Recent content by Malik

My series has a country with gryphons as mounted aerial assets. Recommended reading if I say so myself. ;)

I haven't heard this. It's possible, but the trick is to get exactly the right amount of carbon in your iron for the task at hand. 0.50-0.65% is widely considered ideal; however, the characteristics of 0.50% carbon steel (mild steel) and 0.65% carbon steel (surgical steel) is considerable...

"Always do whatever's next."

And again--please read my earlier (years earlier) posts on this--if there was some kind of super-steel, you wouldn't have medieval martial arts in any form that we'd recognize today. Literally nothing that soldiers developed throughout history would work. You'd need to invent an entirely new...

You don't mine steel. Steel is iron ore, heated and mixed with charcoal (carbon). Steel is not naturally occurring. God, I wish more authors would figure this out. (You're not the first; I read this in Big Fiction every so often, and in indie fantasy fiction so many times I've lost count.)...

https://josephmalik.com/steel-the-everything-of-all-things "Swords are swords because steel is steel" Do a search for the phrase "swords are swords because steel is steel" in the Research forum. Look up my article on the Great Sword of War, also on this site. Then search for "Malik" and...

I'm a former amateur boxer and retired Army, with nearly 10 years in Special Operations. I've been beaten up, blown up, shot, stabbed, poisoned, kicked by a camel, I've had my neck broken, and I once spent a week in a coma and months in a wheelchair. My nose has been broken so many times I look...

Swordfighting isn't sport fencing. It's the incidental damage that wears a fighter down. More often than not--especially in armor--sprains, bruises, concussions, fractures, dislocations, and broken pieces of kit all add up until finally one or the other gets overwhelmed and makes a fatal...

My biggest secret to getting the writing done was to ensure my writing desk had the most comfortable chair in the house.

One of my favorite First Draft quotes is, "I need to remind myself that the first draft is just me shoveling sand into a pile so I can make it into a sandcastle later."

Every book in your series should stand alone as well as working in a series. A reader should be able to jump into the story at any point. And yes, it's as hard as it sounds.

Toward the end of my career, I was in a unit responsible for taking down upstart terrorist groups before they could become a going concern, primarily in countries where we weren't allowed kinetic strikes. We would determine what their "big plan" was--every nascent terror org has a "big plan" to...

If you mean extant mythology in our world that you're working into your fantasy novel, unless it's common knowledge, you're going to need it explained. If it's mythology that's unique to your fantasy world, you're definitely going to need to explain it. The novel I just published has a whole...

I write mine so that the time it takes to read/describe the action stays the same relative to the time it takes the action to happen. When they're circling, feinting, testing each other out? Long descriptions. When the fur is flying? Short, hard phrases. One-word sentences; hell, one-word...