Recent content by ScipioSmith

As a writer who finds it very easy to come up with a lot of events, it's useful for forcing me to ask 'okay, now why should anyone give a damn.' The way that it's turning out in the writing initially the threat to the family is not Iri's powers themselves but the reaction of her family to...

My approach to writing is to think of each plot as consisting of two strands of narrative, the plot of what happens and the plot of what it means, which is an amalgamation of theme and character arc. For my latest work there are two plots and I'm fairly satisfied with the first: What...

Dagmar is a short-ish elf girl (or aelfa) with pale blonde hair and unfashionably pale skin. I haven't decided on the eye colour yet because the entire book is written from her POV and so there hasn't been an occasion to work it into organically. Her looks are important inasmuch as I'm doing...

Yes, I thought that was probably the case, so thank you for confirming it. At the moment the first chapter opens with a disjointed nightmare of her assault, so I suppose my best option might be to make it more coherent to provide a better picture of what happened.

So five chapters in to my latest project, and I've come to realise something about it that might be a problem, and I'd appreciate some advice about it. The setup is this: Dagmar, an elven girl and our protagonist, is attacked on her way home by a group of humans before being rescued by two...

A first look at the cover of my upcoming second novel: Spirit of the Sword: Faith and Virtue

In your case, very few of those things seem like the sort of issues that could be resolved by a prologue, or indeed need an infodump. The codes of manners and conduct that prevail in your setting can be shown quite easily by people following those codes, the reader will soon catch on that this...

I think part of the problem is that we know much more about science than we did then. At the time when Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the Barsoom stories, the quintessential science fantasy, it was possible that there had been life on Mars even if there wasn't now. Now that possibility seems...

As Penpilot said, it's all in the execution. What Penpilot didn't say, but could have, is that you need to have better writing chops to execute perfect well then you do if a character has flaws. Witness all the Mary Sues cluttering ffnet, it isn't that they're bad characters per se its mostly...

I've just updated my blog with a new post announcing my newsletter, and inviting people to subscribe to a mailing list for information on new releases, excerpts and first look at cover art. Announcing My Newsletter

Having just found the comic itself, I now understand.

Thanks for the first comment! Yeah, I did register with Disqus, and I tried to add it in, and I was looking at this HTML and I was like 'what's a page identifier?' And then I decided that there must be an easier way to get comments than that, and so I just searched through the Wix apps...

Blog posts now have comment boxes.

Hi Legendary, Yeah, I would like to add comments. I don't suppose you of anywhere that talks you through how to add the app that could be understood by someone who doesn't know jack about coding? I'm staring at a load of HTML and I don't know what half of it means and I certainly don't know...

Just posting here to advertise my blog, where I sometimes post essays on things that interest me about the genre community and writing. There are two posts up currently that might be of interest to people here: The first is a short essay on reading the classics of the genre, which I wrote...