Recent content by Ivan

Or before the battle, as a way to instill courage...

The trial is the golden opportunity to debate morals in open dialogue. It can either give clarity and affirmation, or open provoking questions, about the righteousness of the hero and the good side.

Unless these were fine upstanding gentleorcs I wouldn't exactly expect them to speak some equivalent of the Queen's English.

It's better to be the puppetmaster behind the throne! However, few people get to the top by being kind-hearted. Kings depended more on the powerful classes of nobles or the military than on public goodwill.

I think that would be a heckuva good twist- just when you think it's done and everyone is about to live happily ever after, it hits the fan bigtime and people are scrambling for the throne. Though, I guess your point is there has to be some reason for the reader to care what happens now that...

I think this is an important point. If you have a group of people struggling for the same thing Khyra was, the transition will be much easier; you have a chapter or two of disorder where these people are trying to figure out what to do next, and in that time one or more of them can begin to...

Good point... All of those works do involve catastrophic wars. However, because they are set in a place that are more or less intact societies - albeit influenced by the destruction around them - I guess I don't consider them post-apocalyptic. They are missing the attributes I mentioned in my...

I associate dystopian with the genre of 1984, V for Vendetta, We, etc. not necessarily the post-apocalyptic genre. These are interesting because they typically speak to a current issue or even a perennial one - in the examples I provided, that of totalitarianism - and makes you think about the...

Spears were made for piercing shields and armor, but not for breaking swords. It depends on the hardness of the sword but you would be more likely to notch it, bend it or knock it out of the guy's hand, if somehow you managed to hit it dead-on with a full swing, which is relatively unlikely as...

That's an innate part of writing. That's why editing is also an innate part of writing. (I suggest resisting the urge to kill everything and start over.)

This is where subplots come in. Something that sparks curiosity, adventure, fear, even humor.

While it would have been an interesting episode I am sure, it is hard to justify a sequel in this case. Return of the King is a strong, bittersweet note to the long fading of the mythical in Middle-earth. Besides there was plenty of time between the Silmarillion and the Hobbit to fill in, which...

Despite the example I provided, hoplites fought in a very specialized way that mitigated the problems of using a long spear one-handed. Fighting in phalanx, it was hard to get into striking range because once you got past one spear, there was another behind it, and another behind that one, and...

Hacking off legs was a pretty common if not very successful medical procedure in the Middle Ages. Of course that is among professionals; depending on this fellow's knowledge of the world, he may not even know how to recognize infection, and to echo the others it is a pretty drastic decision to...

Plutarch recorded an incident from Sparta's most desperate days, where a man joined the defense with a spear and a sword - and no clothes as it happened - and fought well. He was both honored and fined (for fighting without armor). The hoplite's spear tended to be around eight feet. Do keep in...