Recent content by Sean Cunningham

I read a fantasy novel years ago (my copy is in Australia and I'm in London, so I can't check the title) that was set entirely within a rural valley. The writer made me care about the people there and built the threat credibly, so I was invested in their survival. No royalty involved. Terry...

Nuclear winter is definitely the place to begin your research. On the subject of cancers, I know humans get a lot, and so do most vertebrates, but I vaguely recall reading that certain phyla are much less susceptible to it. The context was, "these vertebrates, who have different numbers of neck...

Portal fantasy, perhaps? That's what Narnia-style go through the wardrobe to another world fantasy is sometimes called.

Stephen King's On Writing will teach you some basic things that will make a big difference to your writing.

That's a good one to think about, isn't it?

As I recall, around Napoleon's time officers joined the army by buying their commission, and left the army by selling it. There was a period in English history in which commoners were expected to keep up their skills with the bow, so they would be useful if called up by their feudal lord. (Sorry...

You can come at it from a bromance angle. In the Lethal Weapon movies, Murtaugh shoots a kid he knows. Riggs finds him a drunken mess on his boat and helps him pull together. When Murtaugh is considering retiring, Riggs points out that he'll be losing out too, because Murtaugh's family has all...

I hear James Patterson's chapters are tiny: 2-3 pages each. Given that he writes thrillers, I assume this must be one of his pacing tricks, the result of which seems to be that people say they get dragged through his novels at breakneck speed.

There wouldn't happen to be lots of dry vines and underbrush around this ruined tower, would there? So the stones don't burn, but the dead ivy might?

You can get a bit chicken and egg with this. You get to the final act and think, "Oh, is that why I put that random thing in Act 1?" Or you can put your characters in a jam and think, "Okay, what have I given them that might get them out of this one?" I think an intuitive grasp of...

I downloaded the sample when it first came out and read a couple of interviews he gave. My perception was that the book was slanted towards non-fiction writing. Did you find that to be the case, or did you find it highly relevant to fiction writers as well?

Ah, Transformers. I became a fan of giant transforming robots at a young and impressionable age and never recovered. You've got a nice spread of personalities with the sub-units, which is definitely a good idea and the way to go about it. I quite like the idea of Arsenal travelling along in...

Is the differences in advancement down to the availability of resources? Humans used up the natural resources first to build their technological marvels. Elves came next and finding humans had left them little, they turned to magic for progress. And so on in that fashion.

In what sense does the god fall to evil?

20-25 cents is the whole range? Whether the book is selling for $2.99 or $9.99? So anything from 12%-35%-ish, for the range I used? Cover price or after the distributor takes their cut?