WARNING: RANT AHEAD
If you genuinely enjoy reading fantasy—if you delight in the works of Homer, Burroughs, Tolkien, Sanderson, Rothfuss, or any author who dabbles in speculative storytelling, you owe it to yourself to pick up the books in the Aenya Series. But if you’re looking to satisfy some voyeuristic urge or wish to justify your nudist/naturist inclinations, then sorry, I AM NOT your guy!
OK, I admit, Xandr and Thelana (below) rarely ever wear clothes, barring even the minimal loincloth sported by Conan and Red Sonja. So, like Heracles, Perseus, Theseus, and every other Greek hero in the Louvre; like Michelangelo’s David; and John Carter and Dejah Thorah from Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars series; my heroes are essentially nudists.
In the process of creating Aenya, I have drawn much inspiration from my nudist lifestyle. But calling the Aenya Saga a series about nudity is like calling Game of Thrones (properly, A Song of Ice and Fire) a series about incest. I devote perhaps 2% to 5% of my work to the promotion of natural nudity and the lack of shame among the primitive people in my books, whom I call the Ilmar. At the same time, the rest of the series deals with murderous creatures rising from the Sea, bird people judging humanity for its warlike transgressions, or time-traveling historians recording the enslavement of humanity by snake men (and if none of that appeals to you, don’t buy the books!). There is so much HISTORY AND LORE devoted to AENYA, so many races, cultures, creatures, and exotic locales that have NOTHING to do with nudity, that to focus on just this one aspect of the story is to severely diminish the twenty years I have dedicated to its creation.
So why am I raising such a big stink about this now? Take a look at this:
The only books selling these days are Ages of Aenya and The Feral Girl. I so rarely get paid for the second in the series, The Princess of Aenya, you’d think it doesn’t exist, that I never even wrote the damn thing. And the sad thing is, The Princess of Aenya is the ONLY one of my novels to be critically acclaimed. The good folks at Kirkus, the most prestigious literary magazine since the 1930s, gave it nothing but praise, while IndieReader ranks it among their all-time best, a 4.7 out of 5, calling it, and I quote, “Not just a great indie book, but a great book, period.” It has been compared to some of the greatest fantasy literature by readers, particularly The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, a classic found in Barnes & Noble’s must-read section. Hell, The Princess of Aenya brought a few of my readers to tears, and if I am to be perfectly honest, it’s the story I am most proud to have written.
AND NOBODY IS READING IT!!!
So, what exactly is going on here? I suspect it has something to do with the book’s lack of T&A. My fans really, really like nudity, apparently, and having fallen under the naturist label, potential readers perusing Amazon’s “look inside” feature expect some measure of boobage, sex, or other forms of titillation. Finding nothing to tickle their fancy, they are quick to dismiss it. See, I may have screwed my writing career by coming out as a nudist, despite every how-to book and college professor impressing upon me the same adages: write what you know, be unique, and express your passions. To my young and ignorant mind, nudism fits these criteria to a T. As far as I knew, nobody in the genre was writing from such a perspective, and I seemed uniquely qualified to introduce an original worldview to the reading masses. Of course, this was all before the dreaded algorithm existed, before Google and Amazon shoved the whole of the art community into neat little categories so that anything naked adjacent got mixed in with porn/erotica, no matter the author’s intentions. Nuance cannot exist within the algorithm, which is why, if Nobokov were to write Lolita today, I do not doubt Amazon would throw his book onto the pedophile pile, and Nobokov would be spending the remainder of his days having to explain why his book is actually ANTI-pedophilia.
It might also be that nudism as a philosophy has yet to be understood. Being a gay man, fantasy author T.J. Klune openly endorses LGBTQ rights in his work, yet Barnes & Noble arranges his titles firmly among the fantasy genre, and nowhere near the Gay and Lesbian section. Admittedly, my books promote a naturist perspective, and I do not shy away from that fact, but The Princess of Aenya was meant to explore other themes dear to my heart, like empathy, tyranny, redemption, and environmentalism. Still, despite my best efforts, Amazon continues directing the wrong crowds to my work. The Princess of Aenya is a fairytale adventure inspired by The Neverending Story, The Last Unicorn, and Watership Down. Yet, the algorithm compares it to—I kid you not—“History of Nudism in America,” complete with a fully naked couple on the cover sitting with their bare butts on the couch.
Michelangelo didn’t have to put up with this shit, did he?
Peter S. Beagle’s masterpiece, The Last Unicorn, so influenced me that I named the unicorn in the story Amalthea. Still, the only content the algorithm links to my decades-long labor of love are smutty pamphlets featuring poorly photoshopped, half-naked models. When I started writing about my skyclad heroes half a lifetime ago, I never suspected how damaging it would become to my career. I never imagined my readers focusing so heavily on this single aspect of the story to the detriment of everything else on the page. AENYA is as wide and diverse as Middle Earth or Westeros. It is home to a host of races and cultures, including amphibious merquid, winged avians, cave-dwelling bogrens, conquering Hedonians, enigmatic Tyrnaeleans, nomadic Shemirans … the list goes on. Yet, the only goddamn thing anyone seems to notice is the small naked tribe occupying the Braid River Valley. This wouldn’t bother me so much if the nudist ethos were treated with a modicum of respect, but as it stands, wearing the nudist label as a writer is tantamount to quitting your acting career for OnlyFans. Ironically, Thelana is dismissed by serious fans of fantasy in the same way she is treated like a social leper and outcast by the civilized people of Aenya. This is why, in part, I have devoted myself to more PG-friendly heroines, like Radia and Lilliea, except my female protagonists are also being dismissed by fans expecting a strip show.
If you are interested in AENYA and care about its history and characters, you are seriously missing out if you haven’t picked up The Princess of Aenya. It is a vital piece of the saga, a story I have been constructing for over two decades, and it is the precursor to my upcoming young adult epic, The Magiq of Aenya. But don’t buy it expecting T&A. Don’t buy it for the love of skin, or because you enjoy skinny dipping, because you won’t find much of that in there . . . only fantastical worlds, time-tripping unicorns, and princesses who just might be a little magical.
OK. Rant over.
The Art of Storytelling 
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