So earlier I talked with my friend Victor Thorn (whom I met through another friend) about the magical dueling competition in my second Ravenstone book, because he's a lot older than me and has the kind of life experiences where he might know about competitions. Also he's a fellow author. So yeah, we talked about that, and along with explaining how ( Read more... )

My brain gave me a funny image just now, an image I will have to pre-explain a bit before I reveal it ( Read more... )

I've been working on this Traipah story called "Culture Shock," which is about humans moving to Traipah without enough preparation, and finding it very difficult to adjust. I have the human characters hailing from a colony world that's a lot like our society now, so they're like a stand-in for us. I've been having fun remembering existing Traipahni ( Read more... )

I keep finding, more and more all the time, that worldbuilding and/or writing in my Traipah storyverse is how I deal with things in my own life I need to work on. Sometimes it's something in a story that points to something in me I need to pay attention to, like how for years and years there were things happening in the stories or worldbuilding ( Read more... )

I hate it when morally ambiguous characters are just labeled either villains or anti-heros. I think that’s why I like my character Lyria Spellspinner so much. She's cunning, manipulative, secretive, isn't afraid to kill people when she feels it's needed, defies the laws of nature and man by being heavy into the dark arts, befriends dark creatures, ( Read more... )

I have a character who is an albino. And it occurred to me today that in addition to her eye protection, she should have skin protection, too. So far, she just wears robes with a cowl and usually leaves the cowl up, which has the added benefit of hiding her appearance from others. (Albinos are considered soul-less by her people, and are often ( Read more... )

The magic system I have for the "Playground of the Gods" (AKA Lyriaverse) storyverse has rules and limitations, like any good system of magic. But it is also flexible within those rules. Magic there is really good at making energy, moving things around. There are lots of variations on that. You can also make magical pseudo-matter that has a number ( Read more... )

Text and picture reposted from this Tumblr post. It might make more sense if you read the Tumblr version, since I think this excerpt makes references to things in other peoples' comments, and I don't feel like reposting the entire thing here.

The original picture:


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I was thinking about Gosgolot, the main religion of the Duenicallo of Traipah, again. Specifically about their terror of their sun, which they call The Howler Into The Void, among other titles. And I had this sudden vision of another sect of Gosgolot, a potentially heretical sect, that - while they still fear The Orphanmaker, they believe that the ( Read more... )

 My friend Brooke and I often play this game with one another called "Good news, Bad news," which is a bit like "would you press the button" but you don't get a choice whether it would happen, just imagine what it would be like if it did.
I have a species of people in my main scifi universe, they are called Ah'Koi Bahnis. They are hermaphrodites ( Read more... )