What is the difference between a character who is little more than window dressing for a story and one who is vibrant and realistic? The idea that...
Agendas and Motivations
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J.S. Morin
Write Like a Bulldozer
There is a direction that bulldozers go. That direction is called "forward". When you consider vehicles that can look to a point some ways off and...
Villains
In response to my "7 Types of Heroes" blog, someone suggested that I take a look at villains as well. That got me thinking about just what it takes...
Quiz: How to Tell If You Are Twinborn
At the heart of Firehurler and the Twinborn Trilogy is the mystery of the twinborn. What are they? They are the ones who are aware of other worlds....
How to Kill (Your Characters)
The worlds we write can be dark and dangerous places. In many cases, these dangers are a key element of the plot. Sword fights, monster attacks,...
7 Types of Heroes
You don't need a hero to have a story, but if you want to write about heroic deeds you're going to end up with one somewhere along the lines....
Earth: A Failure of World-Building
There are many elements that go into making a world fit for fantasy storytelling. World-building is a skill any good fantasy writer needs to...
Speech: The High Road and the Low Road
You hear a voice over the phone, a complete stranger. Within moments there are a lot of things you can tell about that person on the other end, even...
Amateur Cartography: the Duty of the Fantasy Author
View a larger version of the map From the Shire to Mordor, the Wall to King's Landing and every journey in between, readers have been dragged hither...
A Storm is Coming: Weather in Fiction
I sit here at the time I write this, being buried beneath the snows of winter storm Nemo. This No-Name storm got me thinking about weather in a more...
A Sense of Self-Publication
A funny thing happened on the way to formatting my novel Firehurler for ebook publication: It ended up published. To say that the process went off...
Games and Why We Play Them
Games are a recurring theme in Firehurler. I used them for a number of purposes. First of all, it is a normal part of people's lives. Not all...
The Power of Fantasy: The World is Yours (even if it’s still sort of England)
I recently heard someone complaining that all fantasy seemed to be set in medieval England. While obviously there are plenty of fantasy stories that...
Aether: the Basis of the Magic System
In the worlds of the Twinborn Trilogy, aether is the stuff that lends power to magic. But what do we know about it? Where does it come from? Aether...
The Breadcrumbs Method
Anyone I've talked to about writing has heard this one before. When I write, I lay out a trail of breadcrumbs as I go. When Hansel and Gretel did...
Mommy, Where Do Twinborn Come From?
What does "twinborn" mean? The twinborn are those who exist in two worlds. Much as Tellurak and Veydrus are linked as worlds, largely mirrors of one...
Idioms: Friend or Foe?
A large element of fantasy is world-building. You are creating a place, in whole or in part, from your imagination, and describing it to your...
Keeping Time: The Calendars of Tellurak and Veydrus
Time passes, but how do we track it? Here on Earth, the English-speaking world is familiar with January through December, with varying numbers of...
Firehurler: the Writing Experience
Now that Firehurler is in the final stages of editing, I think it's a good time to reflect back a bit on how I got here. This is the first...