Recent content by It's a Squirrel...Moose?

I'm a bit partial to 'industrial spiritualism' - and I like the idea of spirits being formed by industrial processes contrasting with the more traditional 'nature' spiritualism. While I'm naturally cautious about trying to introduce real-life moral issues such as environmentalism into fantasy...

Maybe I was unclear in what I meant (the woes of writing whilst tired) - my point was that many people obsess about the plot in short fiction and as a result write a piece that has too much plot. I am not suggesting that people go all Virginia Woolf and write epics about nothing at all...

My personal opinion is that plot is wholly reliant upon the length of the story. With stories of less then 4000 words - a plot is unnecessary as it simply takes up too much space! Indeed, I feel that at times the writer tries too hard to get a plot into every piece; with the result being that...

I personally feel that characters should be a natural development of the plot and idea for my story - and sometimes a plot is concerned with a character. I admit, I tend to 'over construct' my ideas which gets in the way of me actually writing most of my ideas (and my stories have an annoying...

This is very, for a lack of a better term, Neil Gaiman...y. You should read 'Neverwhere' - which, although different to your idea, follows on the same logical basis. And I for one love this sort of thing, though the stories always seem to end up being quite similar which makes me think that's...

My point was that excessive world building often results in a decrease in realism, which (again, in my opinion) is a very, very bad thing; and that a fantasy book need not necessarily be based around magic, dragons and excessive amount of Gods. I enjoy Game of Thrones as much as the next man...

I am sympathetic to the view in the OP. I dislike the notion of world building for fantasy (crazy I know) - simply because I feel people go to the extreme in trying to build a 'different' world to our own in their (in my opinion) misbegotten opinion that our world is boring. Or, they commit (in...

If magic is a essential element of your world, then it goes to follow that humanity has had experience of it in some manner. Maybe a purely scientific approach to magic? One where the magical system was 'discovered' in a similar vein to how Newton 'discovered' gravity?

The problem with undead as i see is not the undead per-say, but the often bizarre and contradictory rules that govern them - that and every single necromancer in every bit of fantasy might as be the same character. Actually, yes... i would say that the undead are overused. It seems that people...

Humans are only as 'degraded' as the writer makes them. Writers seemed obsessed with focusing on the purely negative aspects of humanity - the greed, the inequity, etc - completely ignoring the other aspects of our existence and the positive implications of our society - the forward thinking...

I suppose the question is this: why elves? Your idea is a semi-typical despotian world where the surviving races (in this case elves) have reverted to tribalism in order to survive. I feel tha you are using elves simply because you want t buck the usual trend of elves being haunt and perfect...

We are discussing objects that even physics has a hard time explaining - and remember, we are talking about a fantasy setting... and by that I mean 'it's magic doofus!' I think portals are objects where realism can take a step back, because the physics of portals and wormholes is much, much...

This issue can be overcome b simply basing your core landmass on a real world example - for example with the wheel of time Jordon set it in a European/northern American super continent where odd objects could be easily explained through trade. However, the best method in my mind is to simply not...

Human 'mundane-ness' has the issue of not being true - look at our world, it is inhabited by humans, but each nation and 'ethnic' group demonstrates a vast and fascinating strata of cultures, appearances and personalities - there's nothing mundane about us at all, we are just used to human...

I feel that there is an undue obsession with 'races' when it comes to fiction. At times when reading a story you get the sense that the person is writing less for the story and more to get the most bizarre civilization award. The great strength of humanity is that the race by itself doesn't...