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…