The Land of Bad Fantasy

A fantasy parody for children published in 2006 by Omnibus Books in Australia and New Zealand. Two sequels were planned, and one written, but neither one was ever published.

Characters

Ana Beachcombe

Clemence Sunfeather

Foskett McFang

Egbert the Troll

Andru Mule

Trivia

-The original title was Spouff - pronounced "spoof". It was changed because a) It made no sense, and b) "Spoof" is a slang word for... uh... something grubby. Since I wrote it at 17 and was pretty naive, I had never heard of it until my editor told me

-I used to picture Ana Beachcombe as looking like a young Lindsay Lohan (as she was at the time)

-The book was inspired by a visit to a cheapo shop (for Americans, that would be a "dollar store"), where I saw a tacky resin model of a wizard and a unicorn, which was covered in fake glitter. I found myself wondering who they were and where they had come from, and decided that it must have been a very cheap and tacky sort of world

-In the first version of the book, the protagonists were Wingecombe the wizard and Synnic the unicorn, and Ana Beachcombe (then called Anna) came from our own world. I abandoned that version pretty quickly, largely because Anna wasn't interesting enough. Wingecombe ultimately has a very small role in the final book, and Synnic doesn't appear at all (though she does have a part in the unpublished sequel)

-The sequel was titled Return to the Land of Bad Fantasy, and the unwritten second sequel would have been called Son of the Land of Bad Fantasy

-Foskett the monster was named after a well respected conductor named Toby Foskett, who I met as a teenager, and who once scared the pants off me, though not on purpose

-Egbert the troll was largely based on my paternal grandfather, K.J.Taylor senior, who was often known to call things "remarkable"

-Son of the Land of Bad Fantasy would have featured a war, in which Ana and her friends have to defend Syndup from another interdimensional traveller from her world - a nasty popular girl with the surname of Starpax

-I never intended to even try and publish the book, and only wrote it for fun. But after I read it aloud to some friends during a camping trip, they encouraged me to send it out to publishers

-Though the sequels never saw the light of day, Ana has since made cameo appearances in several of my other books. Since she is an interdimensional traveller, it made sense that she would be able to enter other fictional worlds, and her storyline has continued in the background of other characters' stories