Recent content by Lamar

So your gods exist outside of existence and are fairly indifferent to the sufferings and entreaties of mere mortals. That sounds fairly Lovecraftian to me. Now that's an idea. I don't know that I've seen the creeping horrors of the Cthulhu mythos set in a Tolkienesque fantasy continuum before.

That works if the dialog is short. If it gets longer than five or six exchanges, though, it gets confusing without something to indicate who's speaking.

In the case of a world in which gods were real and take an active role in the affairs of mere mortals, I don't know that there would be a need for religion as we understand it. There is the idea that has been used fairly frequently that the gods get their power from their worshipers and so...

I think that you need to consider the social function of religion within the society you're creating. The primary purpose religion has served in the real world is to create social cohesion. Along with language and other factors, religion is one way a society creates the distinction between "us"...

Here's a link to the map for my current WIP. http://www.wildhavencreative.com/tellurian04.png

A while back, I read The Mystic Arts of Removing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston. In it, Huston never uses attributions for his dialog -- he doesn't even use quotation marks. Instead, he marks each speaker's dialog with an em dash. On the one hand, I found this very annoying, especially...

I don't think authors really need to worry about the categorization of their work, at least not while they're writing them. Take, for example, Margaret Atwood. Her novel "The Handmaid's Tale" takes place in the future. For that reason, it is sometimes classified as "science fiction," something...

My RPG was called Phantasm originally; the French publisher changed the name to Imago because Phantasm apparently has certainly overtones in French. If you're familiar with Mage: The Ascension, that's basically what Phantasm was -- magic in the modern world. I really liked Mage when it came...

Hello, everyone. My name is Lamar. I live in Columbia, Missouri, USA, where I work for the University of Missouri-Columbia. After a number of years of various and sundry difficulties, I have decided to finally get serious about my writing again, and I thought finding a good writers forum...