Category: A to Z Challenge

Today the A to Z Challenge continues! I'll be posting about one letter/word on every weekday in April. Don't want the barrage of posts? Sign up for my newsletter and I'll let you know when I start doing new stuff next month! N is for Nerds. Nerds and nerd culture have taken over massive sections of mainstream culture, but I suspect most of you, like me, have always been nerds, before a handful of cool movies and a massive upswing in technology made it cool to be a nerd. We might call ourselves nerds with pride now but we've all heard it sneered in our direction. I'm sure that even with the rising popularity of nerd culture there are still kids who get called a nerd like it's a bad thing.…

Today the A to Z Challenge continues! I'll be posting about one letter/word on every weekday in April. Don't want the barrage of posts? Sign up for my newsletter and I'll let you know when I start doing new stuff next month! M is for Magic. No discussion of fantasy novels is complete without talking about magic. Magic and the creatures that often come with it--dragons, elves, fairies--are what drew many of us to the fantasy genre in the first place, and what keep many people coming back. It can do anything we can imagine, with as much or as little explanation as we want. Magic can get pretty ridiculous in movies and on TV, especially when you're talking about animation, but I like my magic best when it has rules…

Today the A to Z Challenge continues! I'll be posting about one letter/word on every weekday in April. Don't want the barrage of posts? Sign up for my newsletter and I'll let you know when I start doing new stuff next month! L is for Love. Love(or, I suppose, a lack thereof) is important in all of our lives. There are a great many forms of love: the love we feel for our parents, the love we feel for our other family members, the love we feel for friends, romantic love, and the love we feel for things we're passionate about. Ideally our lives are full of love from most or all of these sources, though sometimes we struggle to get real love from even one. Without love, we become lonely…

Today the A to Z Challenge continues! I'll be posting about one letter/word on every weekday in April. Don't want the barrage of posts? Sign up for my newsletter and I'll let you know when I start doing new stuff next month! K is for Kickstarter. If you haven't already heard of it, Kickstarter is a crowdfunding website that allows you to raise money for pretty much any project you can dream up. Among other things, the site has been used to fund exciting tech projects, non-profit education spaces, movies, music and of course books. Many wonderful board games have also been funded on Kickstarter. There are actually many different crowdfunding websites including specialized sites such as Inkshares(for books) and Tubestart(for film) but Kickstarter is by far the most well known. If you've…

Today the A to Z Challenge continues! I'll be posting about one letter/word on every weekday in April. Don't want the barrage of posts? Sign up for my newsletter and I'll let you know when I start doing new stuff next month! J is for JK Rowling. My mother read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to me out loud when I was a little kid. I loved the world of Hogwarts before most people had even heard of it. Between the books, Pottermore stories, endless Hogwarts house quizzes, fanfiction and eventually the movies I've probably spent a few thousand hours on the Harry Potter series. There was a time when you could ask me pretty much any question about Harry Potter and I'd know the answer within a few seconds(I still remember…

Today the A to Z Challenge continues. I'll be posting about one letter/word on every weekday in April. Don't want the barrage of posts? Sign up for my newsletter and I'll let you know when I start doing new stuff next month! I is for Illumination. No matter what genre you're writing in, the way your people light the world around them matters. Electric lighting implies a very different society than torch light, although you can have both in the same world. Whether public areas in a city are well lit at night has a huge impact on how safe the city is; the same goes for roads in the country. In a fantasy or science fiction setting how your light is created may also be an important part of the world.…

Today the A to Z Challenge continues! I'll be posting about one letter/word on every weekday in April. Don't want the barrage of posts? Sign up for my newsletter and I'll let you know when I start doing new stuff next month! H is for Hope. There are thousands of fascinating stories about hope(when you get right down to it, almost every story is about hope at the core). In the story of Pandora's box, Pandora releases all the evils of the world, all the pain, suffering and monsters of today and past times, but she also releases hope. The implication is that hope could not exist without evil but neither could evil exist without hope. No matter how dark times get, there is always hope. Hope is particularly important for…

Today the A to Z Challenge continues! I'll be posting about one letter/word on every weekday in April. Don't want the barrage of posts? Sign up for my newsletter and I'll let you know when I start doing new stuff next month! G is for Gold. Gold was used as currency for such a long time that on top of still using the gold standard in real life, us writerly types inject it into just about every fantasy world as currency. It's admittedly lazy, but it's also admittedly logical--in a world based off of pretty much any ancient civilization, or a world that mixes up influences from all of them, so basically every fantasy world. Today we're moving away from the gold standard but gold is still highly sought after and gold…

Today the A to Z Challenge continues! I'll be posting about one letter/word on every weekday in April. Don't want the barrage of posts? Sign up for my newsletter and I'll let you know when I start doing new stuff next month! F is for Failure. People don't really like to talk about failure, except that these days you see articles about it every day online, usually opening with a line about exactly that: how people don't like to talk about failure. Which seems kind of silly when so many people are talking about it. Failure is an inevitable part of life, especially if you're a writer. You start by failing to write the great novel you set out to create. Then you fail to be satisfied with it after the first…

Today is the fifth day of the A to Z Challenge! I'll be posting about one letter/word on every weekday in April. Don't want the barrage of posts? Sign up for my newsletter and I'll let you know when I start doing new stuff next month! E is for Elves. As a fantasy author I can't talk about mythological creatures for long without thinking about elves. These days I suspect most people immediately conjure to mind an image of elegant, Tolkien-like elves, but in truth they have as many forms as there are myths about them. Elves first appeared in Norse mythology as a race of minor gods, associated with nature and fertility. Humans could actually become elves upon death if they lived particularly worthwhile lives. These elves were not bound…