Recent content by Vinegar Tom

If I may for one moment ignore the peculiarly intense debate over whether two different kinds of made-up animal are actually the same made-up animal and return to the original topic, there are two very good reasons never, ever to use Orcs. Firstly, fantasy is supposed to be a genre in which...

There is such a thing as obsessing too much about background - don't hold your breath while you're waiting for Peter Jackson's Simarillion trilogy! Your land of Veritas - by the way, are we supposed to translate that as "Truthland", and if so, are you intentionally flagging the Veritans as...

Personally, I detest the Narnia books. I read them as quite a young child, and although I was into all that fantasy stuff - I loved The Hobbit - there was something about the whole saga that bugged me. I did read them all just to try and figure out what was going on, though I never liked those...

This entire thread is a great illustration of how people who may be perfectly good writers go slightly off the rails when they try to write fantasy. Michael Moorcock once said that the only unbreakable rule that good fantasy absolutely must follow is that it must be internally consistent. So if...

I assume that, since an infinite land-mass is scientifically unfeasible, this is pure fantasy, and no science need be applied. However, infinity always causes problems. Gravity is easily dealt with - if the entire universe has a floor, then presumably there's a universal down, and that's why...

H. P. Lovecraft is getting a bit overused these days. I mean, you can even buy Cthulhu plush toys, for crying out loud! But since you obviously don't plan to simply shoehorn his monsters into your own tale, but are going with a less doom-laden and much more whimsical slant on his basic concept...

I don't know how much backstory in the form of magical theory and so on you plan to include in your tale, but you could do worse than consider the concept of the "astral corpse". Just about all ancient peoples - in fact, everyone before the Christians invented Heaven - held that any spirits of...