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 literary sense. Weather is something so common that it plays a part in the daily life of nearly everyone on Earth. It...
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 without a hitch and was far easier than I had expected speaks mainly to the fact that I didn't have to do it myself. My...
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 leisure time is outdoorsy or debauched. There isn't a festival, a court ball or a a dinner party every night, and even if...
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 do not, there is a fair share that evokes that feel: conflicts among noblemen and monarchs, knights and squires, a...
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 comes from living things. It is produced by the Source, the mystical being of every creature and plant. It is both a...
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 it, things didn't work out so well for them, but that was because a bunch of birds were jerks and ate them all. I don't...
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 another, but differently shaped by their histories, so are those who exist in both. They are identical twins in body,...
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 reader. In theory, you could begin your novel with a treatise describing your world and it's history, cultures, geography, and...
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 days in each. It's a convoluted system that developed over centuries, but it's also unique to Earth. It only came about...
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 full-length novel I've ever written, and I can't say whether or not it met my expectations, because I went into the whole thing...