I have been writing a swords & sorcery story.

For much of my adult life, I would have said swords & sorcery was a guilty pleasure, the adolescent male libido-fueled stuff of Conan the Barbarian and Frank Frazetta chainmail bikini posters.

But I’m learning to give up on needless guilt. Early in my friendship with Carlyn, I said some music I was listening to (I don’t remember what) was a guilty pleasure of mine. She replied “I intend not to feel guilty about my pleasures.” It was about the wisest thing I had ever heard anyone say. Reader, I married her for that reason as much as for any other.

So, swords & sorcery–morally complicated pulp fantasy. Less heroic, more hard boiled. Lots of fragments, at least the way I’m writing it. The city where my story is set, Kyrenaikos, is as noir a place as Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, Raymond Chandler’s LA, or Adventure Time‘s City of Thieves.

I’m learning, too, to feel comfortable with pulp fantasy’s one sentence paragraphs, bane of my career as an English teacher.

And my story is definitely post-Conan: the protagonist is nonbinary, and the main badass is three and a half feet tall. I’m trying to draw more on the weirdness of Michael Moorcock’s Elric and the sass of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, leavened with my classic Pitkin open endings and wry asides.

It’s also a classic Pitkin career move for me. Swords & sorcery is one of the least popular subgenres of fantasy today. Today all the buzz is around romantasy (think Sarah Maas), cozy fantasy (think Legends and Lattes), LitRPG (e.g. Dungeon Crawler Carl), and the Critical Role Industrial Complex. I definitely know how to spend dozens of hours writing something the market never asked for.

But I believe swords and sorcery is the right subgenre for the Trump years. Not just because of the noir qualities of the moment, the chaos and corruption and amorality and incompetence of the times (though for those reasons, too). Not just because Elon Musk seems almost literally to be an evil sorcerer of overwhelming power. But even more, I want to exhort readers, or maybe just myself, to (in the words of an old bumper sticker) remember who I wanted to be.

Swords & sorcery, like its sister subgenre hard boiled detective fiction, follows flawed people in corrupt situations who have a tough job to do. The protagonists of these stories may be conflicted; their motives may be impure, even mercenary at first. But they always seem to find that their moral universe cannot simply be handwaved away. The protagonists of swords and sorcery may be immoralists, but they are not amoral.

I am (like many of you) a lackluster moral example, certainly not the kind of person you’d want to rely on to restore the American republic. But we’re all we’ve got. So I teach community college by day, volunteer for Indivisible on the weekends, and write about more or less good people fighting to keep their moral compass under impossible circumstances.

And even if swords & sorcery wasn’t the right genre for this cataclysmic, corrupt moment in American history, I’m having more fun writing this story than I’ve had in a long time. I commit to taking my joys where I can find them today.