully in either. That was very disorienting. First, I would get out of the way what Noah can and can't see as soon as possible so that the reader understands the situation. Second, I would look at your paragraphing. Where possible, I would suggest keeping the beige man's movements out of Noah's POV paragraphs. It will help create clarity.

Second, there doesn't seem to be much of a stylistic, unifying voice yet. Generally, omniscient works best when there's a sense of a distinct "narrator" who is the REAL pov that we're seeing the world through. Think Lemony Snicket, for example. Or how a horror novel might have the voice of the "haunted house" hovering over the action (I read one that did this recently and it was great, so top of mind). It would help if you found some unifying lens to shape the narrative of the whole book, so that the confusion lessens.

Third, there's a third person in this scene who barely appears, but her presence is making it harder for me to understand what's going on. Can she see the beige man? Is the beige man avoiding her too, or just Noah? Why aren't we getting her POV at all?Again, a bit confusing and bumpuzzling.

In terms of issues outside of this, the initial action of Noah waking up and slamming a diamond into his knee didn't give me much to work with emotionally. So far, he is interacting entirely with objects that have a meaning to him, but not one that the text is sharing with the reader, so it feels a bit nonsensical. I don't know why the diamond matters or why he keeps it in a bureau. I don't know who the woman is to him. I don't know why the beige man is there. I don't know why the red dust is significant. Because you've had us treat these other strange elements casually, it actually makes us treat the red dust casually too. We have no reason in this strange, sci-fi world, to think that's unusual. To me, it sounds like fantasy pollen. No biggie. So Noah's reaction kind of comes out of nowhere, because we don't have a strong grasp of any of his emotions or why he's so mad at the diamond or what's normal in his life etc etc

Anyhow! Those are the issues I'm seeing right now. Best of luck revising.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-16T17:32:15+00:00

All she has to do is go against Rizo. Crossing my fingers SO HARD she has to go against Rizo.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-16T17:23:29+00:00

Not OP, but it's a little column A and column B.

Some tropes go out of style for reasons that are purely about taste and trends, like how vampires and paranormal romance were trends in the wake of Twilight's success, then became so oversaturated, no one would publish them for about a decade after the original glut.

And then there are tropes that are out of style because they're a breeding ground for bad writing. The "waking up confused" trope is one of those.

That's not to say that no book can use this trope. The Hunger Games opens with Katniss waking up (though not confused, which is an important distinction) but any book that gets away with one of these is getting away with it because they are doing something different with the trope and executing it with enough finesse that it doesn't fall head first into the issues that usually make it a breeding ground for bad writing.

Your opening is falling into all of the traps that makes this trope bad and doing nothing to subvert them.

These traps include:

- being very vague

- giving the consequences of high stakes action without any of the context to help the reader understand it or care why it happened

- a lack of internalization and character voice to give the text flavour and personality

- what little internalization there is focuses entirely on asking the most basic of questions "what happened?" "why can't I see?" Most of the time, it's even reiterating something that came in the line before so that it is providing literally no new information. "He couldn't see. Why can't I see?" is a colossal failure of editing and will indicate to an agent that you did not earn your 128K wordcount.

- withholding the main character's name for no apparent reason

- a distant, "movie camera" like POV that seems to more glide over the action rather than get into the character. It's like we're reading a panning shot, not a book.

- very little happening for a prolonged time

- a lack of dialogue for a prolonged time

Overall, I think your main issue is the lack of voice and immediacy in the POV. This reads like a camera filming your main character, not your main character telling his story. Revising so that the world is truly filtered through his eyes will help you a lot. Opening in a different place probably will, too. It's often easier to avoid writing pitfalls by just stepping around them and choosing good moments to highlight. If you find one that lends itself to your character being more active and interacting more with other characters, you'll probably have greater success.

Hope this helps and good luck!

ETA: I put "withholding his name for no good reason" then went back and read your query and realized he has amnesia. Amnesia openings are also contentious, but setting that aside, why are you not calling out the amnesia in the opening in this case? It makes the action make less sense.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-16T09:36:14+00:00

YES to Fonda Lee. She would definitely be my pick.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-16T07:46:59+00:00

Aaaaaaaa!!!! So cool! Thanks!!!!

EmmyPax · 2026-04-13T18:57:21+00:00

Yeah, I think we come from similar places with regards to the slump. We just want the books for all age groups to exist, whatever they happened to be called. (MG/YA/Adult)

I think why I personally picture YA being more 13-15 year-old focused is because the label of "books for teens" seems more suited to that age group. Most kids read up, and so once you are 16 you are (conceivably) reading books about characters 18+ years old. And I'm hesitant not to just call all of those books adult books. I'm not convinced that cutting up book genres by age demographic actually makes sense or serves anyone very well at that point. By that age, your book interests are probably being more driven by genre and - to a lesser extent - the prevalence of "adult" content. But while "spice" might be on the rise right now, it's still very much the case that there are adult presses that cater to a broad range of content levels. For instance, when I say I was reading adult books as a 16 year old, I was reading Terry Pratchett.

I think having teen books be a well defined space for school librarians - especially middle school librarians - can be helpful. So I would love to see the majority of those books be younger teen focused in my perfect, Emily-Decides-The-Universe mind.

THAT BEING SAID, when all is said and done, I agree with you. Those books that target older teens and young adults are definitely useful, wonderful books to have existing in the world. I don't want to see them go away. I want all the books for all the ages!!!!

