Recent content by vaiyt

I'm reminded of Asimov's Nightfall, which comes with a foreword noting that the novel calls everything by Earth terms so as to not distract the reader with unnecessary exoticism.

1st person POV is best when the POV character can spin a decent yarn themself. Someone with personality, a view of the world that's worth delving into or at least an entertaining voice. That's my opinion at least. You can also use 1st person POV to hide information from the reader, but 3rd...

I love dragons, so they're a big part of any fantasy setting I work on. That also brings a problem: I want dragons to be awe-inspiring, powerful creatures that dominate the situation whenever they appear, but I also want to be able to work on many variations of them without making them too...

I find it funny that many superheroes feel more wizard-y than actual wizards in many fantasy books. Magneto and The Flash being prime examples.

Mine was done by splicing real world landmasses together, using progressively smaller shapes to create the details.

This is not even close to how the map's going to look by the time it's done, but you can see the shape of continents and the placement of mountains.

Depends a lot. I have two main settings I work with: one that has over a dozen different sentient species, and one where everyone is basically humans with funny colored skin and pointy ears. I'm going to echo Drakevarg in that whenever I think of adding any new species to the first one, I stop...

Classic Greek tragedy is strictly logical: the characters' flaws and dispositions are set up in such a way that it makes the bad ending all but inevitable, much like a train collision.

If I put my writing down, I'm pretty much used to using human because why not. "Men" feels weird, like trying to rip off Tolkien's purposefully archaic style and falling flat. Not using it also has the benefit of freeing the word for males of every similar-enough-to-human species, avoiding...

I really like the show. It looks like the kind of thing I'd have a blast working on. The atmosphere and designs feel so fresh and new even though they're just slight twists on things we've seen before.

When depravity and violence are the object of your story (or that specific part of your story), by all means go overboard. There are plenty of meaningful stories that explore how low humans will go. Just remember that violence polarizes, negatively and positively. You have to think not only...

I don't think it's a good idea. It is the worst of both worlds, having the unfamiliarity (for Americans) of the metric system with the uneven divisions of the imperial system. The imperial system, like the Fahrenheit temperature scale, have one advantage that they're an easy to grasp way to...

I totally should have put this in the brainstorming forum ):

The Harry Potter books are framed like mystery novels, and that's where they take the third person non-omniscient POV from. JKR wanted to omit the full truth until the reveal, but first person narration would already prime the reader to expect an incomplete and partisan narrative. She explicitly...

Calendars are one of these things that are complicated to add in a novel. They are pretty much required for a fully fledged world because there's no way a fantasy world even slightly different from ours would end up with something identical to the kludge that is the Gregorian/Julian calendar. On...