Recent content by Prince of Spires

I would probably ask them what exactly they mean when they'd give me such a critique. It could very well be that something else feels wrong to the reader, but they can't explain it directly so they resort to calling it purple. Also, consider that not all writing is for everyone. Maybe your...

To tackle the question from another angle, write what interests you. Writing a novel is a big time commitment (500 words per hour gives 200 hours for a first draft). So I pick era's that interest me and build a setting based on those. Which partially explains why I gravitate towards...

Congrats on getting this far. Don't worry about length. My personal experience with first novels is that the next one will get longer. A novel needs an aweful lot of stuff happening to get to 50.000 or 100.000 words. A lot more than you probably realized when you started. Don't worry about it...

For being drawn on a napkin, that pegasus looks amazing.

I think you underestimate my curiosity and enjoyment of history and maps... I love hearing history lectures, including about the chaos that was europe through the middle ages. I'm already curious what happened in 1356 in German history. All google gives me is the Golden Bull of 1356. Which I...

Those are cool indeed. Hippo's for me. Just a cool and cute looking animal with a temper. And the worldbuilding idea sounds great!

For me a story always starts with an idea. A story seed which gets stuck in my brain and makes me want to tell that story. And this story seed can be anything. It can be a single scene from the story. It can be a concept. It can be a setting. It can even be an image. For instance, the first...

The easiest way to frame this for myself is to view the author as a translator / interpreter. You get told this story by one of the inhabitants of the fantastical world. And then you as author translate the story to make it understandable for someone in our world. This lets you use terms from...

I have to ask, why 1384? What happens then (either before or after) that it deserved this map now hanging on your wall? (genuinly curious :) ) Yes and no. When you first go somewhere or get to a location, then you can invent the setting to support it. However, if you then return to that...

Just to put it out there (I don't know if you put me in the group of people who know how to draw or content to redraw), but I definitely don't know how to draw. It's all just squigles on the page for me. And I just make it up as I go along, helped by youtube tutorials.

I'm old enough to remember PC's used to have similar issues. Heck, I'm old enough to remember not actually being able to save games since you had no internal hard disk and playing a game like Civilization or Rail Road Tycoon to the end just meant you had to keep your computer running the whole...

There's the Tiffany problem to consider. Which is that some names you think of as modern are actually somewhere between pretty old and very old. With Tiffany being a prime example by sounding modern, but the earliest writen record with it is from the 1600's, with some sources pointing to 1200s...

Welcome Liana! What's your project about? And what's your favorite animal?

I'm not a discovery writer, but that doesn't mean I don't discover my maps, or that I make changes to them. When writing, even with a map, I inevitably come to places where the map is just empty. There's always that small village the hero passes through and has a chance encounter or the forest...

Having not read Fourth Wing, but it feels like the problem isn't their choice of cutlery but more that the setting isn't consistent or fully developed. A school with a cafeteria where they eat with forks is something that fits perfectly in a modern US school. However, internet tells me we're...