Recent content by George Lightgood

Bravo Skip, well thought out posts! I am a major Ian Fleming fan. I look at him similarly to Tolkien in the sense that both were from similar time periods and backgrounds and their stories are more raw and "darker" than one might think.

To say I have a 'go to' narrative is misleading in that it suggests I am an experienced writer. Yes, I have written much drivel over the years, but only recently have I been bitten by the bug to write a complete book (or more) for public consumption. And I am completely unpublished regardless of...

This is just my opinion, obviously, but I think it can easily be done if you tell the truth, even if it is a fictionalized version of it. There were a great many subtext causes of WW2 and it is not nearly so cut and dried as the one-dimensional, sanitized version commonly vomited around. By the...

This (Penpal's) literally could have been my post as I wrote it, so I second it. Hopefully you get some feedback that is useful for you Tom.

Bravo! Now we are cooking with gas. Thank you, both of you, for the time you took to reply in depth. There are a couple on your list that, in hindsight, should have been obvious (i.e. philosophy). As for your wisdom comment, true that. Woo Hoo, I appreciate the heads up on those sites. Very...

Believe it or not, Antarctica is a desert receiving about the same amount of precipitation as the area around Phoenix, Arizona. Maybe six to eight inches total and most of that is by the coast. Do some research to confirm, but cold dry desert ought to be met here easy peasy!. If that is too...

Ah, thank you for that suggestion, Logos. I should have clarified. It is not superpowers or anything like that. It would be thirteen disciplines in life that might be valued by a long-lived, advanced culture. For example, I had Empathy as one. Wisdom as another. Healing was one, also...

Anybody have any suggestions for thirteen disciplines in which my fantasy race would train? At first, I thought of listing the ones I came up with, but then it seemed that letting the cumulative brain power of Mythic Scribes 'have at it' was better. In summary, my Fantasy race requires that...

Hi Tom! It is semantics, perhaps, but why does different have to imply inferior? I doubt you meant that either, right? I am unable to bear children. Does that make me less worthy of a human than a woman? Because most women cannot "equal" most men in strength based athletics/warfare, does that...

It may not be Politically Correct, but frankly, PC is just a...PC word for speech and thought suppression. So I'll say it anyway. In every primitive civilization known to man, or at least known to me, there were/are clear and distinct roles for men and women. By God's design or by Darwin's...

For me, it is whether or not the character feels real. I can tolerate some weakness in the writing, so long as it does not become a distraction. In the same way I can have an interesting conversation with a relatively uneducated person. No amount of florid. pretentious writing, on the other...

This will be my first year attempting it. I've never attempted to write a novel-length anything (Heck, not even a novella-length anything). Let alone NANO. Wish me luck. Good luck to all you word-mongers out there.

Thanks everyone. I am not so naive in life as to not have faced down many a gremlin over the years, but even so, this one is a resilient #*%! Writing is always something I have done, but aside from a little bit of daydreaming, never took the time to write for publication. Oh yes, I knew it...

I have a monster of particularly foul temperament that was born in my closet. (I use a walk in closet for writing and, yeah, there are a lot of tangential jokes we can run with, but that is another subject!) Lately the monster follows me everywhere, especially where I am vulnerable -- the...

From my limited perspective, I have heard the same as everybody here has: Don't start off with a dream (get out of a car, discussing weather, etc.). Granted, the "rules" have always been more guidelines than anything. The challenge is that very few authors have the ability to break storytelling...