Tag: writing
-
Hey, I’m Getting Published! (And Why I’m Going the Self-Publishing Route)
I finished my first novel one month shy of two years ago. It was a beautiful feeling. Of course, the idea of “done-ness” for a novel is relative. I knew it would go through a round or three of edits once a publisher got their hands on it–that’s just the way it’s done–but there’s a…
-
Wheel of Time: A Case Study in Series Pacing
A few weeks ago, I delved into the pacing of a rather interesting novel, A Deadly Education. But that is one novel (admittedly, the first of a series), and it led me to ponder: compared to individual novels, what does the pacing of an entire series look like? And, with those thrilling sneak-peek images for…
-
A Discussion of Narrative Style: Exploring 1st Person PoV in Fantasy
I’d heard a lot about The Cruel Prince by Holly Black in the months prior to me purchasing the novel (which was way back in March if I remember correctly). It’s taken me a while to get to it because I can’t seem to stop myself from buying books this year, but I finally got…
-
Fantasy World-Building Fundamentals
A few weeks ago, I broke down some of the major trends in fantasy that might affect what elements of world-building a writer might want to focus on to ensure they had the details they needed to create an immersive world. (See: The 3 Tiers of Fantasy World-Building.) However, that was a general overview based off…
-
A Deadly Education: A Case Study in Pacing
It is always pleasant to be taken by surprise with a novel, and, a few cultural missteps notwithstanding, A Deadly Education provided just that. (For the concerned reader, I do plan on delving into this in my book review, but this post is already long enough as it is.) The author, Naomi Novik, uses world-building…
-
The 3 Tiers of Fantasy World-Building
Last week, I wrote a post about genre writing and it got me thinking about how to know when a book has enough world-building and if it has enough of the right kind of world building. (The post was a setting study for Monsters of Verity if you wanted to check it out.) Rather than…
-
Setting Study: Monsters of Verity and the Fringes of Genre
Victoria Schwab’s Monsters of Verity duology is one that walks two tracks: it follows some unwritten rules of genre writing while carving out a completely new niche in the specific subgenre of Fantasy. In today’s post, I’m going to attempt to extrapolate what, exactly, might make a book feel more of a genre book rather…
-
Setting Study: Wings of Ebony and Hidden Worlds
To many fantasy readers, there is something alluring about the idea of a magical world hidden from view, the possibility that it could be ours to use if we just know how to pierce that veil of secrecy. You see it in the likes of Harry Potter, Three Dark Crowns (although that is actually high…
-
Let’s Talk Tropes: Minions
No, we’re not talking today about the little corndog shaped creatures from Despicable Me. Or, more accurately perhaps, it’s not all that we’re talking about today. When it comes to combat, there are two options for making the protagonist struggle: conflict of wit or conflict of number. That is to say, outsmarted versus outmatched. Is…
-
Let’s Talk Tropes: Happily Ever Afters
I’m not sure when happy endings fell out of fashion, but I do know that present-day narratives generally strive for a distorted concept of realism where the grittier and darker it is, the more “realistic” it is. At the very least, this is the case for fantasy novels, so much so that the concept of…
Katie Bachelder 