So, I've gone to see Hunger Games: Mockingjay (Pt 1) and braved the opening weekend crowds to do so. To to be up front about it, I haven't read any...
Movie Review: Hunger Games, Mockingjay Part 1
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World building
3 Tips to Remove Yourself From Your Dialogue
Have you ever read a book where every character sounds the same? How about one where the main character has a set of beliefs that they work into...
Worldbuilding With Ships
An imagined world will only feel as large as you make it appear. By focusing on a limited part of the world, you make a world feel small and...
Writing About Monsters: 3 Creatures for Your World
Speculative fiction is a stretching of the world into new shapes, an expansion of ideas to their logical (or illogical) conclusions. One of the many...
Worldbuilding On the Go
Writing is a time-consuming endeavor. Especially when you have limited time available for your writing, the last thing you need is to spend that...
Worldbuilding: Money in Your World
"Excuse me sir, I'd like to buy that sword, a shield, and I'll be needing salted meats and bread for a five-day journey." "That will be $343.49."...
Worldbuilding: How Does Your World Tell Time?
Unless you write in a very strange setting, people are going to keep track of the passage of time. It's a fact of life that we take for granted, but...
Steampunk: the Engineer in the Writer
As I wind my way through the final stages of getting The Mad Tinker's Daughter ready to publish, I thought it might be a good time to reflect on my...
Worldbuilding: Creating Fictional Cultures
When you create a world, you need to create its inhabitants. If you are writing in a historically accurate version of Earth, you have established...
4 Ways to Measure in Fantasy
How much? How far? How Heavy? How long? You've taken your readers into a brand new world, painted landscapes and cities with your prose, and devised...
20 World Building Questions for Authors to Ask Themselves
World building is the art of convincing a reader that a fictitious place exists. What do you do if you don't know where to start creating that...
50 Types of Minor Characters (Part 5, 10-1)
You've got your heroes and your villains. You've even got a sidekick. But who inhabits the rest of the world? World-building is as much about people...
50 Types of Minor Characters (Part 4, 20-11)
You've got your heroes and your villains. You've even got a sidekick. But who inhabits the rest of the world? World-building is as much about people...
50 Types of Minor Characters (Part 3, 30-21)
You've got your heroes and your villains. You've even got a sidekick. But who inhabits the rest of the world? World-building is as much about people...
50 Types of Minor Characters (Part 2, 40-31)
You've got your heroes and your villains. You've even got a sidekick. But who inhabits the rest of the world? World-building is as much about people...
50 Types of Minor Characters (Part 1, 50-41)
You've got your heroes and your villains. You've even got a sidekick. But who inhabits the rest of the world? World-building is as much about people...
Worldbuilding: Science in Fantasy
So you're going with fantasy as your genre of choice? I guess that means you don't need to worry about science. WRONG! Just because you presuppose...
City Mapping
In my earlier blog on Amateur Cartography, I covered the basic concepts behind how to draw a map to go along with your fantasy story. Mainly I...
Goblins in the Twinborn Trilogy
What is a "goblin"? Since they are fictitious creatures, it's okay for there to be more than one answer to this question. However, while you're...
Whimsy or Physics? The Hidden Rules of Magic
Magic is one of the defining characteristics of fantasy. Whether you are looking at "high" or "low" magic, it's going to be in there somewhere (I'm...
Politics: Kadrin Empire
The Kadrin Empire is the most powerful land in the world of Veydrus. Though not unchallenged in their dominance, the Kadrins have been a major...
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...
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...
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...