Recent content by Abomination

You have two different questions: 1. Do talking animals change the nature of a story? and 2. Do you think that a fantasy novel today can include talking animals as characters, and still be taken seriously as a "grown up" novel? For both my answer is yes. To answer the first question, I...

Good point. Swear words are like any other invented linguistic element--whole languages, funky names, unrecognizable thing-names etc. They get in the reader's way unless they are used sparingly. So yeah my characters swear. And they swear in English. I have no ethical problem with...

Yeah, I was just thinking that. You see it with movie ratings too--sex (and even just nudity) gets a worse rating than graphic violence. Shows you where our values are... I can't read the article, but this sounds bad. Especially if she used a pen name, was private about her identity, and...

NaNoWriMo--woot!

Get your letter ripped to shreds in Absolute Write'sQuery Letter Hell!!! AW's a really harsh place. You'll get a lot professional, unprofessional, helpful, unhelpful and very, very raw advice. No one sugar coats everything over there. You don't have to take all the advice of course, but...

Lol @ the pun. Unfortunately, I think fantasy might be rolling its way out of the sword-and-sorcery rut only to fall into a new (and, IMO, even bigger) ditch with the paranormal/urban fantasy. Now we have the choice of: gifted farm boy/lost king saves the medieval peasant village OR...

I'd read that. I think it's the problem of trends. Trends catch on--the medieval, the mysteriously gifted farm boy, the returning king, and of course there has to be a castle--and they tend to stick for a while. You see it in romance, thrillers, sci-fi--you name it. They've all got...

Duotrope's Digest

It's not just you. Dark themes are really common in fanfiction, much more common, I think, than they are in published books. Not saying there aren't really dark books out there, but fanfiction takes despair, pain, grief etc. to much deeper levels than most original fiction. I think it's a...

Been thinking about it. Never written a script before. I am, however, currently working on a story all in dialogue (not trying to be meta or anything, just working on my dialogue writing skills,) It's gotten me thinking about script-writing, so I may give it a whirl. I totally bombed at...

Addendum: I think the pacing is one of the major things that draws me to the show. It seems to me that many of the shows I've watched recently have adopted the Soap Opera style of pacing where they draw everything out, in an attempt to create suspense but then fail miserably. (To of the...

Embarrassingly, yes. However, though I started watching it because I ran out of other stuff to watch, I continued watching because I came to believe--and I assume you all understand the weight of this--it's the best Vampire story (TV, movie...) since Buffy. The first half of S1 is pretty...

Ah, Lord of the Rings...I could also go on forever about it...but I wont...I'll try First of all, let me say that I actually love watching the movies. They seem to capture the feeling of the books in many places, and I don't mind all the inaccuracies. That being said... 1. Having elves at...

Two points here: 1. I think a very good writer will use words so judiciously that they can paint a full picture even in a short story. To be honest, most of the short fiction I read is sci-fi or borderline, which is odd, because most of the novels I read are fantasy...wonder if there's...

Really? I've mostly heard the opposite. But you know, ask 10 writers and you'll get 11 answers... Why build a house when you could build a skyscraper? Why build a skyscraper when you could build a house? Short stories are the zoomed in inset detail. Novels are the whole image. Short...