Recent content by GroundedTraveler

Secondary world dieselpunk. Magic exists in the landscape and technology is developed to take advantage of it. In the same way the the Wright Brothers understood flight based on a bird's wing, this society learns from the oddity of their world. Although in practice it is pretty heavily leaning...

Love the Constantinople history stuff. My two thoughts: Often in these sorts of fights three is a "royalist" faction. A group that just wants to keep things the same and in the absence of their king/emperor will look for an heir. Yes all of the factions are likely to be looking for someone...

I finally finished and self-published my first novella. Queen of the Cloud Pirates is the first novella in the Crossing the Dropline series. Amazon.com: Queen of the Cloud Pirates (Crossing the Dropline) eBook: Andrew Couch: Kindle Store The cover is one of my own making, but leans very...

As many have mentioned, eight seems like a lot. I would also add if you do have a cast that size especially in rapid succession to keep the names separate alphabetically as you can. Having three names that all begin with L and have four syllables tends to help people confuse them. Yes they might...

I agree with Devor that the story needs to be about your character. Either of your options can be really interesting depending on how you set up the character in it. I actually the setting idea of 1, but it needs the story to make it interesting. What is frightening/fascinating to your...

Interesting discussion.. someone mentioned the WW2 bomber setup with 10 man crews of bombers. If you captain and pilot are the one in the same, it may very well end up feeling like this. Especially if airships are more about air superiority and bombing runs than shifting of troops. For...

Why do you need to know the age? Not to dissuade you, but sometimes the answer to the "why" can help lead you to the answer for "what" (in this case "what is the age of the planet?"). As Shreddies says though, check out the involvement of the creators and get a read on how many "ages" have...

My first read on this is that the title is too small and feels almost like an afterthought. I also have a hard time understanding the imagery. And the black triangle in the top left feels a bit like a mistake. My guess on it is that it is an urban werewolf story. Is that correct?

It would make teaching, learning and practice nearly impossible. How would you learn spellcasting if you could not practice doing it?

I definitely have ideas of what characters are like, but exact features don't seem to stick in my head when I read. Sometimes if I really like a piece of cover art, I will adapt that into my mental view of a character, but for others they remain hazy. I am much more about how a character speaks...

Thanks again for the feedback and ideas. I have tried to let it settle a little more in my head before putting up another round. Based on some of TheMirrorMage's ideas and a few things that Stephan had to offer, here we go. I really liked the line style around the 'The'. I tried pulling off he...

Reading the OP, Cartographer's Guild is what popped into my head. Not sure if there are tutorials there, but as I remember it is a pretty deep and active forum around doing maps.

Interesting idea. I am working on the cover for my first ebook and I have had some similar thoughts. The paper world and the electronic world are indeed different and very much CAN be dealt with differently. I work in web development and there has long been this idea that web pages should act...

Picked up the sample chapter from the DE site. Curious if that means anything to their rankings. I'll let you know when I get to reading the full book and reviewing it.