You can keep your Excaliburs, your Brisingrs, your Glamdrings, and, yes, your lightsabers. I need a weapon that’s going to put some hair on my chest, allow me to converse with bears, send a wet streak down my foe’s leg, and, well, practically speaking, take out that knight in full plate and chain. Ladies and … Read more
This article is by A.L.S. Vossler. Recently, I took up the hobby of soaping, which, as you might guess, is making soap. There are three ways of making soap: hand-milled, cold process, and hot process. Hand-milled, which is also known as melt-and-pour, basically involves taking a soap base which someone else has already prepared, and … Read more
This article is by Julian Saheed. There is a reason we all leave space for acknowledgments in the first few pages of our books. Though our names appear on the front covers as the architects of the story, there are those who check to make sure the final product is what people want. Those whose … Read more
If you’ve done National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) you know there sometimes comes a point when you think, “Why in the hell am I doing this?” This is a normal feeling albeit a demoralizing one. You’ve been tap-tapping away when suddenly the juice runs out, the muse falls off her glittery pegasus, or writer’s block … Read more
Surprising a reader requires that an author think differently from others. As I mentioned in my previous article, being creative means finding new material to trigger ideas in your mind, or digging deeper for ideas in the material you have. But when I showed my post to my wife, she referred to it as the … Read more