Tag: genre
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Hurry Up, Technology!
I’ve made this complaint before, but we need those dream records they have in “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.” I had a sequel/continuation to a previous dream. Both of them were awesome. Both of them vanished from my brain the moment I woke up. I have little broken pieces, images mostly, floating around in my…
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Dystopia, Genre, and Finishing the First Draft
You may find yourself asking, where has Joe been? He hasn’t been posting three times a day. That’s night like you. You may also find yourself living in a shotgun shack. You may find yourself in another part of the world. If it’s the former, December is when I have to work. And not just…
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The Drawl
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been struggling on voice with JEHOVAH’S HITLIST. It’s not so much struggling as I can’t find it. It’s struggling in that I keep changing my mind, so the narrative text is horribly inconsistent. Here’s where I’ve been flipping. Take a nice classic rural drawl. Change of to a, drop the…
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That was EPIC!
The fastest way to start a literary nerd fight? Say X fantasy book is/is not epic fantasy. Epic fantasy may be the poorest defined genre currently being published1. I think this is a result of the ’80s/’90s where almost all fantasy published was epic fantasy. Epic fantasy was so pervasive within the genre that epic…
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Stuart Greenman has the right of it
Livia Blackburne tipped me off to Stuart Greenman’s entry into the Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. In one sentence (and pay attention, it really is one sentence), Stuart Greenman shows everything that drives me nuts about fantasy: A quest is not to be undertaken lightly–or at all!–pondered Hlothgar of the Western Boglands, son of Glothar, nephew…
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The Obnoxiousness of Fantasy Characters
Fantasy characters are dicks. In fiction, in D&D adventures, anywhere “adventurer” is available as a life choice, people are dicks. You see it all the time. Main character meets Douchebag McAsshole and DMcA immediately starts talking down to him. I’m a wizard. I’m a barbarian. I don’t bow before anyone. I don’t show any semblance…