This Saturday I watched the U.S. premiere of The White Queen on Starz, a miniseries based on the Philippa Gregory novel of the same name. The story is set during The War of the Roses, which happened to be the inspiration for George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. Needless to say, I enjoyed stumbling…
Season 3 of HBO’s Game of Thrones premiers on March 31st, so it’s about time for another review of a book from George R.R. Martin’s epic series A Song of Ice and Fire. As I’ve mentioned before, I started reading A Song of Ice and Fire shortly before the HBO series first premiered, so I arrived…
One of the things I love about journey tales is all the different places they can take the reader. For example, my own novel, Enoch’s Device, begins at the monastery of Derry in Ireland, but the journey soon takes my protagonist to France (and the cities of Paris and Poitiers), and finally into the heart…
The Wayward Herald remains convinced that the number of interesting blog posts on which to comment decreases substantially during National Novel Writing Month. Fortunately, that will soon end, and that is one thing for which the Wayward Herald is thankful this week. Dante looks back on Purgatory at the end of NaNoWriMo. The Wayward Herald is…
Like the news-bearing heralds of old, Fresh-scraped Vellum is becoming a bit more newsy, albeit in a potentially wayward fashion. So every Monday for the foreseeable future, the Wayward Herald will report on news and items of interest to readers and writers of historical and fantasy fiction. For his inaugural post, here are some interesting…
In the final installment in my series on the Top 5 Elements of a Great Epic, I’m focusing on Grand Events – those major conflicts that makes a great epic so breathtaking. Grand events are critical because they are a primary vehicle through which the author shows how huge the stakes are in the story. They…
Every story needs a protagonist, and often he or she possesses qualities that could be described as “heroic.” A great epic, however, needs a hero in the truest sense of the word. Just look at three of the first four definitions in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to see what I mean: Definition of HERO a mythological…
Great epics are never about a single character’s journey. Even if the stakes are enormous for that one character, rarely would such a story be described as epic. In great epics, many characters must be in peril, and sometimes the fate of whole nations, or even whole worlds, are at issue in the story. The…
I’m slammed with work this week, so my next installment of the Top 5 Elements of a Great Epic needs a little more time and attention. For now, here’s my first post about epics from August 2011. This summer has been huge for George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. First, HBO made…
Among the Top 5 Elements of a Great Epic, setting is at the top of my list. Great stories, of course, can take place in a very limited setting. Stephen King’s The Mist, which largely takes place in a convenience store, and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, which primarily takes place in the protagonist’s home,…
I adore epic fiction. It’s likely the fault of George Lucas and J.R.R. Tolkien. I was eight when Star Wars came out in 1977, and I’ll never forget staring wide-eyed at the opening image of the rebel ship and that star destroyer. Then Darth Vader emerged through that smoke-filled portal and it blew my mind. Later that…