Recent content by Captain Loye

I'm on my phone so please excuse any mistakes! I don't know much about medicine but I studied viruses and evolution so I can tell you a little about that. Viruses are technically alive (though debatable) and have co-evolved with their hosts. A virus normally acts like the cold sore virus - sits...

Perhaps you could look at it a different way. Firstly, are your gods actually interacting with the story, or are they there are justification for the actions of your characters? If they're just part of your world-building and as a way to differentiate your two societies, you could think about...

Hey, Incan's were totally using terrace farming technique up in the Andes, which is pretty cold! They had a really good knowledge of how different arrangements of terraces (eg, height, depth, slope, wind-breaking walls) could create microclimatic conditions. They used these to create conditions...

The comments above are pretty much on the mark - changes to biological systems generally happen over millions to tens of millions of years. Geological changes like mountain formation and continental drift are more like hundreds of millions of years. Today our world is cooler and drier than most...

I agree that you can do whatever you want with the 'classical' races, but I think if you're going to change them too much you might be better off renaming them entirely. Like it or not, when you say 'dwarf', people get a certain expectation. If your dwarf is winged and hairless, that's fine, but...

I can't remember specifically, but I think that he went mad because magic in Brittania started to get all screwy and all the mages went a bit crazy! But that game had a reagent-based magic that was pretty cool - there was no way to case Armageddon without access to rare black pearls, for...

Just took a gander through my WIP, didn't realise how many times 'was' and 'had' slipped in there. I'd known about avoiding passive voice, but I think I slip into it from the formal writing style I read during the day, which is full of passive voice. This is something to keep in mind when I'm...

This. Alligators and crocodiles are probably the modern animal that is most similar to old-fashioned dinosaurs, despite birds technically being dinosaurs. I agree that it's not necessarily important to understand what it tastes like if the characters are used to eating it, but it might be...

I wouldn't say it's an anchor, but it's definitely something I keep in mind. I hate myself for sharing some characteristics with the 'hipster' movement, but I do dislike being associated with popular things - I blame it on youth culture. That bleeds over into my writing. I don't check out other...

I'm about to hand in my post-graduate dissertation in plant ecology, and I can tell you, sometimes there's more art than science in science too :P! I liked this article, it is certainly food for thought. I'm still not sure what approach works for me. So far in my writing I've been mostly...

Thanks for the warm welcome everyone. I'll be sure to do my best to make up for lost time on the forum! Ps, Shetland ponies rock. They're definitely in my top five horse-like species.

Hi everybody I've been lurking on this website for probably two years or so, silently sipping from your fountain of knowledge. I don't know why I never registered and joined in, but I've decided that I should probably at least sign up to say a big thank you to the community. Hopefully now...