Holidays are tough on writers. Even when you think you’ll have time to write, something gets in the way. Agent Rachelle Gardner recently suggested that writers should plan out how much time they think they’ll have to write during the holidays – and then divide that in half. This year, I should’ve divided that number…
Yesterday I stumbled across a little known fact about Dwarves. I say little known, when in fact it may be widely known. But it was news to me. This month I started reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit to my daughter, and we’re still at the scene where Thorin Oakenshield and all his Dwarves are invading…
Because I was traveling for the past five weeks, I had little time to conduct research on Vikings for my next novel. But I did have enough time to re-read another of my favorite stories about Vikings, Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead. The book is short (about 175 pages), and it has probably been…
To the Celts, October 31st was Samain, a harvest festival that many believe became the inspiration for Halloween. I could write more about Samain, but today I’d like to simply quote the great opening passage of Bernard Cornwell’s Enemy of God. Cornwell, who reimagines the Arthurian myth, writes about a time when the old Celtic…
I’m halfway through my recent travels, and – keeping with my journey tale analogies – I feel like I’ve made it through the Mines of Moria. But there’s still a long way to go and the Dead Marshes await, so it will be a while before I get back to writing on a regular basis….
I haven’t been writing much because I’ve been on the road for work, and it looks like several more weeks of that are on the way. All this travelling, however, has had me thinking about storylines that involve long, arduous journeys. The classic tale, at least for fantasy fiction, is Tolkien’s The Lord of the…
I recently finished Black Ships by Jo Graham, a novel that reimagnes The Aeneid in a more historically accurate way. I enjoyed Black Ships, and it reminded me how much I love novels that reimagine familiar legends. My all time favorite reimagining of a famous legend is Bernard Cornwell’s The Warlord Chronicles, which retells the legend…
Of all the blogs I frequent, my favorite for quick and amusing reads is Evil Editor. Evil Editor (or EE for short) provides critiques of query letters — those partial summaries of a novel that are supposed to entice literary agents to want to read your book. While a lot of EE’s points are helpful to…
Ann C. Crispin of Writer Beware posted a fantastic article today titled “How to Satisfy Your Reader Without Being Predictable.” It’s about the need for unpredictable endings in genre fiction while still satisfying the reader’s expectations. She uses The Return of the King as an example of genre fiction which could have had a perfectly predictable and satisfying…
The first sentence may be the most important sentence in a novel. A great first line can set the tone for the story or convey the essence of a character in just a few words. So for today’s post, I thought I’d highlight some of my favorite first lines from historical and fantasy fiction: In a hole…
This summer has been huge for George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. First, HBO made Martin’s premiere novel in the series, A Games of Thrones, into a ten-episode television series that concluded this past June and has been nominated for 13 Emmy Awards. In addition, HBO has renewed the series for another…