Recent content by jacksimmons

The most important thing is that what you choose fits your setting. If your fantasy races and mythological creatures generally look like normal humans with the odd horn, maybe upright talking cows would be incongruous. Setting considerations aside, personally I would go with what is cool and...

My dwarves are called the Ithen and by the time of most of my stories they are long dead. They were a spacefaring, high-technology race that mined out planets to creat huge installations like O'Neill Cylinders and Dyson Spheres. Most of these installations have fallen to ruin; the Ithen were...

Thanks for reading Gwynndamere! Much appreciated! I am glad it was more 'suspenseful' and less 'frustrating'.

Thanks for the feedback Chasejxyz This is what I figured so I have referenced the conflict and hinted from just a few sentences in and then throughout. They are harassed by the monster by the second or third page, and by 4-5k in the exact nature of the creature and its link to their past is...

Hey guys, I am writing a short story/novella that is fairly straightforward plot-wise. It's a space-opera/dark fantasy thing about a family (two parents and a daughter) living on a gloomy alien planet and they are haunted by a being called a Kindastadht because of something terrible they did in...

I don't think you can. If you are a white writer I think it is assumed that a character in your story is white unless stated otherwise. And vice versa. And I would imagine that if left ambiguous a reader is most likely to project their background on to a character ie a white person imagines a...

If the first one is about the main character directly you could have this one as the final chapter, or the end of the final chapter. The second event sounds like a good epilogue.

To answer your question: I am of the understanding that the moon affects tides and seasons and the length of the day, among other things. A disappeared moon could have an large impact on these things after a few million years. But I don't believe the difference would be particularly noticeable...

So are you saying that in your setting, where mages actually have the ability to control the elements and produce magical outcomes, it makes sense that they would be the dominant force, the caste that most people believe in, as opposed to priests, who have no demonstrable magical abilities? I...

Library Orrery/Clocktower Solars Reception Halls Church/Prayer Rooms

This really strikes a chord with me. I too have been giving my Mum my writing for years and years, since I was a little kid, and nothing is ever finished. I have been writing since before I can remember and the first thing I ever finished was a novella, 50-60k words, only last year. The second...

I realised I sort of misinterpreted your original post. By 'ancient man' I thought you meant cave-dwelling man. I think the idea of taking a culture like the ancient greeks and dropping them on an alien world is really cool.

One question I might ask if I were reading this is how come this isolated human civilisation has developed so similarly to another Earth-based culture like the Greeks or the Hawaiians. On a planet with different topography, with a completely separate cultural history, I would expect a...

Pretty much everything I write starts with an opening scene. From there I pants it until I have to start asking myself important questions. This usually culminates in a map of some sort being drawn (for longer works.) In the words of GRRM "I knew I was screwed when I started drawing the maps."...

I second this Morgoth_69 I am writing something with a similar angle and it would be great to swap feedback if you were so inclined.