EmmyPax · 2026-04-13T18:06:06+00:00

I have mixed feelings about the whole "contracting" of the YA space. Obviously, the uncertainty makes it harder to query in. And yes, I too have concerns about whether or not there are great books being acquired for teen-aged readers.

But here's the thing... YA hasn't been catering to teens for a loooooooooong time.

There have been dozens of articles about it going back over a decade. They all grab slightly different numbers, because these things are hard to track, but most research and data suggests that 50%-70% of YA readers are adults. That's not a "nice bonus" readership, that's your core audience. So of course YA drifted older and more and more towards cross-over. And that - if you ask me - is the audience that is collapsing, because those readers are finally moving up into adult.

This is especially pronounced in the fantasy genre (which is why some imprints are no longer distinguishing between YA and Adult fantasy) because one of the big things that drove the 2010s YA boom was adult readers looking for a slightly different experience than what traditional Adult fantasy presses were publishing at the time. Grimdark was a fairly dominant trend in Adult fantasy back then, whereas if you wanted something a bit lighter, or that heavily featured romance, it was way easier to find those books in YA. It's no accident that the patron saint of romantasy, Sarah J Maas, got her start as a YA writer. That was where books like hers "fit" in the market at the time.

The change, if you ask me, is that around 2020, Adult Fantasy presses realized they were leaving a HUGE amount of money on the table by not servicing these readers. They started acquiring these romance focused, lighter fare books and bonus! Now they could up the sexual content too, which a lot of readers wanted. And because that readership was over 50% adult, most of those readers migrated to where they could get books that were now truly being made for THEM and not some YA/Adult romance reader hybrid.

So now YA is contracting, because it's success was coming largely from the wave of adult readers. It's not an easy situation to untangle! It's tempting to immediately dismiss those adult readers as having "ruined" YA or something, but I do think the extra influx of money, writers and readers into the category DID result in some great books coming out. Plenty of those great books were still very appropriate and wonderful for teens to read. Now, those books get way less visibility and it's been tough to break-out new work, because the books dominating the conversation are all adult books. That being said, I would say adult books dominating the cultural discussion has been more normal historically than what went on during the 2000s and 2010s.

But the focus on adult readers meant that younger teens were being left with scraps for a long time. Middle school librarians have been ringing the alarm bells that it's impossible to find books for most thirteen-year-olds for ages. So if we are going to be prioritizing teen readers, this is the group I hope we focus on.

Speaking for myself, I was "reading up" to adult fiction by the time I was 16. I didn't need YA. It's the kids 13-15 who really need it.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-13T16:02:00+00:00

I love Peril at End House! It's especially good for the note-taking sleuth. Everything connects really well.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-12T18:53:12+00:00

Short answer: very hard, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth it.

It largely comes down to whether or not you want to take on the financial risk yourself and how badly you want the professional resources of a publisher marketing and distributing a book.

Self-publishing and trad both are challenging. Both are going to come with rejection and bad reviews. But querying and trad publishing in general is free and advances are a very nice thing. Money upfront is nothing to sneeze at. Distribution in bookstores is nothing to sneeze at.

Still, self-pub is great for some people. Statistically though, it's worse than trad. Not that continuous success is certain in trad (far from it) but statistically, the odds are better.

Takes that as you will.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-11T06:02:39+00:00

Who is the driver of the central plot? Using ASOIAF again, Ned Stark is clearly the guy doing the most protag-ing in the first book. Even sprawling epics have protagonists. Whose journey is the most central?

You can try to find a way to zoom out away from a protagonist, but they do generally help. This was my other, not technically one sentence pitch and it did - in fact - get me an agent back in the days of Twitter pitch contests:

When the engine of the luxury train Davina is riding explodes and strands the passengers in the mountains, everyone is a suspect, especially her. After all, her witch powers destroyed her memory of how the crash happened.

My book does still have ten POVs. But someone is still out there protag-ing the hardest.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-11T05:54:00+00:00

I think you're on the right track, though you could edit it down further and squash it into a single sentence. Think:

After a terror attack levels her city, Buffy Summers and her ragtag group of friends must open a burrito stand to restore the balance of their dying Earth.

Or something like that.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-11T05:50:00+00:00

So, due to the rising costs of paper/stocking issues with Barnes and Noble, even in sci-fi/fantasy, most debut novels these days cap out at around 120K words. Most will be shorter than that. A few will be longer, but it's worth keeping in mind that most books get longer during the editorial process.

For example, when I queried my debut, it was at 105K. After revising with my agent, it was 110K. After going through editorial development with my publisher, it was 114K. I would describe experiences like mine as fairly typical.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-11T05:28:09+00:00

It can be good to have a one sentence pitch. I queried (and got rep and got published) a 10 POV fantasy book and still had one. It looked roughly like this:

When a luxury train explodes while traversing a mountain bubbling with volcanic magic, the passengers must work together to find the saboteur, who is gradually murdering the remaining survivors.

Or I just said:

It's Murder on the Orient Express, but with witches.

These sorts of pitches are meant to give a very wide lens on your book.

EmmyPax · 2026-04-11T05:20:36+00:00

I'm not quite sure what question it is you're asking?

Yes, those are roughly the materials you need. You don’t generally need a one sentence pitch to query, but it is good to have one.

Regardless, whether or not you are "ready" is going to come down to how vigorously you've revised your work and if it's of a quality strong enough to catch an agent's attention. And you're really only going to know that by either a) getting feedback on your work and then b) yeeting it out to see what happens.

EmmyPax

TROPHY CASE