Put yourself in the shoes of the character who discovered these facts about your story world and ask how they would have designed the resulting...
And stuff like this continues today to an extent. I've seen word maps of London denoting where you can find the immigrant communities clustered...
The value of worldbuilding depends on your audience and desires. It is a piece of string question. There are audiences who aren't getting out of...
*pause* Now I think about it, the webcomic Order of the Stick has a really good example of a conventional siege with magic users on each side...
People beat me to the punch. Codex Alera features a crapton of magical battles and while mostly people are using their skills to be supersoldiers,...
Skip, can you also do an essay on things people consider to be Medieval that are actually Renaissance/Reformation? I feel like there's a pretty...
GRR Martin has a decent amount of foreshadowing for his later books in book 1. Ditto Robert Jordan. Ditto maybe every major Epic Fantasy series...
I think the classic tricks for getting readers to accept this type of character are 1) Have him go against an even bigger jerk, so he looks like...
Fair, but even then, I feel like it's honestly been a long time since I've read too many of those. Maybe I'm just reading less and less Epic...
This is true. However - there's little differences in the aesthetic, and those correspond more with D&D. More fantasy authors' elves are more like...
I generally try doing a logline/summary after I've done my test scenes and am trying to decide how much I like the idea. If I can't, it's probably...
People who find fantasy derivative of Tolkien basically enjoy wallowing in ignorance, and their lies debase our genre and should be fought. To let...
Sometimes I take a break - a few days, a few weeks, even a month or two. Sometimes I put on the inspirational music and crack on through....
In most of my ideas, no. I just aesthetically find swords and what not more interesting.
Might be worth reading this article on conversation topic patterns - C.S. Pacat - I quite like it as a way to add dynamism and verisimilitude to a...
Here's Jim Butcher's advice - I find it pretty solid - How to build a Villain, by Jim Butcher I think in terms of creating a villain people will...
I feel a bit of a heel for saying it, but I can't help but notice that when non-fantasy publications make fantasy lists, it seems rather focused...
I'd agree about there being conscious choices when it comes to voice, at least in terms of how I define it. Beyond trying to throw my voice for...
I read The Poppy War. It is a curate's egg to me due to the many and dramatic shifts of tone and theme, with some parts being DNF-worthy and...
Yeah, I'd say 100 pages - well, somewhere between 50 and 100 - is where I settle into a voice I don't like. But the thing is, even when the voice...
