The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opened this weekend, setting a new December record according to Box Office Mojo. The film earned $84.6 million in the U.S., which is great – but it’s far behind what I need to win my domestic wager. The Hobbit faces a long trek up the Lonely Mountain! The Hobbit’s opening…
Every December I am reminded of how difficult it is to get anything done during the holidays. Agent Rachelle Gardner once 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. Even that may be generous, and this December is…
The Wayward Herald looks forward to the post-NaNoWriMo month of December and revival within the blogosphere on the topics of writing, publishing, and, or course, historical and fantasy fiction. But the end of November 2012 also marks the end to one of the great fantasy book review blog sites around: Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review. Sailing to…
The Wayward Herald remains convinced that the number of interesting blog posts on which to comment decreases substantially during National Novel Writing Month. Fortunately, that will soon end, and that is one thing for which the Wayward Herald is thankful this week. Dante looks back on Purgatory at the end of NaNoWriMo. The Wayward Herald is…
The concept of my early week posts under the guise of The Wayward Herald is to highlight interesting blog posts and other information I’ve encountered from the blogosphere in the prior week. But these days, there’s been a dearth of interesting posts, and I attribute that to NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month – which…
I have long been a fan of Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat! as an excellent resource on storytelling, and plot in particular. This week, in preparation for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), author Bethany Myers posted an article titled Plot Like A Pro, a creative piece applying Snyder’s 15 elements of story structure to Harry…
The folks at Middle-Earth News previewed two TV spots for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which will debut in December. One of the spots is featured below. You can view the other one here. Meanwhile, Andrew Russo of Scifi Bloggers published an article on the demise of the TV show Heroes titled How Heroes Devolved:…
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…
One of the most interesting bits of news this week concerned a heretofore unpublished poem by J.R.R. Tolkien titled The Fall of Arthur. Middle-Earth News announced this week that the poem will be published in its entirety by Harper Collins on May 23, 2013. For anyone who has read Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and…
It was a slow week for tidings, but the Wayward Herald found one post by author Jane Lebak quite interesting. The post, titled No Protagonist? No Problem (but don’t try this at home), starts with the premise that a protagonist is critical to any good story. And by “protagonist,” she means the character who “faces…
Bernard Cornwell’s new novel 1356 came out this week in the UK. Unfortunately (and for reasons that still vex me), it won’t be released in the U.S. until January 8, 2013 – but I can hardly wait! The novel is about the famous Battle of Poitiers during the Hundred Years’ War, and it brings back one…