Recent content by RedAndy

Thor appears in the Douglas Adams book The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and, similar to the Marvel character, flies by throwing his hammer and hanging onto it. So I don't think using that element in a story would present any copyright problems either.

Translating things into other languages is a good way of doing things. One of the towns in my WIP has an ancient bridge that has recently been blasted into ruins by a bungling general; I drew inspiration for that from the Bosnian city of Mostar, whose eponymous bridge ("Stari Most" means "old...

Depending on whether your story requires the abandoned side of the island to still be accessible, a big enough earthquake could conceivably tilt the island, forcing half of it underwater. Read up on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Sea (fascinating for all sorts of reasons) - in the 2004...

I wrote out some character profiles the other day, which is pretty much the most preparation I've ever done before NaNoWriMo. I have a good idea of the setting and the initial part of the plot. I also have a decent idea of the ending, but how I get there will be an adventure! I'm looking...

Some kind of censorship, as earlier posters have implied, might be a way to go. Think of the M. Night Shayamalan film "The Village" on a larger scale. So perhaps there is an elite group who know of the existence of other countries, but suppress this information for religious or other reasons...

You can probably safely assume that it's okay to go with whatever sounds best. Even if there are rules, they are obscure enough that no one is likely to call you out on it if you get it "wrong."

NaNo was how I got started with writing. For a long time I had a premise for a novel but no motivation to write it. So I gave NaNo a go, and haven't looked back. My project for this year is entitled Gruestalker. It's set in the same world as my NaNo novels of 2011 and 2012, though with mostly...

Have a think about what form your substance takes. If it's a particle (or something particle-like), it'll most likely end in -on (proton, electron, Higgs boson etc). To use the examples from above, something ending in -ium is likely to be a chemical element (e.g. strontium); something ending in...

I agree, and it's something I've particularly noticed recently (i.e. last 5-10 years) in films. Lots of good films that could have been great if they'd not been dragged out. Films can get away with being long if they're gripping throughout, but so many nowadays just seem to be have been...

In the world where my stories are set, mythical creatures are just that - mythical. There are legends and folklore about them, but they don't really exist. Nonetheless lots of them are widely believed in, even in civilised society (e.g. nautical maps often display warnings about kraken). It...

I once went to the Korean War Museum in Dandong, a Chinese city on the Tumen River, opposite North Korea. Their version of events is that the South attacked first and North Korea/China were merely defending their territory against the US-backed aggressors. This is the version of events that is...

This is an important point. Mythology changes over time. For example, the ancestry of the British Royal Family (and most of the European nobility, come to that) can be traced back to an Anglo-Saxon king called Cerdic. The lineage begins there, because Cerdic invented his own genealogy (or...

There might be an element of spiritualism about certain landscapes; for example, mountainous terrain isn't really a rich environment for steppe-dwelling pastoral nomads and their horses, so maybe they would believe that mountains are filled with evil spirits. Additionally, marauding nomads like...

Hi all, I'm Andy; I've lurked on these forums for a bit before deciding to take the plunge and join. You all seem like a reasonable bunch! It's good to have a community of like-minded writers online. Like a lot of you, I'm still getting started - my first foray into fantasy writing was...