Recent content by kjbartolotta

It depends on your story, but if you're going for realism you should check out Project Rho and then read The Killing of Worlds anyways. :)

Since we're naming off the classics here, I would highly recommend both Hesiod's Theogony and his Works and Days, usually packaged in the same slim volume. You get both epic worldbuilding and a cranky but empathetic look at the tribulations of Bronze Age life among the common folk.

Malik, since there's enough high-quality steel in my own setting it merits a fair degree of research, finding out about your blog is both a huge boon and a research rabbit hole that's probably gonna throttle my word count a bit. Either way, thank you for such a wonderful resource!

Ugh, I know! I just tipped over 40k, and Saturdays are really bad for getting the time to write. Guess I'm gonna hafta sit down after dinner and bang out what I can. But. I. Will. Conquer. NaNoWriMo. (Then stress out about finishing the novel and turning it into something readable at a later date)

I would do anything to sidestep an issue like this. IRL days of the week don't sound right to me, and I don't want to learn new ones. The calendar in my setting doesn't really have days or months, rather everything runs on an elaborate cycle based on lunar and sidereal movement, and people...

Yeah, but you know you're gonna do it.

But you're soooo close. I am very much having the same issue, after a fairly challenging November IRL. But got at least 13K to go, and man it's kicking my butt. How you guys write so fast is beyond me, I hit 1667 and my brain shuts down.

But of course! Sadly, Gormenghast is likely to sit with The Magic Mountain and The Recognitions among the great works of genius I'll never get to finishing.

Considering that Weis and Hickman revisit After the End and Second World tropes in their other books fairly often, I don't think this young man was too off the rails in his thinking. Also, his other main series of interest was Shannara (and I am precisely dating myself with these references), so...

PKD was a very specific form of genius, both loose and sloppy and profound in a way few authors can aspire to. No one else can imitate. I'd rank Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch as only slightly inferior to Fifth Head, and equal in dignity to Left Hand of Darkness. But those are my three, as...

Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe is the pinnacle of American speculative fiction IMHO.

Hi everyone, name's Kevin from the sunny ontological prison that is Los Angeles. Been reading the MythicScribes articles for a while, somehow stumbled over here from AbsoluteWrite and I am loving this place. Big lover of fantasy and sci-fi literature, as you would expect.

I haven't revisited them in some time, but, looking back, it's occurs to me these novels are both extremely cheesy and immensely satisfying, like all Weis and Hickman. I kind of view my love of them as an old shame, but man they got me through some rough times. In an slight aside, I came to...

Hi there Mythmasters! Know I'm late to the game, but I'm spending American Pre-Christmas Turkey Holiday home sick reading Mythic Scribe articles, so I thought I'd take the moment to jump in. Daily Goal: Write the exact number of words to complete NaNoWriMo by the end of November. Day 23 and...