Yes, before we start, just in case, I do believe it’s possible to write fantasy without magic, I don’t consider it an essential requirement of the genre, I don’t think that any novel set in another world but not using magic is therefore “historical,” blah blah blah. If you’re dead-set on convincing me that this isn’t true, save your keystrokes. I’m ( Read more... )

It helps, I think, that a) I’ve been looking forward to this rant, and b) the fantasy books that I’ve enjoyed the most in the last month were both adult bildungsromans. One, Charles de Lint’s Memory and Dream, was a reread, and perhaps better than I remembered; the character’s adolescent past is entwined with recollections of her adult life, and ( Read more... )

The second part of the city rant.

Yeah, can’t think of any grander title than that.

( Here we are )

The first of two parts. There is just so much to be done here, and a lot of the information will be more or less useful depending on whether you’re writing urban fantasy set in another world or just using the city as a passing-through point.

( Cities )

This is just a list of questions, really. The answers will be different for each author, and it’ll all depend on the kind of characters you’ve created and the story you want to tell. I will give examples of considerations you might want to take into account and things I’ve seen that don’t’ work, but they’re examples rather than prescriptions; you ( Read more... )

In case the title is confusing, I will say that this is a method of world-building which depends on little, tiny threads braided together at a time, or bricks of many different kinds piled on top of each other, or dozens of different kinds of food made into a meal (choose your favorite metaphor for writing). It does not rely on big honking ( Read more... )

Ah, here we are.

Just as with the rant on transformative fantasy, I’m essentially defining a subgenre here. As with transformative fantasy, it’s a subgenre I like, and one that a lot of the fantasy books I love fall into. This means that I burble.

Like, a lot. As in, this isn’t as much of a rant as a long, long stream of burbling.

( Brutal fantasy )

This is a rambly rant, in which I write about points as they occur to me, and not all on surprise endings.

( There’s some in-story revelations stuff, too )

The last of the education rants, on ideas that don’t fit anywhere else. Some of these actually present more flexible plots than the academies or schools, I think; a lot of the school fantasies end up sounding the same. (Of course, one could argue that that’s a convention of the genre, but in that case I would prefer to read a less conventional ( Read more... )

The mage education rant, once again focused on training a protagonist in ways that will not trigger my automatic KILL reaction.

( Fantasy education: Magic )