Recent content by Prince of Spires

A good thing about place names (and similar) to keep in mind is that most real world place names are very unimaginative and often just reference something. It's how we end up with names like the River Avon, where Avon is just river in ancient English (or Welsh) and thus it's the River River or...

There are two options I think. Either you haven't found the right publisher (or agent) for your piece, or it's not as good as you were hoping it would be. Both are of course a distinct possibility. I can only look at my own writing. When I read back my first few stories and novels, I can now...

Sounds like a fun magic system (or at least fun for the reader, for the practitioners, not so much...). What I'm missing, and what helps tie it to the rest of the world, is how people see magic users. Are magic users feared or used or outcast or ...? Are they in power? Are the magical families...

One thing I try to keep in mind when coming up with a name for a main character is that I will be typing it a lot. And that's fine if you have a Bob or an Arik, but if my protagonist is called SplorkFlorkl, then first I will start feeling silly typing it after the first page, and second being...

I have sold 576 book split over 6 novels since I started publishing, 5 years ago. So I'm in a very different place. What I have found however, is that the metrics of what succes is move. When I worked on getting my first novel published, I read a lot about self-publishing. Anything I could...

I can only speak for myself, but I'm not interested in your ideas in the sense that I need them for my own stories or am actively looking for ideas to propel my own stories forward. I already have too many ideas for novels stuck in my head as it is. I can easily count a dozen of them living...

I'm not sure about that. I'm indie-published, and my publisher keeps nagging at me about all the little stuff I need to do. Like send out review copies or market and promote the damn thing or write another blurb or ...

If you want to get into screenwriting, then I think Save the Cat! is the go to resource to get started.

Why do you think they're 'based on true stories' instead of just 'true stories'? To turn true stories into movies, you need to adapt the events and add the cause and effect that a plot requires. Events need to be dramatized, characters enhanced or added/removed, and boring bits taken out.

congrats on getting it finished! That's an amazing achievement! Small note, if you're looking for beta readers, this topic should probably be moved to Critique Requests. Though it doesn't matter too much to me, since I never know which subforum I'm at anyway... Unfortunately I don't have much...

I bow to your superior knowledge. Some details from my history lessons are a bit hazy. I blame having learned it more than 2 decades ago... ;) WW1 and the events leading up to it aren't my forte.

That looks pretty! Good luck with the kickstarter.

It's a very different way of telling a story. The most obvious is in how strict movies / shows are with structure. Some guides for writing a movie script go as far as telling you what needs to happen on which page of the script. Like the inciting incident needs to happen between pages 15 and...

Realistic is very hard to define, and I personally feel that something feeling unrealistic in fiction is usually the consequence of bad writing, and not of an unrealistic plot. As an example, there are a lot of historic events that sound just as unrealistic as fictional events. Some even more...

The stigma around self publishing has long disappeared. This used to be the case, but it's not so anymore. Self publishing is a viable alternative to trad publishing. For some people it's also a step up to being trad published if you wish to go that route. If you can show that you can write...