Recent content by Insolent Lad

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...

In that the basic premise of my main fantasy mythos is that there are infinite universes, it follows that there are infinite worlds of the gods. This allows me to do pretty much anything I want with them, ranging from deities that are simply unfathomable to those that are very like humans. The...

I have a long list of titles I've saved for possible future projects. Sometimes the title will even suggest the plot. It is rare that I get far into a book without having chosen one though, to be sure, it sometimes changes before I'm done. This goes hand-in-hand somewhat with phrases I've saved...

Women and animals is a recurring Frazetta theme but I can't think of any that quite meet your description.

If you did something of this sort you might want to apply a Creative Commons license that allows the publishing of derivative works.

I've been binging on mid-Twentieth Century British travel writing--Greene, Huxley, both Waughs. It took some guts (and, apparently, plenty of alcohol) to travel to third world countries in those days.

I very much like to drop the reader into the middle of ongoing action. Explanations can come later.