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Story-Beat Study: The Mysterious Benedict Society
As my second middle-grade reread challenge, a book I haven’t read in years, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was getting into with this book. It’s not fantasy. An evil, egotistical genius makes a machine that can be broadcast through the television that brainwashes the general population to think there is a big Emergency from…
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Let’s Talk Tropes: Instalove
Look, in a single book, there’s only so much time that two character has to fall in love with each other. Books take place in a single time-frame, and often, it’s one that spans days, weeks, or maybe months. Rarely years. Even Wheel of Time, a massive fourteen-book series, only takes place over the course…
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Setting Study: Here, There Be Dragons
Here, There Be Dragons is the first of a middle grade series by James A. Owen called The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica. It is based off of the concept that many famous fantastical settings from books are real places, and that many of the heroes of those stories were real as well. An unseen…
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A Memory of Light Spoiler Rant
I did a series review of Wheel of Time, recently, and I intended for it to serve as a book review for the final book, A Memory of Light. I mean, it makes sense, especially for this book. While for most series, the payoff is in the latter half of the final book, the entirety…
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The Various Roles of Minor Characters
Welcome back to our discussions of minor characters. You can find the first of these posts here, where we discuss the various levels and dimensionality of characters who play a smaller role than the protagonist. Today, I want to expand on that post by delving into the different functions that a minor character might have…
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Let’s Talk Tropes: The Quest
Our last tropes discussion talked about Chosen Ones–ironically, one of the biggest character tropes in the fantasy genre. Today, I decided to focus on one of the best-known plot tropes of the genre: the quest. A quest is a trip that one or more characters–quite often, a group–embarks on in order to accomplish some important…
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Book Review: A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green
Too often within the SFF genres, the books that we read have pessimistic outlooks on hope and kindness. They frequently portray optimism as foolish at best, danerous at worst; sometimes you’ll read a book that suggests people really would be kind, except that there will always be a few bad eggs that make the rest…
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The Craft of Building Minor Characters
Most people on the internet will tell you how to create your protagonist and antagonist. You know, the ones who admittedly get the most page time. But most people are also hesitant to attempt explaining how one might go about creating the less important characters that will appear throughout your story. It’s a fair problem,…
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Writing Resources for Fantasy Authors
While I was working on my current project–which is a high fantasy piece–there were a lot of resources I found myself pulling from in order to make the story as realistic, consistent, and good as possible. It seemed like a good idea to me to put all, or at least the most important, of those…
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Wheel of Time Wrap-Up (Spoiler-Free)
It took me almost a year and a half to read the whole series, but I finally finished A Memory of Light, and whoo! What a ride this has been. A pleasurable one, most of the time, but now it’s time for me to answer the question: Was it worth it? Whether you’re deciding if…
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Katie Bachelder 