A somewhat-belated Happy New Year!


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You know what's always a good time? Worldbuilding. I like researching what would make sense in a certain situation, and I like brainstorming things that would be cool, and it's satisfying to find the place where the two fit together ( Read more... )

I've been doing fanart!

I've been writing, too, of course, and reading a lot. But fanart is great fun, so I thought I'd share a bit of that. I recently read and enjoyed a YA low-fantasy novel called Of Metal and Wishes by Sarah Fine - a retelling of The Phantom of the Opera, but set in a factory complex in a reimagined industrial Asia. It's ( Read more... )

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It has come to my attention that today is Appreciate a Dragon Day. (Although really, shouldn't every day be?) So, I had to think about some dragons that I appreciate. Want to know which ones I came up with? No? Oh, okay. PSYCH, you're hearing about them anyway! (Deep inside, you know that's what you wanted.)

• The various dragons kind enough ( Read more... )

So, awhile ago, I was looking at upcoming teen books to potentially order for the library where I work, and I saw this:


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For my Popular Materials class, a partner and I presented on the fantasy genre. To kick off our presentation, I handed out a quiz I'd written - not to be collected or graded, which might have gotten me assassinated, but to show classmates that they already knew more about fantasy than they might have thought ( Read more... )

Per usual, I'm aware that not everyone may care to read a description of every panel I attended at the splendiferous James River Writers Conference, so I will put all that under a cut. For the short version, I'll say that I had an awesome time - and got to have cool conversations with not one, but two literary agents!

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I recently ran up against an interesting worldbuilding issue: a reason for smeerps.

In case you're not familiar with the convention of "calling a rabbit a smeerp", it is when a writer of sci-fi or fantasy includes something that is clearly recognizable as an existing object, concept, or creature (e.g. clock, love, rabbit) in a non-human (or at ( Read more... )

Today's two writing-related topics are steampunk (yay!) and cover whitewashing (boo!).

How do these things relate? Well, Jaclyn Dolamore's debut novel, Magic Under Glass, is YA steampunk. (I have heard some arguments for calling it "Victorian fantasy" instead. Haven't yet read it, so I'm going by what the various categorizing entities say.) It ( Read more... )