Recent content by Stevie

Lost in Space. The re-boot, not the original. Like the mighty George Thorogood said about his own music, it's cheeseburger, but sometimes, what you want a cheeseburger. And The Chronicles of Riddick is a great movie.

The 'ahem' was a nod towards a couple of the short stories in "Anthonology", his collection from, I think, about mid-eighties. Deeply disturbing they were.

Hi MommaKat and welcome. Piers Anthony and Anne McCaffrey. Flashback to the eighties for me. I remember reading the Incarnations of Immortality series and thinking, "What is this guy about?" Also remember a couple of his more *ahem* interesting short stories and thinking the same, only more so.

I don't think you lack experience. You've had the same amount of time as every other 22 year old on the planet. You've just had a different set of experiences from the ones that I guess you think you should have had or be having. That doesn't make your experience any less valid or vital than...

'It's' works better for me.

I took out a subscription to Interzone last year but didn't renew. Most (all!) of the stories in it leaned to or where purely literary, which just leaves me cold. Out of six or so issues, I could only recall one story that I enjoyed reading. Still like a good short story though and maybe need to...

One of the tricks I use is to assign the light or the effect of the light, some quality light can't have but that catches the mood of the piece. So for a fight on a dance floor, I had something like, "the strobe razored his face into bands of light and dark". I've used light having a physical...

It is an interesting tension. And further proof (as if it's needed!) that best sellers don't need to be well written. Which kind of raises the question of what good writing is. Be interesting to get hold of a recent debut novel to see what the 'state of the art' is outwith established authors...

See, I think the first version is far better because it gets to the heart of the matter a lot faster and feels much more as if I'm in the character's head. This is why I love writing. When it comes to adverbs, I'd say avoid putting them in dialogue tags at all costs. The rest of the time...

If your story is grounded in a medieaval setting, it might be useful to think along the lines of how religion was used to set out standards of behaviour and how religious organisations monitored and policed those standards to control the community. Somebody posted about the Inquisition, which is...

Doesn't that contradict what you said a bit earlier, that talk of sub-genre plot is inaccurate? (or am I picking up your earlier post wrong?) I agree a plot consists of protagonist etc, across all writing, at a high level. But if you are going to make a promise to the reader as you say, you need...

I'd go out on a limb and say there is such a thing as a fantasy plot and I'd try to define it as any plot where elements of fantasy (magic, weird beasts and the like) are necessary to make the plot work. Take police procedural crime novels as a comparison. To make the plot of one of those work...

Well done Ankari. To quote my editor, 'A lot of people start writing a book, not many of them finish it.' It is quite an achievement when you look back at where you started. I've just finished the 'and what follows ' bit on my first book. It feels like I've just broken through into daylight...

There are plenty of models for how humans react to finding other humans on our own planet that you could use. See the Conquistadors in South America, the British meeting the Austrailian aborigiones, Europeans meeting the North American natives ... The historian Yuval Harari, in one of his books...

Hot dang doodle! I just got a request for a full manuscript. That's two for two now. Two submission queries, two requests for the full manuscript. One, you can put down to luck, but two? Maybe, just maybe, this book is the one ...