Recent content by Lord Darkstorm

Well, I think one of the things many people don't take into consideration is the social state of the people doing the reading. Back over a 100 years ago, fantasy was more for children's stories, not for grown adults. While people would still read them, it wasn't as socially accepted to talk...

Work, the kind that pays the bills. I suffer from it all the time. My job has me going to various places to work for different clients. Traveling is hard on sitting down to write...you would think that having a lack of all the normal distractions that exist at home would make it easier, but...

The biggest thing to remember on books about writing is that they don't teach you how to write, they try and teach you how to think. How do you create a compelling and interesting character? There are many answers to that question, and a good book on characters will provide many examples on...

Liquid story binder, it is an interesting program, and it had one feature I found worth paying them for...timeline. It isn't really that impressive as a feature by itself, but it does do a good job. I think it has some value personally, but it won't really make your story any better. It could...

Writing software is only valuable if it helps you organize what you are doing and write more. I have been working with LSB which is interesting, but more as an organizer than anything else. Tools are great if they help, but I find many of the programs waste more time than help. I looked at...

The other main point of showing the character is that if you expect the reader to gain a form of connection with that character, then the fastest way to get that is by having the reader feel what they feel and get a chance to live in their skin. Telling me about someone doesn't usually anything...

My typical way of knowing when to tell something is that when I'm trying to write it I find I'm bored with it. Can you summarize it, yes. You can briefly mention any close calls or other semi notable events in the escape, but if you just left a high action scene, and this is dull, then a...

I actually think people learning to string together good words is very important. There are so many badly written stories, the content becomes irrelevant if the writing fails to communicate the story. All to often people forget that writing is about communicating, and communicating is using...

My only problem with it is that they have taken good books out of the standard shelves to put them in a new marketing group called...YA. Just what is YA actually? Novels that don't deal in certain things? Hunger games had plenty of violence and things I found quite interesting as a reader...I...

My point is that not all fantasy is world ending, but it is a very common theme. To me, the world ending plot is so cliche I really can't find the desire to care. The only reason I'll bother with the last book of the wheel of time is because I've already endured the others, might as well...

Being that I read both, but mainly write scifi, I doubt that the writers are really the issue. There are good writers on both sides, but scifi is easier for some people to accept as possible than magic is. While both rely on things that just aren't real, with scifi it is less of a stretch of...

Maybe use more than just crystals? For some abilities crystals work best, others metals, and maybe even a few require simpler things like water, or fire. Toss in different things and mix them together and see what you come up with, you might end up with a much more interesting system and events.

Work, morons who change timelines because it fits what they want over reality...which leads to more work, long hours, and a mental tiredness that makes it hard to do much of anything. :) Currently experiencing one of the mentioned periods now...ah such is life.

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I haven't seen them overused myself. I use them all the time in my fiction, but most of my use of them is data storage. :) I write more scifi than fantasy and in this case, crystals for storage has been used often enough it is easy for people to accept it as such without any real explanation.