Recent content by Azul-din

My bad. You are quite correct. In mitigation. let me say that I grew up in the 40's and 50's, when gender branded clothing was like holy writ. There was one boy in my senior year who dressed in tight trousers, pink shirts and ballet slippers and the comment on his yearbook picture said, 'the man...

Chacun a' son gout. Great photo, tho'

Right! As Diana Gabaldin pointed out in the 'Outlander' series, 'women's work' in the eighteenth century was really HARD work, and the wearing of corsets, for example, was intended to support the lower back, not to restrict the breathing to the point of apoplexy.

Everything one writes is a statement of one's own belief's and prejudices. Unless one is so wedded to the attitudes of society as a whole that one finds oneself unable to hold an individual belief or prejudice.

Apologies: in the course of a long life and no one has ever been able to shut me up.

Joan was burned alive (well, the 'alive' part was because the English had built the bonfire too high for the executioner to strangle her first which was usual practice except for cases of witchcraft or treason) after being convicted of leading the French Army to victory against the English...

Um...define what you mean by 'dressing as men? ' What men? You mean dressing to deceive, to impersonate? Surely that depends wholly on what era you are writing in or imagining. Bradamante in 'Orlando Furioso' dressed as an armoured knight because she was a warrior and petticoats would have...

Oh really? How does it feel to be an Orc? What is a dragon thinking about when he eats the Princess? What does it feel like to be born out of an egg? Can you imagine what it would be like to be turned into an owl? I don't mean just physically, what about the change in the nature of...

It's easy to describe what a non-human character says and does, but thoughts and perceptions are another matter. How do they see the world? What do they think of, say, human civilization and motivations? Suppose they have a tail- how do they feel about it? What would it be like to have a...

Ah, the automatic lubricity of youth. I meant casting a spell or being under one.

I suppose it's a question of whether you see the Lady as doing or done by

It is, admittedly, a balancing act when you try to construct a totally alien world. My present project started out as a short story and expanding it into a novel meant solving all sorts of problems as well as creating new ones. For example, I mentioned at one point that my imaginary kingdom had...

Blame it on a classical education which gives me the power to bore the pants off anyone.

Not forgetting strophe, antistrophe and epode- elements of Greek classical Ode.. Sort of like statement, counter-statement and resolution. LOTR is a good modern example in literature.

I think it is more iconic than literary. I don't know why, but artists are advised to have an odd number of figures in their paintings. ex. 3-5- 7. Very often Folktales involve an odd number of MC's - c'mon, seven dwarfs? Sam, Frodo and Gollum? Nine Ringwraiths? And yes, the Trinity...perhaps it...