According to Wikipedia, “an antihero … is generally considered to be a protagonist whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal hero.” This character is usually the antithesis of the “knight in shining armor.” But what makes him work? In my view, the antihero has to be someone…
As I noted in my previous post on Great First Lines, the first sentence in a novel can often be its most important. But not always. Some stories need longer to develop. Still, it’s hard to underestimate the significance of the story’s opening passage. This is the “beginning” of the tale, a chance to hook…
The trailer for Season 2 of HBO’s Game of Thrones, which will air in April 2012, was released this week (you can watch it here). Season 1 was fantastic and, from the trailer, Season 2 looks equally promising – as it should be since it depicts A Clash of Kings, the wonderful second novel in…
This is not a new phenomenon, but for authors of short stories the market for their work seems to be forever shrinking. This past November, we saw the demise of one of the higher-end publications for speculative fiction, Realms of Fantasy magazine, and now there is news that Zahir, A Journal of Speculative Fiction, is…
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…