by Jeff Reynolds When I was eight, I wrote my first short story. It was bad, as the writing of an eight-year-old tends to be, full of tropes and endless misspellings. It long ago disappeared into the trash bin of my personal history. But my teacher gave me an A on the work, and I […]
by Nathan Nance,
So you’re writing SFF, and you’ve got spaceships to design. Engine systems to map. A haunted forest to populate. A talking badger to draw. If you’re not a rocket scientist writing hard sci-fi, how are you supposed to make your version of James S.A. Corey’s Rocinante, you know, fly?
by Dan Brotzel
Genuine idea theft and plagiarism are complete no-nos, of course. But I’m amazed how protective writers of stories, articles and posts can be about ideas that aren’t really worth stealing. Here are a few thoughts on ideation and originality…
by Paul Jessup
Let’s talk about that early stage of the story, when you have that bright gleaming idea in your head, burning brightly. It wants to be born, it wants to come to life. You spend days, weeks, months doing research, laying down pages and pages and pages of notes. Enough to be a small novel in itself. And then you start writing.
by Daniel Brotzel
Finishing a book sounds like hard enough work when there’s just one of you. Can working with someone else really help? Yes! says Dan Brotzel, who’s recently launched a novel he wrote with two pals. Here’s the why and the how…
by Luna Corbden
I have turned my inner narrative around with one simple new rule: “Count your successes.”
by Paul Jessup
Novels are hard, yo. I mean, books in general, maybe writing overall? But for me making that leap from short stories to novels was a difficult transition. I had to completely change my writerly habits, completely reinvent the ways I was doing things altogether.
by Ken Pelham
World-building is more than misty mountains, crumbling castles, dripping neon cityscapes, and talking rats. It’s also about psychology and language, and the language equation includes the everyday corruptions of jargon and slang.
We all know ‘an army marches on its stomach,’ but it’s not like Napoleon discovered something new. Vegetius (De re militari) and Sun Tzu (The Art of War) were well aware of this concept, as was Alexander the Great (Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, 1980). And it wasn’t news to them, either. Pre-modern military commanders knew this; they planned for this. They paid attention to logistics.
Fantasy writers should, too.
by Dan Brotzel
The philosopher of language Paul Grice (1913-88) is best known for his four conversational maxims, which describe what’s going on when people hold a conversation. I want to look at these to see how they can help us in crafting fiction.
Four sorcerers—a former courtesan, a duelist, a metalsmith, and an illiterate youth—hire out their extraordinary talents to Cantagna’s Shadow Lord for missions of intrigue that ungifted spies would find impossible. They call themselves the Chimera.
Susan’s been working on the Jurisdiction series for more years than she cares to specify. Now that she’s retired from her day job she’s calling herself a full-time author in shameless disregard of the facts.
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