Recent content by Insolent Lad

Yes, it works great (at least sometimes) on the stage where a character is explaining his inner thoughts not to another character but to the audience. We can use the interior monologue for that but stories these days rarely do an omniscient peek inside the villain's head.

Woody Woodpecker, because I can do the laugh.

That sounds a bit like how mana operates among Oceanic peoples.

I've always followed the Tolkien example and jotted down stuff on the backs of scrap paper.

From my short story, Fair Games: “There are dragon sports, I would assume.” “To be sure. When I was young I would enjoy a bit of one-on-one air hockey. The idea is to keep the, um, puck from hitting the ground. That’s a point for the other dragon.” “Puck?” “Oh, we would use whatever was...

I think I would have to admit that my original idea of what elves are (or were or would be or something) came from Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword, which I read as a teen well before being introduced to anything by Tolkien. Not nearly as noble a bunch as those in LOTR and somewhat closer to...

Duh, that's INauthentic.

In that I use little profanity in my own life, I tend to feel awkward and a bit authentic putting it into the mouths of my characters. I feel it is safer simply to avoid using it much, but, yes, occasionally someone does have to let something rip. Usually something pretty mild.

Read critically. Try to understand how and why authors do things you might or might not like, and feel do or do not work. Put those thoughts into words as reviews, to make them solid. That's advice received as a poet but applies equally well to prose.

The Song of Hiawatha, almost as soon as I could read. It gave me a lifelong love for both poetic language and myth.

My first writing (perhaps not surprisingly) was poetry. I was making up little poems before I could write, for that matter. And my first 'serious' writing as an adult was also poetry, which did earn me some recognition (and very little money!). Then I started writing magazine articles which did...

I would add The Godfather to that list. What a slog the novel was.

People will believe what people will believe. This is simply the basis of a fairly strict magic system.

I've set stories in my primary fantasy world ranging from a neolithic civilization to an analog of the late Renaissance and I can't say that I preferred one over another nor that any of them was more satisfying to write. I like being able to explore them all.

I started up (yet another) blog a little while back to post bits of this and that about my Izan Cycle novels (21 books so far). That would be Annals of Izan (https://annalsofizan.blogspot.com). I drop in a bit of information on my world-building and such now and again. Anyway, the latest post is...