I’ve been reading Abraham Merritt’s The Ship of Ishtar recently and this paragraph jumped out at me tonight: “From here and there comes the food,” answered the Viking. “It is a ship of warlocks and a cursed one. Not long may it stop at any place, nor at any place is it welcome. Nay, not […]
I often ramble on about sports here (and even more often delete the drafts). There’s a few reasons, not least I really like sports. But one of the major ones is there’s a lot of sports writers who talk constantly about getting better at the craft – the coaching guys, the analytics geeks, and so […]
Wotcha all. I’m here to talk about storytelling using everyone’s favourite thing – sport. In this case, team sports where people move around quite quickly in pursuit for an object with which they must score. Hockey (both kinds), Football (all kinds), Rugby (both kinds), Basketball, Netball, etc.etc. The thing that intrigues me about them as […]
(spoilers yo) One way to get me wading into an argument despite there being no point very quickly – the definition of High Fantasy. It’s a very pointless one as the meaning of the sub-genre has gone so muddled with so many different definitions that I regard trying to reclaim it as pointless. Even viewed […]
(spoiler central my peeps) I start this post not entirely sure whether I have enough material here. The Serpentwar Saga is an adolescent favourite that I still have a good deal of time for but without feeling it’s so good that I should scream about it a lot, the way I do for Pratchett and […]
(spoilers yo) Things to do when bored. Look at your own blog archives and find statements you made but never really followed up. In this case, the idea that we don’t talk enough about sets of characters and their dynamics in terms of what makes great fiction. To rectify this, I’m going to do some […]
Once upon a time, a fellow of my acquaintance challenged someone to be a full Marie Brennan fanatic and get everything, including all four Worldbuilding books (but not Cold-Forged Flame, the best thing she’s written). This got my attention right away. Did I love worldbuilding? Yes. Did I know Marie Brennan is an academically trained […]
(spoilers for starts, natch) Wotcha there, and welcome to some more thoughts on writing and stories based on what worked for me and what didn’t work for me. Here I’ll be looking at books that left me standing on the quay when the book’s plot took off from Start Harbour and took off for the […]
There are two things that are true. One is I have a term “Pathofdaggersitis” that I’ve coined for books that remind me of Path of Daggers with its multiple PoVs and corresponding lack of anything much to drag one into the narrative. It’s a hyperbolic term born of frustration, much as I was with Path […]
Book idea seven and by now the main thing I know is I’ve got to be more selective about which ideas I let live. This one’s old. Some parts of it are super old. And it’s mainly here because it’s got 20k words on it, which is too much to ignore. Or is it? Let’s […]
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