This week, author Marie Brennan, at Science Fiction & Fantasy Novelists, wrote an interesting post on portal fantasies, titled This Wardrobe Closed Until Further Notice. The premise is that agents and publishing houses have no interest in portal tales — those stories where a character from our world goes through some looking glass or other…
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…
This week’s “beginning” comes from Hood, Stephen R. Lawhead’s reimagination of the Robin Hood myth. For those who haven’t read my post on Legends Reimagined, Hood features “Robin” as a Welsh freedom fighter during the Norman Conquest. Here is how it begins: The pig was young and wary, a yearling boar timidly testing the…
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…
The end of last week’s discussion on the beginning of Deryni Checkmate and openings that start with the weather had me thinking about the opening passage of one of my favorite novels, The Arcanum by Thomas Wheeler (you can read my review here). I think I’m on the side that believes opening with the weather…
For several years now, I’ve been interested in medieval Spain, and about a quarter of my first novel takes place in tenth century Córdoba (which was part of a Moorish caliphate, back when the Iberian Peninsula was called Al-Andalus). Knowing this, it’s astounding (and a bit embarrassing) that I waited so long to read The Lions of…