Recent content by skip.knox

I have acres of notebooks, going back to the early 1970s. I keep them in order to curse my children with them. My current favorite notebooks are Septcouleur. The paper is good quality and holds anything from a ball point to a fountain pen without bleeding (though I have to be careful with gel...

Seems odd to me to arrange them so that none of the spines show. How on earth do you actually find something?

Why are you showing it? Are you looking for just a vague "I liked it, you can dance to it" reaction? Are you looking for detailed editorial comments? Are you showing it because the other person is kith or kin and they want to see what you've written? All this will affect not only what you show...

Prince of Spires has the right of it: much depends on the era. To which I would add much depends, too, on which peoples. Do you mean to have, say, carpentry be the same for humans, dwarves, elves, orcs? Or will trades vary (which of course means shops and buildings will vary). Now, cutting up...

Sounds like graphics card, which is not great news, There was a cartoon, many and many a year ago, that has ever held true. When there's trouble First look up Then look down Then look in your wallet. [minor edit: I think the line was, Look at your shoes. I can still see the line-drawn...

We welcome reality, fantasy, alternate reality, and alternate fantasy. And even alternate historical fantasy!

It can be separate, but I would call it a hobby only if the person involved never actually wrote stories. Worldbuilding for a game, or simply as a pastime, is unrelated to the act of writing books (or short stories). If it is part of the writing process, then no. Or, at least insofar as the...

In this as with pretty much all other "what's another word for..." questions, I suggest temporarily stop looking. Instead, look at the phrases you have. Start with those four. For example, when you have "a land of magic" what are you trying to impart at that point in the story? Is it a land...

I have a couple of Chosen One tropes that has never even made it to sketch stage. One is, Wrong Guy stumbles into a place or finds a thing that marks him as the Chosen One. He doesn't want it, but everyone around him keeps relying on him and then getting pissed when things don't work out. It's...

Another vote for cables. Back in the CRT days I encountered this when people would shove those huge monitors as far back on their desktop as they could, pinching the cable against the wall. They were astounded when a cable jiggle and scooting the monitor forward fixed it. Ah, the 1980s....

Which sort of life do you mean? Think how you might answer if a person asked you what life in America in the 2020s was like. Which part of America? Wealthy or poor? Urban or rural? Young or old? What about along the margins of society? You begin to see the scope of the question is too large to...

Depends on the genre (even just within fantasy), the author, and the reader. If the language is used in an erotic scene, the author must bring the characters to that point. This means they have used such language in other contexts. Otherwise it would be out of character, as it were. That in...

I ought to have been more clear. Everything that is in the *finished* story should be there on purpose. Drafts are exempted.

I used to be able to add exclusion strings: -getty for example. Because Getty and other entities have tied up billions upon billions of images. Copyright law does not prevent them from doing this, but it sure screws up searches. I'm a historian, and I go looking for images of, say, Emperor...

Two more books by Patrick Leigh Fermor, both about Greece. One, Roumeli is about northern Greece while Mani is down in the Peloponnese. Both are crammed full of vignettes and descriptions that, while not actual fantasy, are quite fantastical.