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…
I recently re-read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for the first time in probably ten years. Once I got past the older and awkward narrative viewpoint (in Tolkien’s defense, the omniscient point-of-view was in vogue back in 1937, especially for what was considered a children’s book), I was reminded of how rich and wonderful the story…
The other day I was looking at the top shelf of my bookshelf and realized it contains a number of beautiful hardcover books, but they’re not necessarily my favorite novels (due, in part, to the fact that I keep my Bernard Cornwell novels together, and every book I own of The Warlord Chronicles are all…
Last week, I mentioned how my upcoming novel, Enoch’s Device, was a bit of a journey tale. This was a reference to a series of posts I wrote on Long Journeys about a year ago, during a time when I was travelling constantly, with little time to write. A year later, I find myself in…
On a lazy weekend back in the early ‘90s, I stumbled across a movie on TV that helped me discover one of the finest books I have ever read – and the story that became the inspiration for my first novel. I was drawn to the movie by its medieval setting, and became immediately intrigued…
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…
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…