Recent content by Zophos

Completely agree. I never have much of a problem with this since I'm actually one of those weirdos who doesn't really like very many books I read IN the genre. Way too much to explain without departing completely from the topic, but at bottom, I either don't find it interesting, find it...

Thanks, archived.

Couple of questions: 1) Does your character know infection well enough to know that he needs to cut off his own foot? That's a pretty drastic step even for modern thinkers who know much more about infection than those in times past. 2) Is your character in danger of becoming septic or are his...

First off, I'm non-religious, so feel free to completely disregard my opinion, but: I think this very topic is addressed in the Bible. In Corinthians, Paul talks about not eating meat if it causes his brother to stumble. That draws, likely indirectly, but in a similar enough fashion that is...

Except for the scars one accumulates from dangerous behavior, of course. Funny, I wrote a short about a cult that worshipped a god whose name roughly translated to suicide in the human tongue; it was a godslayer.

As stated above, the denser organs such as liver, kidneys, heart are quite edible and quite nutricious. Meat can be dried in the sun, as well. Inuits made great use of the long days to cure meat in the sun. Don't necessarily need a fire, but the purpose of smoking is to keep the bugs away and...

I suddenly have the urge to rewrite Thomas Paine's Common Sense replacing government with big business.

You run the risk of opening Pandora's box if you start getting too far into the weeds on answering specifically what commodities are available. For example, if you just took Medieval England as an example things like tomatoes, potatoes, hops (think ale v. beer), rabbits (up until the 12th...

Agree. Despise them and won't buy their stuff.

I absolutely think there are times you should leave things out. Not only as an element of mystery, but also as an actual plot device. Par Lagerkvist's Barabbas comes to mind as a supreme example of not tipping your hand to the reader. He leaves out his own beliefs and any in-situ description of...

That's the beauty of the Angel of Death. She doesn't have to (or perhaps have the faculties to) know what he does for a living. She's just a side job. There's also the whole role reversal thing for his character. Milton expands beautifully on the fact that Angels aren't good or bad, they are...

I like where you are going with your story's development, BTW. Read a bit of it down in the Showcase or wherever you had it posted and I've been following your open development in other threads. Really digging the deaf character.

Use Azariel, the angel of death. Lot's of good connections with your deaf character. In some traditions Azariel never speaks. He writes your name when you are born and blights it out when you are gone. Excellent complexity of characterization with him being the Angel of Death and serving as a...

That's why I generally start with the one star reviews and work my way up. It's fairly evident that many of the 5-star reviews are shills. Honestly, who would take the time to write a 500 word essay on how great a book was, even if it was a very good book? I don't put a great deal of credence...

I don't use orcs. Do use elves, dwarves and gnomes. Also use the fay, which are nothing like hobbits, halflings or kender except for their diminuative size. Never written anything of any length on gnomes and they are the rarest of the races (because the rest of the world tried to stamp them...